That winter Mrs. Singer seceded from the church which Mrs. Payley ran, and founded an Episcopal church, taking seven choir members out of the Congregational church, to say nothing of the organist. All this mixed up religion in Homeburg that winter until you could scarcely tell it from a ward caucus.
By spring it was dangerous to show favors to either side, and when the school election came around, it was fought out between the Payley and Singer factions. Sally Singer had been given higher marks than Sarah Payley, and the upshot of it all was that when the Payley side prevailed at election by nine votes, the superintendent lost his job. He was a good superintendent and the cause of education didn't get over the jolt for some years, but justice, of course, had to be done.
The Singers got some satisfaction out of it by electing the school board treasurer, which took a lot of money out of the First National Bank. That, of course, got the banks into the row. You city folks may have your financial flurries, but if you've never been around and between and under a bank scrap in a small town, you don't know what trouble is. There were a couple of failures that needn't have happened, and a lot of partisan financiering, and then the town rose up and sat down on our social leaders with a most pronounced scrunch. We can stand just about so much society in Homeburg, but when it gets to elbowing into business, churches, schools and funerals, we are more sensible than you metropolitans are. It only takes a half-day to pass the word through a small town, and one fine morning the Payleys and Singers discovered that while they were still facing each other like two snorty and inextinguishable generals, their armies had gone off arm in arm.
That ended the feud and put society in Homeburg back in its proper place—in the front parlors in the evening after the dishes had been done up. The Payleys and Singers still continued to compete, but we declined to fight and bleed for them and amused ourselves instead by watching them from the sidelines. Mrs. Payley joined the "When I was in Europe" brigade, and the Singers got the first automobile in town. It kept the Singers so busy supporting and encouraging it, that the Payleys were able to build the first modern house with a sleeping porch and individual bathrooms—and about the time the Singers came back with a two-story bungalow full of chopped wood furniture, Mrs. Payley went abroad again and began to say: "The last time I was in Europe." It was nip and tuck, year in and year out, between the two, and we all enjoyed it a lot.
But it wasn't until the Payley and Singer children came home from college and formed a tight little circle with their backs out, that we began to reap the benefits of really haughty society.
The Payley and Singer children had absorbed all their families had to offer, and then they went off to school in the East and laid in a complete stock of the latest styles in superiority. They were all finished in the same spring and shipped back to Homeburg—magnificent specimens of college art with even their names done over—and when they realized that they had to live forever in the old town, where no one spoke their language or could even understand their clothes, the family feud was forgotten and the four rushed together for mutual protection and formed a real Smart Set.
It's just like your bigger crowd. It doesn't have anything to do with us in particular. And we are just like you are. You open your Sunday papers and read reams about the plumbing and pajamas and pet dogs and love affairs of your first families, and I guess nothing that Sally Singer or Sarah Payley ever did got past the scornful but lynx-eyed Homeburgers. When Sarah was getting letters on expensive stationery from Kansas City, the whole town discussed the probable character of a man who would put blue sealing wax on his envelopes, and when Sally made her pa put an addition on the Singer home, we knew what color she was going to do her boudoir in three months in advance. But we are prouder than your people. You hire down-trodden reporters to go and abase themselves to get the information, while we wouldn't lower ourselves enough to ask even by proxy. We just let the sewing women and hired girls tell us.
Being an exclusive set in a small town is a whole lot harder than it is in New York, and I've always admired our youngsters for the way they've carried it off. Of course, four people can't form a club or give parties or support an exclusive restaurant; they can't even be exclusive all by themselves. They have had to mingle with us, but they are always carefully insulated. They joined our Country Club, but they did it with their fingers crossed, so to speak. They always come out together and protect each other from our rude advances as much as possible. They import college friends whenever they can, and they always have a few bush leaguers, or utility players, to work in on such occasions. Henry Snyder used to say he could tell when there was need of the peasantry at the Singer house by the way Sally Singer would suddenly descend from the third cross-road beyond Mars to the street in front of the post-office and ask him with an accurately hospitable smile if he couldn't bring his sister up to the house that evening to meet a few guests. And once a year all four turn in and give a real dress rehearsal of up-to-date social science, to which Homeburg is liberally invited and at which unknown and unsuspected things are served for refreshments and a new and deadly variation of bridge or dancing or punch or receiving lines or conversational technique is put on for our inspection and bewilderment.
We have a show at our opera-house now and then, and we always go to these affairs largely to see our Smart Set perform. It always comes—even East Lynne is better that West Homeburg—and I'll tell you, by the time they have come rustling in about half way through the first act, H. DeLancey Payley and W. Sam Singer in clawhammers with an acre apiece of white shirt and holding about four bushels of pink fluff over their arms, and the boys have consulted anxiously with the usher, the two girls, beautiful visions of Arctic perfection, standing in well-bred suspense and holding their gowns in the 1915 manner, and all four have hurried down to the best seats and have unharnessed and stowed away their upholsterings, and DeLancey has folded up his explosive hat and Sam has leaned back in a lordly way and beckoned to the usher for another program—by the time all this has transpired, the actors have forgotten their lines, and we have gotten our money's worth out of the evening's entertainment.
The hardships those people inflict on themselves in the sacred cause of correctness are agonizing. It takes something more than nerve to wear a silk hat and Prince Albert down to the Homeburg post-office on Sundays to get the mail—especially with Ad Summers always on hand to spill a large red laugh into his sleeve and say to some friend in a tremendous stage whisper that the darn dude's legs must be bowed or he wouldn't want to hide 'em that way. And as for the carriage proposition, I'm certain that no martyrs have endured more. DeLancey persuaded Hi Nott to buy a real city carriage, and the four have used it faithfully; only the Payleys and Singers live in different edges of town, and by the time Hi has hauled Sam and his sister across town to the Payleys, through Homeburg's April streets, which average a little more depth than width, and has hauled the four down to the theater, there are usually about three breakdowns. I've seen the four of them plodding haughtily home from "Wedded but No Wife", the girls holding their imported dresses out of the mud, and the boys sounding for bottom on the crossings with their canes, while Hi drove the carriage solemnly down the road beside them. The mud was too deep for them to get home in the carriage, but everybody could see it was there and that they had paid for it and had done their darndest, anyway. After all, that's no worse than the way you New Yorkers carry your gloves in your hand in warm weather. You don't need them, but you want the world to know you've got 'em and wouldn't be found dead without 'em.