The Fifth Wheel | Page 2

brother in New York. We are
the Vars of Hilton, Massachusetts, cotton mill owners originally, but
now a little of everything and scattered from Wisconsin to the Atlantic
Ocean. I am a New England girl, not the timid, resigned type one
usually thinks of when the term is used, but the kind that goes away to
a fashionable boarding-school when she is sixteen, has an elaborate
coming-out party two years later, and then proves herself either a
success or a failure according to the number of invitations she receives
and the frequency with which her dances are cut into at the balls. She is
supposed to feel grateful for the sacrifices that are made for her début,
and the best way to show it is by becoming engaged when the time is
right to a man one rung higher up on the social ladder than she.
I had no mother to guide me through these intricacies. My pilot was my
ambitious sister-in-law, Edith, who married Alec when I was fifteen,
remodeled our old 240 Main Street, Hilton, Mass., into a very grand
and elegant mansion and christened it The Homestead. Hilton used to
be just a nice, typical New England city. It had its social ambitions and
discontents, I suppose, but no more pronounced than in any community
of fifty or sixty thousand people. It was the Summer Colony with its
liveried servants, expensive automobiles, and elaborate entertaining
that caused such discontent in Hilton.
I've seen perfectly happy and good-natured babies made cross and
irritable by putting them into a four-foot-square nursery yard. The wall
of wealth and aristocracy around Hilton has had somewhat the same
effect upon the people that it confines. If a social barrier of any sort
appears upon the horizon of my sister-in-law Edith, she is never happy
until she has climbed over it. She was in the very midst of scaling that
high and difficult barrier built up about Hilton by the Summer
Colonists, when she married Alec.
It didn't seem to me a mean or contemptible object. To endeavor to
place our name--sunk into unjust oblivion since the reverses of our
fortune--in the front ranks of social distinction, where it belonged,
impressed me as a worthy ambition. I was glad to be used in Edith's
operations. Even as a little girl something had rankled in my heart, too,

when our once unrestricted fields and hills gradually became posted
with signs such as, "Idlewold, Private Grounds," "Cedarcrest, No
Picnickers Allowed," "Grassmere, No Trespassing."
I wasn't eighteen when I had my coming-out party. It was decided, and
fully discussed in my presence, that, as young as I was, chance for
social success would be greater this fall than a year hence, when the list
of débutantes among our summer friends promised to be less
distinguished. It happened that many of these débutantes lived in
Boston in the winter, which isn't very far from Hilton, and Edith had
already laid out before me her plan of campaign in that city, where she
was going to give me a few luncheons and dinners during the month of
December, and possibly a Ball if I proved a success.
If I proved a success! No young man ever started out in business with
more exalted determination to make good than I. I used to lie awake
nights and worry for fear the next morning's mail would not contain
some cherished invitation or other. And when it did, and Edith came
bearing it triumphantly up to my room, where I was being combed,
brushed and polished by her maid, and kissed me ecstatically on the
brow and whispered, "You little winner, you!" I could have run up a
flag for relief and joy.
I kept those invitations stuck into the mirror of my dressing-table as if
they were badges of honor. Edith used to make a point of having her
luncheon and dinner guests take off their things in my room. I knew it
was because of the invitations stuck in the mirror, and I was proud to
be able to return something for all the money and effort she had
expended.
It appeared incumbent upon me as a kind of holy duty to prove myself
a remunerative investment. The long hours spent in the preparation of
my toilette; the money paid out for my folderols; the deceptions we had
to resort to for the sake of expediency; everything--schemes, plans and
devices--all appeared to me as simply necessary parts of a big and
difficult contest I had entered and must win. It never occurred to me
then that my efforts were unadmirable. When at the end of my first
season Edith and I discovered to our delight, when the Summer Colony

returned to our hills, that our names had become fixtures on their