“Do! Do! Do! Why—everything!”
The visitor drew off her gloves.
“I will stay and help you. Shan’t I get the spare room ready?”
A gesture of disdain.
“As if I would have put that off until today!”
“Can I help about luncheon?”
“Well! I should be ashamed of myself if the cook hadn’t her orders and materials and all before this!”
“Perhaps I could dust the parlors? or polish silver? or—” glancing around the perfectly appointed dining-room, where the luncheon table was already laid—“I might arrange the flowers in the vases?”
It finally transpired that the frantic and “forehanded” hostess could specify but one thing that remained to be done before everything should be in order for the visitors. She had “butter-balls to make” for luncheon. She always kept the paddles in ice-water for hours beforehand.
I was young then and read the little story aloud to my mother—a woman blessed with a keen sense of humor and as keen a perception of the fitness of things. She adopted the phrase on the spot. “Butter-balls to make” became with us the synonym for needless hurry and flurry and worry. When used interrogatively, it was the cabalistic formula that caused a precipitate and a settlement of many a muddy whirl of anxieties, the open sesame to a “chamber the name of which was Peace.”