e-president, treasurer and
general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five
brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five
years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar until the
Goddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "As
$350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first
thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the
bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.

The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite
monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then
she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes
the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The
Worthingtons in the lifetime of Ezra had ventured no further into the
social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher
at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King's Daughters for a social,
sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the
gasoline used in heating it.

To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the
Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years
after Ezra Worthington's death that the glow of the rising Worthington
sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years
Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best
hundred books, had consumed the Chautauqua course, had prepared and
delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organised, five papers
ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of
the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric
Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been
elected president of the City Federation of Clubs, and, being a delegate
to the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State
Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington
Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on
the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house,
and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that
the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best
social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
Worthington's reception made a strong impressio