"Are reformers bores?" she said.
"Always!" he declared.
"Why?"
"Because," he said, dryly, "they never suffer from any impediment in their speech."
Yet he was not so much bored that he stayed away from Lakeville. The place itself seemed to him entirely funny. Its very respectable population was made up of hardworking, good-naturedly vulgar folk, whose taste was painful or amusing, as you might happen to look at it. Once Fred made him stay to supper, and afterward go to a party with her and Laura—whose presence had been secured by judicious pressure upon Billy-boy. This especial festivity was called a "can-can" because the guests' idea of humor consisted in wearing a string of empty tin cans over their shoulders, with a resultant noise when they danced which gave, it seemed, a peculiar joy. Frederica's man of business, sitting on a bench with several gentlemen who mopped themselves breathlessly after their exertions and were obviously comfortable in their shirtsleeves, laughed until, he said, his sides ached.
"You like it, Fred?" he asked, incredulously—she and Laura had taken him home with them to give him something cool to drink before he started on his midnight spin into town.
"Love it!" she said.
"Well," he said, "it seems to be a case of 'give me heaven for climate, but hell for company!' It would bore me to death."
They were on the little front porch of Sunrise Cottage—Laura lounging on the lowest step, looking up at the stars, and Arthur Weston sitting on the railing, sipping ginger-ale. Frederica, standing up, began to expatiate on the woman's club she had organized. After the first meeting she had turned it into a suffrage league, under the admiring eyes of ladies who whispered to each other that she was the Miss Payton—"you know? Society girl. Why, my husband says the Paytons could buy up every house in Lakeville and not know they'd put their hands in their pockets!" Fred had constant afternoon teas for these ladies—which would have been pleasanter if Flora, when waiting upon them, had been less haughty.
"She calls all our neighbors 'common people,'" Fred said.