Mona Lisa, she observed:--

"She sort o' lifts me up, like somethin' I've thought of, myself. But I
don't see any sense in raisin' a question about what her smile means. I
told the agent so. 'Whenever I set for my photograph,' I says to him, 'I
always have that same silly smile on my face.'"

With us all the Friendship idea prevails: we accept what Progress sends,
but we regard it in our own fashion. Our improvements, like our
entertainments, our funerals, our holidays, and our very loves, are but
Friendship Village exponents of the modern spirit. Perhaps, in a
tenderer significance than she meant, Calliope characterized us when she
said:--

"This town is more like a back door than a front--or, givin' it full
credit, _anyhow_, it's no more'n a side door, with no vines."

For indeed, we are a kind of middle door to experience, minus the fuss
of official arriving and, too, without the old odours of the kitchen
savoury beds; but having, instead, a serene side-door existence,
partaking of both electric bells and of neighbours with shawls pinned
over their heads.

Only at one point Calliope was wrong. There are vines, with tendrils and
flowers and many birds.

II

THE DEBUT

Mrs. Ricker, "washens, scrubben, work by the day or Our," as the sign of
her own lettering announced, had come into a little fortune by the death
of her first husband, Al Kitton, early divorced and late repentant. Just
before my arrival in Friendship she had bought a respectable frame house
in the heart of the village,--for a village will have a heart instead of
having a boulevard,--and with her daughter Emerel she had set up a
modest establishment with Ingrain carpets and parlour pieces, and a bit
of grass in front. Thus Emerel Kitton--we, in our simple, penultimate
way, called it Kitten--became a kind of heiress. She had been christened
Emma Ella, but her mother, of her love of order, had tidied the name to
Emerel, and Friendship had adopted the form, perhaps as having about it
something pleasing and jewel-like. Though Emerel was in the thirties at
the time of her inheritance, she was still pretty, shy, conformable; and
yet there was no disguising that she was nearly a spinster when, as soon
as the white house was settled, Mrs. Ricker issued invitations to her
daughter's coming-out party.

You aRe Invite
to A
Comen Out Recep
Next wenesday Night at eigt
At Her Home
Emma Ella Kitton
Mrs. Ricke