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 m