sed to, for example. Now the
four of them will be working all day over Thursday's dinner, and, dear
me! it's a simple enough dinner."

"Well, you have to serve so much with a dinner, nowadays," Mrs. Carew
said, in a mildly martyred tone. "Crackers and everything else with
oysters--I'm going to have cucumber sandwiches with the soup--"

"Delicious!" said Mrs. Lloyd.

"'Cucumbers, olives, salted nuts, currant jelly'", Mrs. Carew was
reading her list, "'ginger chutney, saltines, bar-le-duc, cream
cheese', those are for the salad, you know, 'dinner rolls, sandwich
bread, fancy cakes, Maraschino cherries, maple sugar,' that's to go hot
on the ice, I'm going to serve it in melons, and 'candy'--just pink and
green wafers, I think. All that before it comes to the actual dinner at
all, and it's all so fussy!"

"Don't say one word!" said Mrs. Lloyd, sympathetically. "But it sounds
dee-licious!" she added consolingly, and little Mrs. Carew went
contentedly home to a hot and furious session in her kitchen; hours of
baking, boiling and frying, chopping and whipping and frosting,
creaming and seasoning, freezing and straining.

"I don't mind the work, if only everything goes right!" Mrs. Carew
would say gallantly to herself, and it must be said to her credit that
usually everything did "go right" at her house, although even the maids
in the kitchen, heroically attacking pyramids of sticky plates, were
not so tired as she was, when the dinner was well over.

But there was a certain stimulus in the mere thought of entertaining
Mrs. Burgoyne, and there was the exhilarating consciousness that one of
these days she would entertain in turn; so the Santa Paloma housewives
exerted themselves to the utmost of their endurance, and one delightful
dinner party followed another.

But a dispassionate onlooker from another planet might have found it
curious to notice, in contrast to this uniformity, that no two women
dressed alike on these occasions, and no woman who could help it wore
the same gown twice. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Carew, to be sure, wore their
"little old silks" more than once, but each was secretly consoled by
the thought that a really "smart" new gown awaited Mrs. White's dinner;
which was naturally the climax of all the affairs. Only the wearers and
their dress-makers knew what hours had been spent upon these costumes,
what discouraged debates attended their making, what muscular agonies
their fitting. Only they could have es