. So, in the
language of the inner sanctuary, there was "The Whist Club," to the
exclusion of all other possible human Whist Clubs under the stars. When
summer came the Whist Club fled as birds to the mountains--save
Priscilla Winthrop, who went to Duxbury, and came home with a brass
warming-pan and a set of Royal Copenhagen china that were set up as holy
objects in the temple.

But Mrs. Worthington went to the National Federation of Women's Clubs,
made the acquaintance of the women there who wore clothes from Paris,
began tracing her ancestry back to the Maryland Calverts--on her
mother's side of the house--brought home a membership in the Daughters
of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames and a society which referred to
Charles I. as "Charles Martyr," claimed a Stuart as the rightful king of
England, affecting to score the impudence of King Edward in sitting on
another's throne. More than this, Mrs. Worthington had secured the
promise of Mrs. Ellen Vail Montgomery, Vice-President of the National
Federation, to visit Cliff Crest, as Mrs. Worthington called the
Worthington mansion, and she turned up her nose at those who worshiped
under the towers, turrets and minarets of the Conklin mosque, and played
the hose of her ridicule on their outer wall that she might have it
spotless for a target when she got ready to raze it with her big gun.

The week that Ellen Vail Montgomery came to town was a busy one for Miss
Larrabee. We turned over the whole fourth page of the paper to her for a
daily society page, and charged the Bee Hive and the White Front Dry
Goods store people double rates to put their special advertisements on
that page while the "National Vice," as the Young Prince called her, was
in town. For the "National Vice" brought the State President and two
State Vices down, also four District Presidents and six District Vices,
who, as Miss Larrabee said, were monsters "of so frightful mien, that to
be hated need but to be seen." The entire delegation of visiting
stateswomen--Vices and Virtues and Beatitudes as we called them--were
entertained by Mrs. Worthington at Cliff Crest, and there was so much
Federation politics going on in our town that the New York _Sun_ took
five hundred words about it by wire, and Colonel Alphabetical Morrison
said that with all those dressed-up women about he felt as though he was
living in a Sunday supplement.

The third day of the ghost-dance at Cliff Crest was to be the day of the
big e