to the row. You city folks may have
your financial flurries, but if you've never been around and between and
under a bank scrap in a small town, you don't know what trouble is.
There were a couple of failures that needn't have happened, and a lot of
partisan financiering, and then the town rose up and sat down on our
social leaders with a most pronounced scrunch. We can stand just about
so much society in Homeburg, but when it gets to elbowing into business,
churches, schools and funerals, we are more sensible than you
metropolitans are. It only takes a half-day to pass the word through a
small town, and one fine morning the Payleys and Singers discovered
that while they were still facing each other like two snorty and
inextinguishable generals, their armies had gone off arm in arm.

That ended the feud and put society in Homeburg back in its proper
place--in the front parlors in the evening after the dishes had been
done up. The Payleys and Singers still continued to compete, but we
declined to fight and bleed for them and amused ourselves instead by
watching them from the sidelines. Mrs. Payley joined the "When I was in
Europe" brigade, and the Singers got the first automobile in town. It
kept the Singers so busy supporting and encouraging it, that the Payleys
were able to build the first modern house with a sleeping porch and
individual bathrooms--and about the time the Singers came back with a
two-story bungalow full of chopped wood furniture, Mrs. Payley went
abroad again and began to say: "The last time I was in Europe." It was
nip and tuck, year in and year out, between the two, and we all enjoyed
it a lot.

But it wasn't until the Payley and Singer children came home from
college and formed a tight little circle with their backs out, that we
began to reap the benefits of really haughty society.

The Payley and Singer children had absorbed all their families had to
offer, and then they went off to school in the East and laid in a
complete stock of the latest styles in superiority. They were all
finished in the same spring and shipped back to Homeburg--magnificent
specimens of college art with even their names done over--and when they
realized that they had to live forever in the old town, where no one
spoke their language or could even understand their clothes, the family
feud was forgotten and the four rushed together for mutual protection
and formed a real Smart Set.

It's just like your bigger crowd. It do