“I’d love to go with you, Mrs. Curtis.”
“Good. And you’ll come back and dine with us?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t like to, just yet, because of our deep—” for the life of her she could not say grief—“mourning,” she supplemented.
“Tut! No one stops to think of that, nowadays.” Suddenly realizing that she might be treading on rather painful ground for Beatrice, Mrs. Curtis pulled herself up short. “I’ll take another glass of sherry after all, for I am simply exhausted. Ever since three o’clock I’ve done nothing but peddle cards from house to house.”
“Done what?” asked Beatrice, in blank amazement.
“Peddle cards—visiting cards. I have a calling list as long as the Washington Monument. It’s perfectly fearful. First they call; you call; they call, and so it goes, back and forth, battledore and shuttlecock.”
“It is a treadmill,” agreed Beatrice, laughing. “It is a pity someone doesn’t open a clearing house for callers, it would simplify matters, particularly for the official set.”
“The habit is just as bad among the Cave Dwellers (old Washingtonians),” she explained in parenthesis. “They even make tea calls! I work like a slavey, and yet it’s all I can do to make my bread and butter ones. By the way, did you go to the Constables’ dinner dance two weeks ago?”
“No,” answered Beatrice, interested. “I heard it was a feast.”
“A feast? It was a feed! One hundred and fifty dinner guests, and fifty extra couples for the cotillion afterwards. The favors were beautiful, so beautiful that there was great rivalry to get them, and later in the evening it was noised around that the souvenir favors were twenty dollar gold pieces. Anyway, that particular favor was given out in cardboard boxes, and none of the men would give them away to a girl until they investigated them first for fear they wouldn’t get one in return.”