Mrs. Budlongs Christmas Presents | Page 7

cleaning up a year's social debts and went up and down the streets dropping doleful calls like wreaths on headstones, walked in unannounced of mornings. It was now Mrs. Budlong that had to keep dressed up all day. Everybody accepted the inevitable invitations to have a cup of tea, till the cook struck. Cook said she had conthracted to cuke for a small family, not to run a continurous bairbecue. Besides she had to answer the doorbell so much she couldn't get her hands into the dough, before they were out again. And dinner was never ready. The amount of tea consumed and bakery cake and the butter, began to alarm Mrs. Budlong. And Carthage people were so nervous at taking tea with a millionairess that they kept dropping cups or setting saucers down too hard.
Mrs. Budlong had never a moment the whole day long to leave the house, and she suddenly found herself without a call returned. She had so many invitations to dinners and luncheons, that her life became a hop, skip and jump.
During the first ecstasy of the good news, Mrs. Budlong had raved over the places she was going to travel,--Paris (now pronounced Paree), London, Vienna, St. Marks, the Lion of Lucerne--she talked like a handbook of Cook's Tours. To successive callers she told the story over and over till the rhapsody finally palled on her own tongue. She began to hate Paree, London, Vienna, St. Marks, and to loathe the Lion of Lucerne. All she wanted to do was to get out of town to some quiet retreat. Carthage was no longer quiet. It simmered to the boiling-over point.
Once it had been Mrs. Budlong's pride to be the social leader of Carthage. Now that her husband was worth (or to be worth) a hundred thousand dollars Carthage seemed a very petty parish to be the social leader of. She began to read New York society notes with expectancy, as one cons the Baedeker of a town one is approaching.
She lay awake nights wondering what she should wear at Mrs. Stuyvesant Square's next party and at Mrs. Astor House's sociable. She fretted the choice whether she should take a letter from her church to St. Bartholomew's or to Grace or St. John's the Divine's. And all the while she was pouring tea for the wives of harness makers and druggists, dentists and grocers.
The more reason for not appearing before them in the same clothes incessantly. But with a dinner or a reception or a tea or a ball every night, her two dressy-up dresses became so familiar that at one party when she was coming downstairs from laying off her cloak people spoke to her dress before they could see her face. And she could hardly afford to get new clothes, for after all she had not come into the money. She had just come at it, or toward it; or as her husband began to say, tip against it.
Mr. Budlong was kept on such tenterhooks by lawyers and papers to sign, titles to clear, executors and executrices to consult, and waivers, deeds, indentures and things that he had no time for his regular business.
As there is housemaid's knee, and painter's colic, so there is millionaire's melancholia. And the Budlongs were enduring the illness without entertaining the microbe.
It is almost as much trouble to inherit money nowadays as to earn it in the first place. Mr. Budlong was confronted with such a list of post-mortem debts that must be postpaid for his deceased Aunt Ida that he almost begrudged her her bit of very real estate in Woodlawn. And the Budlongs began to think that tombstones were in bad form if ostentatious. Heirs have notoriously simple tastes in monuments.
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