They had always accounted Aunt Ida a hard-fisted miser before, but now she began to look like a slippery-palmed spendthrift. They began almost to suspect the probity of the poor old maid. Worse yet, they feared that a later will might turn up bequeathing all her money to some abominable charity or other. She had been addicted to occasional subscriptions during her lifetime.
The Budlongs themselves were beginning, even at this distance from their money-to-be, to suffer its infection, its inevitable reaction on the character. Those who live beyond their means joyously when their means are small, become small themselves, when their means get beyond living beyond. The Budlongs began to figure percentages on sums left in the bank or put out on mortgages. They began to think money; and money is money, large or small. Mrs. Budlong began to feel that she had been unjust to Aunt Ida. What she had called miserliness was really prudence and thrift and other pleasant-sounding virtues. What she had called liberality was wanton waste.
Finally her social debts reached such a mass that she decided to give a large dinner to wipe off a great number at once. But now when she calculated that the olives, the turkey, the Malaga grapes, the English walnuts, the salted almonds and a man from the hotel to wait on table, would total up twenty-five dollars or so, she found herself figuring how much twenty-five dollars would amount to in twenty-five years at compound interest.
She grew frantic to be quit of Carthage—to rub it off her visiting list. Unconsciously her motto became Cato's ruthless Carthago delenda est.
But she could neither delete Carthage from her map, nor free her feet from its dust. Her husband's business required him yet awhile. Even to close it up took time. And he would not, and could not, borrow money on Aunt Ida's estate till he was sure that it was his.
But all the while the festival reveled on. People in Carthage to whom New York was an inaccessible Carcassone, were now planning to visit Mrs. Budlong there at the palatial home she had described. Some of them frankly told her they were coming to see her. Wealth took on a new discomfort.
Sally Swezey afflicted the telephone with gossip: "As Mrs. Talbot was saying only yes'day, my dear, so many folks have threatened to visit you in your home on Fifth Avenue that you'll have to hang hammocks in your front yard."
And now they had spoiled even her future for her. What pride could she take in having a gorgeous home on Fifth Avenue with all these Carthage people rocking on the front porch. Probably some warm evening when Mrs. Hotel Vanderbilt was driving by in her new barouche, it would be just like Roscoe Detwiller to turn in at the gate, flounce down on the top step and sit there with his vest unbuttoned, and his seersucker coat under his arm, while he mopped the inside of his hat with his handkerchief.
But that was the discomfort of the morrow. To-day had its own spawn.
One morning she was called to the telephone by the merciless Sallie
Swezey with a new infliction. There was something almost ghoulish in
Mrs. Swezey's cackling glee as she sang out across the wire:
"We're all so glad, my dear, that the next meeting of the Progressive
Euchre is to be at your house."