Webster G. Burgess was enormously entertained by his wife’s social and philanthropic enterprises and he was proud of her ability to manage things. Their two children were away at school and at such times as they dined alone at home the table was the freest confessional for her activities. She never understood why Webster evinced so much greater interest and pleasure in her reports of the warring factions than in affairs that moved smoothly under her supreme direction.
“You know, Web,” she began on an evening during the progress of the Great War, after watching her spouse thrust his fork with satisfaction into a pudding she had always found successful in winning him to an amiable mood; “you know, Web, that Mrs. Gurley hasn’t the slightest sense of fitness,—no tact,—no delicacy!”
“You’ve hinted as much before,” said Webster placidly. “Cleaned you up in a club election?”
“Web!” ejaculated Mrs. Burgess disdainfully. “You know perfectly well she was completely snowed under at the Women’s Civic League election. Do you think after all I did to start that movement I’d let such a woman take the presidency away from me? It isn’t that I cared for it; heaven knows I’ve got enough to do without that!”
“Right!” affirmed Burgess readily. “But what’s she put over on you now?”
Mrs. Burgess lifted her head quickly from a scrutiny of the percolator flame.
“Put over! Don’t you think I give her any chance to put anything over! I wouldn’t have her think for a minute that she was in any sense a rival.”
“No; nothing vulgar and common like that,” agreed Webster.
“But that woman’s got the idea that she’s going to entertain all the distinguished people that come here. And the Gurleys have only been here two years and we’ve lived here all our lives! It’s nothing to me, of course, but you know there is a certain dignity in being an old family, even here, and my great grandfather was a pioneer governor, and yours was the first State treasurer and that ought to count and always has counted. And the Gurleys made all their money out of tomatoes and pickles in a few years; and since they came to town they’ve just been forcing themselves everywhere.”
“I’d hardly say that,” commented Burgess. “There’s no stone wall around this town. I was on a committee of the Chamber of Commerce that invited Gurley to move his canning factory here.”