s were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.

All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We
knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but
Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact
that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with
prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted
horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view
was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper
into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a
quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita
boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin
was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home
in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred
thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money,
Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find
language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for
airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the
house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their
stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of
the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came;
then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish
was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory.
The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three
sacred scrolls of the sect.

All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had
received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the
Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town
allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social
revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist
Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the
kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and
to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel
Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of
the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when
Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children