And dinner was never ready. The amount of
tea consumed and bakery cake and the butter, began to alarm Mrs.
Budlong. And Carthage people were so nervous at taking tea with a
millionairess that they kept dropping cups or setting saucers down too
hard.
Mrs. Budlong had never a moment the whole day long to leave the house,
and she suddenly found herself without a call returned. She had so
many invitations to dinners and luncheons, that her life became a hop,
skip and jump.
During the first ecstasy of the good news, Mrs. Budlong had raved over
the places she was going to travel,--Paris (now pronounced Paree),
London, Vienna, St. Marks, the Lion of Lucerne--she talked like a
handbook of Cook's Tours. To successive callers she told the story
over and over till the rhapsody finally palled on her own tongue. She
began to hate Paree, London, Vienna, St. Marks, and to loathe the Lion
of Lucerne. All she wanted to do was to get out of town to some quiet
retreat. Carthage was no longer quiet. It simmered to the
boiling-over point.
Once it had been Mrs. Budlong's pride to be the social leader of
Carthage. Now that her husband was worth (or to be worth) a hundred
thousand dollars Carthage seemed a very petty parish to be the social
leader of. She began to read New York society notes with expectancy,
as one cons the Baedeker of a town one is approaching.
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