I know the rest of the country throws it up to New York a lot because of its Four Hundred, and that the ordinary small-town man gets so scornful when he talks of the idle and diamond-crusted rich, with their poodle-dog pastimes, that he lives in constant danger of stabbing his eyes with his nose. But I'm not that way; I'm interested. Nothing fascinates me so much as the stories in your papers about Mrs. Clymorr Busst's clever pearl earrings, made to resemble door knobs; and about Mrs. Spenser Coyne's determination to have Columbia University removed because it interferes with the view from her garage; and about little Mrs. Justin Wright's charming innocence in buying a whole steamship whenever she goes over to Europe. I'd go a long way to see your Four Hundred perform; and moreover, after I had accumulated a precarious balance on an iron spike fence in order to rest one eye on a genuine duke while he fought his way out of a church with one of your leading local beauties, who had just been affixed to him for life, I would not squint pityingly on the heaving mass of spectators and hiss:
"We don't do this in Homeburg."
Because we would do it fast enough if we had a chance.
We don't have anything like your Smart Set, of course, but I desire to say with pride that while there aren't enough tiaras in Homeburg to fill a pill box, and the only limousine we possess is the closed carriage which is used for the family of the deceased at funerals, we have our exclusive and magnificent class just as New York has. We haven't a Four Hundred in Homeburg, but we have a Two Four-Hundredths. If you get as much real, solid pleasure and amusement in New York watching your Four Hundred as we do watching the Payleys and the Singers, I envy you. They're worth all the trouble they cause.
For a good many years, Mrs. Wert Payley, wife of the First National Bank, was our Smart Set, all by herself. There was never any question of it. She admitted it, and we didn't take the trouble to deny it. In a way, she was regarded as a public benefactor. Nobody else cared to spend the money necessary to be a Smart Set, and since Mrs. Payley was willing to fight and be bled, so to speak, to give our town tone and inject a little excitement into our prairie lives now and then, we felt that the least we could do was to regard her as a social colossus.
The Payleys were the only people in Homeburg who had lunch at noon, and as early as 1900 they ate it from the bare table. She was the only woman in Homeburg who could "look in" on an afternoon gabble of any kind for a few minutes and get away with it without insulting the hostess. When she shook hands with you, you always grabbed in the wrong place, no matter how much thought you put into it, and while you were readjusting your sights and clawing for her fingers and perspiring with mortification, she was getting a start on you which kept you bashfully humble as long as she was in sight. She was real goods, Mrs. Payley was—not arrogant, but just naturally superior. People who called at the Payleys' evenings were the social lights of Homeburg, and whenever some lady wanted to discharge a few fireworks indicating her social position, she would form a hollow square around Mrs. Payley in public and get intimate with her in full view of everybody. Mrs. Payley ran the town, and everybody was comfortable and content about it until the Singers arrived.
The Singers came from Cincinnati to cashier in the Farmers' State Bank: Mrs. Singer was city bred and city heeled and when she met Mrs. Wert Payley she didn't even blink. She put out her hand a little nor'-nor'east of her chatelaine watch, when Mrs. Payley put out her hand some four inches southwest by south, and waited calmly for Mrs. Payley to correct herself. There was an awful moment of suspense, and when it became evident that the only way to get Mrs. Singer's hand down to the other level would be to excavate beneath her and change her foundations, Mrs. Payley gave in and reached.
War was declared that minute, and I shudder now when I think of the months which followed.
Mrs. Payley, having been on the ground a long time, had fortified it, of course, and was president of all the clubs. But inside of a month Mrs. Singer flanked her position. She declined to join most of the clubs on the plea of being a busy woman, and organized a flower mission. Its object was to distribute flowers to the sick and needy, who generally consisted of Pat Ryan. Pat was nearly smothered in flowers that year, being good-natured, and as the work of collecting said flowers involved a great deal of meeting in the Singer home and dancing in the Singer attic, which was floored with hard maple that winter, Mrs. Singer had the girls of the town organized into a Roman phalanx before spring.
Mrs. Payley was triumphantly reëlected to the presidency of all her clubs that winter, but Mrs. Singer organized a public library association and pulled off a German. Mrs. Payley attended, and when she tried to patronize Mrs. Singer with her compliments, that clever infighter beat her to it by explaining the theory of the German to her. That made Mrs. Payley so mad that the next month she invited the state president of the Federation of Women's Clubs to visit her, and didn't ask Mrs. Singer to the tea. The next week Mrs. Singer organized a Country Club. It only consisted of a two-room pavilion in which picnics could be held and dances could be pulled off, with long intermissions for the extraction of slivers from the feet. But it was just as easy to talk about while you were in town and to refer to in a hushed and exclusive manner as if it cost a million, and when Mrs. Payley realized that she could never hope to become exclusive enough to get into it, though goodness knows she couldn't have been hired to belong to the foolish thing, she quit speaking to Mrs. Singer, the split became a chasm, and we began choosing up sides in earnest.