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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12881 ***
+
+MRS. BUDLONG'S CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
+
+BY
+
+RUPERT HUGHES
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "EXCUSE ME," "THE OLD NEST," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+MCMXII
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+    I  AT THE SIGN OF THE PIANO LAMP
+   II  CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN
+  III  MISTRESS OF THE REVELS
+   IV  ONLY A MILLIONAIRE
+    V  THE BITER BIT
+   VI  DESPAIR AND AN IDEA
+  VII  FOILED
+ VIII  FOILED AGAIN
+   IX  WORSE, AND MORE OF IT
+    X  A WELL LAID PLAN
+   XI  GANG AGLEY AGAIN
+  XII  AN AMAZING CHRISTMAS
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BUDLONG'S CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
+
+I
+
+AT THE SIGN OF THE PIANO LAMP
+
+The morning after Christmas Eve is the worst morning-after there is.
+The very house suffers the headache that follows a prolonged spree.
+Remorse stalks at large; remorse for the things one gave--and did not
+give--and got.
+
+Everybody must act a general glee which can be felt only
+specifically, if at all.  Everybody must exclaim about everything Oh!
+and Ah! and How Sweet of You! and Isn't it Perfectly Dear! The very
+THING I Wanted! and How DID you EVER Guess it?
+
+Christmas morning in the town of Carthage is a day when most of the
+people keep close at home, for Christmas is another passover.  It is
+Santa Claus that passes over.
+
+People in Carthage are not rich; the shops are not grandiose, and
+inter-family presents are apt to be trivial and futile--or worse yet,
+utile.
+
+The Carthaginian mother generally finds that Father has credited the
+hat she got last fall, to this Christmas; the elder brothers receive
+warm under-things and the young ones brass-toed boots, mitts and
+mufflers.  The girls may find something ornamental in their
+stockings, and their stockings may be silk or nearly--but then girls
+have to be foolishly diked up anyway, or they will never be married
+out.  Dressing up daughters comes under the head of window-display or
+coupons, and is charged off to publicity.
+
+Nearly everybody in Carthage--except Mrs. Ulysses S. G.
+Budlong--celebrates Christmas behind closed doors.  People find it
+easier to rhapsodize when the collateral is not shown.  It is amazing
+how far a Carthaginian can go on the most meager donation.  The
+formula is usually: "We had Such a lovely Christmas at our house.
+What did I get?  Oh, so many things I can't reMember!"
+
+But Mrs. Ulysses S. G. Budlong does not celebrate her Christmasses
+behind closed doors--or rather she did not: a strange change came
+over her this last Christmas.  She used to open her doors
+wide--metaphorically, that is; for there was a storm-door with a
+spring on it to keep the cold draught out of the hall.
+
+As regular as Christmas itself was the oh-quite-informal reception
+Mrs. Budlong gave to mitigate the ineffable stupidity of Christmas
+afternoon: that dolorous period when one meditates the ancient
+platitude that anticipation is better than realization; and suddenly
+understands why it is blesseder to give than to receive: because one
+does not have to wear what one gives away.
+
+On Christmas Mrs. U. S. G. Budlong took all the gifts she had
+gleaned, and piled them on and around the baby grand piano in the
+back parlor.  There was a piano lamp there, one of those illuminated
+umbrellas--about as large and as useful as a date-palm tree.
+
+Along about that time in the afternoon when the Christmas dinner
+becomes a matter of hopeless remorse, Mrs. Budlong's neighbors were
+expected to drop in and view the loot under the lamp.  It looked like
+hospitality, but it felt like hostility.  She passed her neighbors
+under the yoke and gloated over her guests, while seeming to
+overgloat her gifts.
+
+But she got the gifts.  There was no question of that.  By hook or by
+crook she saw to it that the bazaar under the piano lamp always
+groaned.
+
+One of the chief engines for keeping up the display was the display
+itself.  Everybody who knew Mrs. Budlong--and not to know Mrs.
+Budlong was to argue oneself unknown--knew that he or she would be
+invited to this Christmas triumph.  And being invited rather implied
+being represented in the tribute.
+
+Hence ensued a curious rivalry in Carthage.  People vied with each
+other in giving Mrs. Budlong presents; not that they loved Mrs.
+Budlong more, but that they loved comparisons less.
+
+The rivalry had grown to ridiculous proportions.  But of course Mrs.
+Budlong did not care how ridiculous it grew; for it could hardly have
+escaped her shrewd eyes how largely it advantaged her that people
+should give her presents in order to show other people that some
+people needn't think they could show off before other people without
+having other people show that they could show off, too, as well as
+other people could.  The pyschology must be correct, for it is
+incoherent.
+
+Mrs. Budlong herself was never known to break any of the
+commandments, but in her back parlor her neighbors made flitters of
+the one against coveting thy neighbor's and-so-forth and so-on.
+
+It was when Mr. and Mrs. County Road Supervisor Detwiller were
+walking home from one of these occasions, that Mr. Detwiller was
+saying: "Well, ain't Mizzes Budlong the niftiest little gift-getter
+that ever held up a train?  How on earth did We happen to get stung?"
+
+"I don't know, Roscoe.  It's one of those things you can't get out of
+without getting out of town too.  Here we've been and gone and
+skimped our own children to buy something that would show up good in
+Mrs. Budlong's back parlor, and when I laid eyes on it in all that
+clutter--why, if it didn't look like something the cat brought in,
+I'll eat it!"
+
+Mr. Detwiller had only one consolation--and he grinned over it:
+
+"Well, there's no use cryin' over spilt gifts.  But did you see how
+she stuck old Widower Clute for that Japanese porcelain vace--I
+notice she called it vahs?"
+
+"Porcelain?" sniffed Mrs. Detwiller.  "Paper musshay!"
+
+"Well, getting even a paper--what you said--from old Clute is equal
+to extracting solid gold from anybody else.  He's the stingiest man
+in sev'n states.  He don't care any more for a two dollar bill than
+he does for his right eye.  I bet she gave him ether before he let
+go."
+
+"Oh, she works all the old bachelors and widowers that way," said
+Mrs. Detwiller, with a mixture of contempt and awe.  "Invites 'em to
+a dinner party or two around Christmas marketing time, and begins to
+talk about how pretty the shops are and how tempting everything she
+wants is; says she saw a nimitation bronze clock at Strouther and
+Streckfuss's that it almost broke her heart to leave there.  But o'
+course she couldn't afford to buy those kind of things for herself
+now when she's got to remember all her dear friends, and she runs on
+and on and the old batch growls, 'Stung again!' and goes to Strouther
+and Streckfuss's and tells Mr. Streckfuss to send Mrs. Budlong that
+blamed bronze clock she was admiring.  And that's how she gets
+things.  I could do it myself if I'd a mind to."
+
+Mr. Detwiller felt that there was more envy than truth in this last
+remark, and he was rash enough to speak up for justice: "You could if
+you'd a mind to?  Yep.  If you'd a mind to!  That's what somebody
+said about Shakespeare's plays.  'I could a wrote 'em myself if I'd a
+mind to,' says he, and somebody else said, 'Yes, if you'd a mind to,'
+he says.  And that's about it.  Any body could do what Mizzes Budlong
+does if they had the mind to; but the thing is, she's got the mind
+to.  She goes after the gifts--and gits 'em.  She don't almost git
+'em, and she ain't goin' to git 'em.  She gits 'em.  And what gits me
+is how she gits 'em."
+
+"Roscoe Detwiller, if you're goin' to praise that woman in the
+presence of your own lawful wife, I'll never speak to you the longest
+day I live." "Who's praisin' her?  I was just sayin'--"
+
+"Why, Roscoe Detwiller, you did, too!  And I should think you'd be
+ashamed of yourself."
+
+"Say, what ails you?  Why, I was roastin' her to beat the band."
+
+"And to think that on Christmas day of all days I should live to hear
+my own husband that I've loved and cherished and worked my fingers to
+the bone and never got any thanks and other women keepin' two and
+three hired girls, and after him denyin' his own children things to
+get expensive presents for a shameless creature like that Budlong
+woman--"
+
+All over Carthage on Christmas afternoons couples were similarly at
+loggerheads over Mrs. Budlong's annual triumph.
+
+Now of course Mrs. Budlong did not get all those presents without
+giving presents.  Not in Carthage!  It might have been possible to
+bamboozle these people one Christmas, but never another.  Mrs.
+Budlong gave heaps of presents.  Christmas was an industry with her,
+an ambition; Christmas was her career.  It had long ago lost its
+religious significance for her, as for nearly everybody else in
+Carthage.  Even Mr. Frankenstein (the Pantatorium magnate) is one of
+the most ardent advertisers of Christmas bargains, while Isidore
+Strouther and Esau Streckfuss are "almost persuaded" every December.
+They might be entirely persuaded if it were not for the scenes they
+witness in their aisles during the last weeks of Yuletide and the
+aftermath of trying to collect from the Gentile husbands during
+Billtide.
+
+Mrs.  Budlong's Christmas presents were of two sorts: those she made
+herself and those she made her husband pay for.  He was the typical
+husband who never fails to settle his wife's bills, so long as he may
+raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an
+expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford.
+Then he subsides until the first of the next month.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN
+
+Mrs. Budlong's campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness
+as a magazine editor's.  On or about the Fourth of July she began to
+worry and plan.  By the second week in August she had her tatting
+well under way.  By the middle of September she was getting in her
+embroidered doilies.  The earliest frost rarely surprised her with
+her quilts untufted.  And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags
+were all stuffed and smelly.
+
+She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time.  At
+missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures
+of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for
+a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two.  Then she
+would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at
+something she carried round in a sort of drumhead.  At the end of
+that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece
+of colored fabric which she called a "drape" or a "throw."  It could
+not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash
+perhaps three times.
+
+Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at
+the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses
+and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of
+starvation the first week.  But he never told Mrs. Budlong this.
+Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it
+kept her mysteriously contented.  She was stitching herself to her
+own home all the time.
+
+The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a
+matter of needle and thread.  Not at all!  One year she turned her
+sewing room into a smithy.  She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the
+loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen--and
+with a purple ribbon tied to its tail.  They kept flowers in it
+several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it
+and completely scuttled it.
+
+The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass
+version of a C. D. Gibson drawing.  The lady and gentleman looked as
+if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and
+smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something.  And the
+plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall
+paper.  But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of
+changing the paper some day.  It stayed there until the fateful
+evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was
+just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the
+wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and
+bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur's skull.  Mr. Chur said something
+that may have been Damocles.  But he did not propose, and Mrs.
+Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.
+
+The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted
+velvet.  They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be.  Mrs.
+Budlong's first landscape might as well have been painted on the side
+of her Scotch collie.
+
+Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy
+tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering
+rage.  It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the
+church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible.
+Dr. Torpadie was a very soothing preacher, but no one slept o'sermons
+during the reign of that pulpit cloth.
+
+Mrs. Budlong was so elated over the success of it, however, that she
+announced her intention of going in for stained glass.  She planned a
+series of the sweetest windows to replace those already in the
+church.  But she never got nearer to that than painted china.
+
+The painted china era was a dire era.  The cups would break and the
+colors would run, and they never came out what she expected after
+they were fired.  Of course she knew that the pigments must suffer
+alteration in the furnace, but there was always a surprise beyond
+surprise.
+
+She soon became accustomed to getting green roses with crimson
+leaves, and deep blue apple blossoms against a pure white sky, but
+when she finished one complete set of table china in fifty pieces,
+each cup and saucer with a flower on it, the result looked so
+startlingly like something from a medical museum, that she never
+dared give the set away.  She lent it to the cook to eat her meals
+on.  The set went fast.
+
+During this epoch Master Ulysses Budlong Jr. was studying at school a
+physiology ornamented with a few pictures in color representing the
+stomachs of alcohol specialists.  They were intended, perhaps, to
+frighten little school children from frequenting saloons during
+recess, or to warn them not to put whisky on their porridge.
+
+It was at this time that Mrs. Budlong spent two weeks' hard labor
+painting Easter lilies on an umbrella jug.  When it came home from
+the furnace, her husband stared at it and mumbled:
+
+"It's artistic, but what is it?"
+
+Little Ulysses shrieked: "Oh, I know!" and darting away, returned
+with his physiology opened at one of those gastric sunsets,
+and--well, it was this that impelled Mrs. Budlong to a solemn pledge
+never to paint china again--a pledge she has nobly kept.
+
+From smeared china she went to that art in which a woman buys
+something at a store, pulls out half of it, and calls the remnant
+drawn work.  A season of this was succeeded by a mania for sofa
+cushions.  It fairly snowed sofa cushions all over Carthage that
+Christmas; and Yale, Harvard and Princeton pillows could be found in
+homes that had never known even a night school alumnus.
+
+There ensued a sober period of burnt wood and a period of burnt
+leather, during which excited neighbors with a keen sense of smell
+called the fire department three times and the board of health once.
+And now Indian heads broke out all over town and the walls looked as
+if a shoemaker's apron had been chosen for the national pennant.
+
+There were various other spasms of manufacture, each of them
+fashionable at its time and foolish at anytime.  As Mr. Detwiller
+said:
+
+"Somebody ought to write a history of Mrs. Budlong's Christmas
+presents.  It would tell the complete story of all the darned fool
+fads that American women have been up to for twenty years."
+
+But foolish soever, Mrs. Budlong was fair.  A keen sense of
+sportsmanship led her to give full notice to such people as she
+planned to honor with her gifts.  She knew how embarrassing it is to
+receive presents from one to whom no present has been sent, and she
+made it a point of honor somehow to forewarn her prospective
+beneficiaries betimes.  Her favorite method was the classic device of
+pretending to let slip a secret.  For instance:
+
+"Yesterday morning, my dear, I had the Strangest exPerience.  It was
+just ten o'clock.  I remember the hour so exactly because for the
+last few days I have made it a rule to begin work on your Christmas
+present just at ten--Oh, but I didn't mean to tell you.  It was to be
+a surprise.  No, don't ask me, I won't give you an inkling, but I
+really think it will please you.  It's something you've been needing
+for Such a long time."
+
+And she left the victim to writhe from then on to Christmas, trying
+alternately to imagine what gift was impending and what would be an
+appropriate counter-gift.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MISTRESS OF THE REVELS
+
+In more ways than one Mrs. Budlong kept Carthage on the writhe.
+Christmas was merely the climax of a ceaseless activity.  All the
+year round she was at work like a yeast alert in a soggy dough.
+
+She was forever getting up things.  She was one of those terrible
+women who return calls on time or a little ahead.  That made it
+necessary for you to return hers earlier.  If you didn't, she called
+you up on the telephone and asked you why you hadn't.  You had to
+promise to come over at once or she'd talk to you till your ear was
+welded to the telephone.  Then if you broke your promise she called
+you up about that.  She got in from fifty-two to a hundred and four
+calls a year, where one or two would have amply sufficed for all she
+had to say.
+
+It was due to her that Carthage had such a lively social
+existence--for its size.  Once, when she fell ill, the people felt
+suddenly as passengers feel when a street car is suddenly braked back
+on its haunches.  All Carthage found itself wavering and poised on
+tiptoe and clinging to straps; and then it sogged back on its heels
+and waited till the car should resume progress.  Mrs. Budlong was the
+town's motorman--or "motorneer," as they say in Carthage.
+
+Before she was out of bed, she had invitations abroad for a
+convalescent tea, and everybody said, "Here we go again!"
+
+If strangers visited Carthage, Mrs. Budlong counted them her clients
+the moment they arrived.  Of course, the merely commercial visitors
+she left to the hackmen at the station, but friends or relatives of
+prominent people could not escape Mrs. Budlong's well-meant
+attentions.  It was sometimes embarrassing when relatives
+appeared--for everybody has Concealed Relatives that he is perfectly
+willing to leave in concealment.
+
+Mrs. Alex. (pronounced Ellick) Stubblebine never forgave Mrs. Budlong
+for dragging into the limelight some obscure cousins of her husband's
+who had drifted into Carthage to borrow money on their farm.  Mrs.
+Stubblebine was always bragging about her people, her own people that
+is.  Her husband's people, of course, were after all only
+Stubblebines, while her maiden name was Dilatush; and the Dilatushes,
+as everybody knew, were related by marriage to the Tatums.
+
+But these were Stubblebines that came to town.  Mrs. Stubblebine
+could hardly slam the door in their faces, but she would fain have
+locked the doors after them.  She would not even invite them out on
+the front porch.  She told them the back porch was cosier and less
+conspicuous.  And then Mrs. Budlong had to call up on the telephone
+and sing out in her telephoniest tone:
+
+"Oh, my dear, I've just this minute heard you have guests--some of
+your dear husband's relatives.  Now they must come to me to dinner
+to-morrow.  Oh, it isn't the slightest trouble, I asSure you.  I'm
+giving a little party anyway.  I won't take no for an answer."
+
+And she wouldn't.  Mrs. Stubblebine fairly perspired excuses, but
+Mrs. Budlong finally grew so suspicious that she had to accept; or
+leave the impression that the relatives were burglars or
+counterfeiters in hiding.  And they were not--they were pitifully
+honest.
+
+The result was even worse than she feared.  Mr. Stubblebine's cousin
+was so shy that he never said a word except when it was pulled out of
+him, and then he said, "Yes, ma'am"!
+
+In Carthage when you are at a dinner party and you don't quite catch
+the last remark, you don't snap "What?" or "How?" or "Wha' jew say?"
+Whatever your home habits may be, at a dinner party or before
+comp'ny, you raise your eyebrows gracefully and murmur, "I beg your
+pardon."
+
+But Mr. Stubblebine's rural cousin grunted "Huh?"--like an Indian
+chief trying to scare a white general.  And he was perfectly frank
+about the intimate processes of mastication.
+
+And when he dropped a batch of scalloped oysters into his watch
+pocket he solemnly fished them-out with a souvenir after-dinner
+coffee spoon having the Statue of Liberty for a handle and Brooklyn
+Bridge in the bowl.
+
+And the wretch's wife was so nervous that she talked all the time
+about people the others had never seen or heard of.  And she said she
+"never used tomattus."  And she wasn't ashamed of what she was
+chewing either.
+
+Mrs. Stubblebine would have felt much obliged to fate if she had been
+presented with an apoplectic stroke.  But she had to sit the dinner
+out.  From what she said to her poor husband afterward, however, one
+might have gathered that he picked out those relatives just to spite
+her, when as a matter of fact he had always loathed them and
+regretted them and the next day he borrowed enough money to lend them
+and send them back to the soil.
+
+Mrs. Budlong had constituted herself Entertainment Committee for all
+sorts of visitors.  If a young girl came home from boarding school
+with a classmate, the real hostess had hardly time to show her to the
+spare room, and say, "This is the bathroom, round here; watch out for
+the step.  And if the water don't run just wait--" when the telephone
+would go Brrrrr!  And there would be Mrs. Budlong brandishing an
+invitation to a dinner party.
+
+When the supply of guests ran low she would visit the sick.  If a
+worn-out housewife slept late some morning to catch up, Mrs. Budlong
+would hear of it and rush over with a broth or something.  It is said
+that old Miss Malkin got out of bed with an unfinished attack of
+pneumonia, just to keep from eating any more of Mrs. Budlong's wine
+jellies.
+
+In Carthage one pays for the telephone by the year.  The company lost
+money on Mrs. Budlong's wire.  As a telephoner she was simply
+interminable.  She would spend a weekend at the instrument while the
+prisoner at the other extreme of the wire shifted from ear to ear,
+sagged along the wall, postponed household duties, made signals of
+distress to other members of the family, and generally cursed Mr.
+Alexander Graham Bell for his ingenuity.
+
+Three wall telephones were changed to table phones on Mrs. Budlong's
+account, and Mrs. Talbot had hers put by the bed.  She used to take
+naps while Mrs. Budlong talked and she trained herself to murmur,
+"Yes, dear," at intervals in her sleep.
+
+By means like this Mrs. Budlong kept Carthage more or less under her
+thumb.  Carthage squirmed but it could not crawl out from under.
+
+This is the story of how the thumb was removed for good and all.  It
+was Mrs. Budlong herself that removed it.  Carthage could never have
+pried it up.
+
+And strange to say the thumb came off because it grew popular.
+
+Hitherto Mrs. Budlong had never been truly popular.  People were
+merely afraid of her.  She was a whipper-in, a social bush-beater,
+driving the populace from cover like partridges.  She would not let
+the town rest.  The merchants alone admired her, for she was the
+cause of much buying of new shoes, new hats, new clothes, fine
+groceries, olives, Malaga grapes, salted almonds, raisins, English
+walnuts and other things that one eats only at parties.  She was the
+first woman in Carthage that ever gave a luncheon and called it
+breakfast, as years before she had been the first hostess to give a
+dinner at any time except in the middle of the day.  Also, she was
+the first person there to say, "Come to me" when she meant "Come to
+our house."  It had a Scriptural sound and was thought shocking until
+Carthage grew used to it.
+
+It was due to her that several elderly men were forced into their
+first evening dress.  They had thought to escape through life without
+that ordeal.  Old Clute would have preferred to be fitted for a pine
+box, and would have felt about as comfortable in it.  He tried to
+compromise with the tailor on a garment that could serve as a Prince
+Albert by day and a "swaller tail" by night, but Mr. Kweskin could
+not manage it even though his Christian name was Moses.
+
+So Mr. Clute blamed Mrs. Budlong for yet another expense.  Husbands
+all over town were blaming Mrs. Budlong for running their families
+into fool extravagances.  Mothers were blaming her for dragging them
+round by the nose and leaving them no rest.  But everybody in town
+resentfully obeyed Mrs. Budlong, though Mrs. Roscoe Detwiller wanted
+to organize a HomeKeepers Union, and strike.  For the women never
+dared trust themselves about the house in a wrapper, since Mrs.
+Budlong might happen in as like as not--rather liker than not.
+
+And then, just as the town was fermenting for revolt, Mrs. Budlong
+came into a lot of money.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ONLY A MILLIONAIRE
+
+That is, Mr. Budlong came into a lot of money.  Which meant that Mr.
+Budlong would be permitted to take care of it while his wife got rid of
+it.  One of those relatives, very common in fiction, and not altogether
+unknown in real life, finally let go of her money at the behest of her
+impatient undertaker.  The Budlongs had the pleasure of seeing the
+glorious news of their good fortune in big headlines in the Carthage
+papers.
+
+It was the only display Mr. Budlong ever received in that paper without
+paying for it--excepting the time when he ran for Mayor on the
+opposition ticket and was referred to in letters an inch high as
+"Candidate Nipped-in-the-Budlong."
+
+But now the cornucopia of plenty had burst wide open on the front
+porch.  It seemed as if they would have to wade through gold dollars to
+get to their front gate--when the money was collected.  When the money
+was collected.
+
+And now it was Mrs.  Budlong's telephone that rang and rang.  It was
+she that was called up and called up.  It was she that sagged along the
+wall and shifted from foot to foot, from elbow to elbow and ear to ear.
+
+After living in Carthage all her life she was suddenly, as it were,
+welcomed to the city as a distinguished visiting stranger.  And now she
+had no need to invite people to return their calls.  They came
+spontaneously.  Sometimes there were a dozen calling at once.  It was a
+reception every day.  There were overflow meetings in the room which
+Mrs. Budlong called Mr. Budlong's "den." This was the place where she
+kept the furniture that she didn't dare keep in the parlor.
+
+People who had never come to see her in spite of her prehensile
+telephone, dropped in to pay up some musty old call that had lain
+unreturned for years.  People who had always come formally, even
+funereally, rushed in as informally and with as devouring an enthusiasm
+as old chums.  People who used to run in informally now drove up in
+vehicles from MacMulkin's livery stable; or if they came in their own
+turn-outs they had the tops washed and the harness polished, and the
+gardener and furnaceman who drove, had his hat brushed, was not allowed
+to smoke, and was urged to sit up straight and for heaven's sake to
+keep his foot off the dashboard.
+
+People who had been in the habit of devoting a day or two to 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 she decided to give a
+large dinner to wipe off a great number at once.  But now when she
+calculated that the olives, the turkey, the Malaga grapes, the English
+walnuts, the salted almonds and a man from the hotel to wait on table,
+would total up twenty-five dollars or so, she found herself figuring
+how much twenty-five dollars would amount to in twenty-five years at
+compound interest.
+
+She grew frantic to be quit of Carthage--to rub it off her visiting
+list.  Unconsciously her motto became Cato's ruthless _Carthago delenda
+est_.
+
+But she could neither delete Carthage from her map, nor free her feet
+from its dust.  Her husband's business required him yet awhile.  Even
+to close it up took time.  And he would not, and could not, borrow
+money on Aunt Ida's estate till he was sure that it was his.
+
+But all the while the festival reveled on.  People in Carthage to whom
+New York was an inaccessible Carcassone, were now planning to visit
+Mrs. Budlong there at the palatial home she had described.  Some of
+them frankly told her they were coming to see her.  Wealth took on a
+new discomfort.
+
+Sally Swezey afflicted the telephone with gossip: "As Mrs. Talbot was
+saying only yes'day, my dear, so many folks have threatened to visit
+you in your home on Fifth Avenue that you'll have to hang hammocks in
+your front yard."
+
+And now they had spoiled even her future for her.  What pride could she
+take in having a gorgeous home on Fifth Avenue with all these Carthage
+people rocking on the front porch.  Probably some warm evening when
+Mrs. Hotel Vanderbilt was driving by in her new barouche, it would be
+just like Roscoe Detwiller to turn in at the gate, flounce down on the
+top step and sit there with his vest unbuttoned, and his seersucker
+coat under his arm, while he mopped the inside of his hat with his
+handkerchief.
+
+But that was the discomfort of the morrow.  To-day had its own spawn.
+One morning she was called to the telephone by the merciless Sallie
+Swezey with a new infliction.  There was something almost ghoulish in
+Mrs. Swezey's cackling glee as she sang out across the wire:
+
+"We're all so glad, my dear, that the next meeting of the Progressive
+Euchre is to be at your house."
+
+Mrs. Budlong's chin dropped.  She had quite forgotten this.  Sallie
+chortled on:
+
+"And say, do you know what?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Everybody says you're going to give solid gold prizes and that even
+your booby prize will be handsomer than the first prize was at Mrs.
+Detwiller's."
+
+"Ha, ha!" laughed Mrs. Budlong in a tone that sounded just like the
+spelling.
+
+Mrs. Budlong's wealth seemed to be accepted as a sort of municipal
+legacy.  All Carthage assumed to own it in community, and to enjoy it
+with her.  Her walls rang with the hilarity of her neighbors.  But her
+laughter took on more and more the sound of icicles snapping from the
+eaves of a shed.
+
+She became the logical candidate for all the chief offices in clubs and
+societies and circles.  She suddenly found herself seven or eight
+presidents and at least eleven chairwomen.  The richest woman in town
+heretofore was Mrs. Foster Herpers, wife of the pole and shaft
+manufacturer.  He owned about half of the real estate in town, but his
+wife had to distill expenses out of him in pennies.  With a profound
+sigh of relief she resigned all her honors in Mrs. Budlong's favor.
+
+Being president chiefly meant lending one's house for meetings as well
+as one's china and tea and sandwiches, and being five dollars ahead of
+anybody else in every subscription.  Mrs. Budlong was panic-stricken
+with her own success, for there is nothing harder to handle than a
+dam-break of prosperity.
+
+Worse yet, Mr. Budlong was ceasing to be the meek thing of yore.  Every
+day was the first of the month with him.
+
+It was well on in November when he flung himself into a Morris chair
+one evening and groaned aloud:
+
+"I don't believe Aunt Ida ever left any money.  If she did I don't
+believe we'll ever get any of it.  And if we do, I know we'll not have
+a sniff at it before January.  One of the lawyers has been called
+abroad on another case.  We've got to stay in Carthage, at least over
+Christmas."
+
+"Christmas!" The word crackled and sputtered in Mrs. Budlong's brain
+like a fuse in the dark.  The past month had been so packed with other
+excitements that she had forgotten the very word.  Now it blew up and
+came down as if one of her own unstable Christmas trees had toppled
+over on her with all its ropes of tinsel, its lambent tapers, and its
+eggshell splendors.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE BITER BIT
+
+First, Mrs. Budlong felt amazement that she could have so ignored the
+very focus of her former ambition.  Then she felt shame at her
+unpreparedness.  She caught the evening paper out of her husband's
+lap to find the date.  November ninth and not a Christmas thing
+begun.  Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her
+that Christmas was coming, for by the middle of November all the
+magazines put on their holly and their chromos of the three Magi and
+their Santa Clauses, as women put on summer straw hats at Easter.
+
+Mrs. Budlong's hands sought and wrung each other as if in mutual
+reproach.  They had been pouring tea and passing wafers when they
+should have been Dorcassing at their Christmas tasks.  It had been
+left for her husband of all people to warn her that her own special
+Bacchanal was imminent.
+
+If he had been a day later, the neighbors would have anticipated him
+as well as the magazines.  The Christmas idea seemed to strike the
+whole town at once.  Mrs. Budlong became the victim of her own
+classic device of pretending to let slip a secret.  The townswomen
+shamelessly turned her own formula against her.
+
+Mrs. Detwiller met her at church and said:
+
+"Yesterday morning at eleven I had the most curious presentiment, my
+dear.  I remember the hour so exactly because I've been making it a
+rule to begin work on your Christmas present every morning at--  Oh,
+but I didn't inTend to let you know.  No, dearie, I won't tell you
+what it is.  But I can't help believing it's Just what you'll need in
+New York."
+
+Myra Eppley, with whom Mrs. Budlong had never exchanged Christmas
+presents, at all, but with whom an intimacy had sprung up since Mrs.
+Budlong came into the reputation of her money--Myra Eppley had the
+effrontery to call up on the telephone and say:
+
+"Would you mind telling me, my dear, the shade of wall paper you're
+going to have in your New York parlor, because I'm making you the
+daintiest little--well, no matter, but will you tell me?"
+
+Poor Mrs. Budlong almost swooned from the telephone.  She did not
+know what the color of her wall paper would be in New York.  She did
+not know that she would ever have wall paper in New York.  She only
+knew that Myra Eppley, too, was calling her "my dear."  Myra Eppley
+also was going to give her a Christmas present.  And would have to be
+given one.
+
+Mrs. Budlong had received fair warning, but she felt about as
+grateful as a wayfarer feels to the rattlesnake that whizzes "Make
+r-r-r-ready for the corrroner-r-r."
+
+Next, young Mrs. Chur (Editha Cinnamon as was, for she had finally
+landed Mr. Chur in spite of the accident--or because of it) called up
+to say:
+
+"Oh, my dear, my husband wants to know what brand of cigars your
+husband smokes; and would you tell me, dearie--it's rather personal,
+but--what size bath-slippers you wear?"
+
+When Sally Swezey came to the Progressive Euchre skirmish at Mrs.
+Budlong's she noted with joy that her hint had borne fruit.  The
+prizes were indeed of solid gold.  Mr. Budlong did not learn it till
+the first of the following month when the bill came in from Jim
+Henderson's jewelry store.
+
+As if she had not done enough in forcing solid gold prizes on Mr.
+Budlong, Sally had to say:
+
+"I'm just dying to see your back parlor, my dear, this next Christmas
+afternoon.  It has always been a sight for sore eyes; but this
+Christmas it will be a perfect wonder, for I do declare everybody in
+town is going to send you something nice."
+
+This conviction was already chilling Mrs. Budlong's marrow.  Of old
+she would have rejoiced at the golden triumph, but now she could only
+realize that if everybody in Carthage sent her something nice, it was
+because everybody in Carthage expected something nicer.  And her
+Christmas crops were hopelessly backward.  At a time when she should
+be half done, she could not even begin.  She had not tatted or
+smeared or hammered a thing.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DESPAIR AND AN IDEA
+
+Days and days went by in a stupor of dull hopelessness.  Thanksgiving
+came and the Budlong turkey might as well have been a crow.  In
+desperation she decided to make a tentative exploration of the shops
+now burgeoning with Christmas splendor; every window a spasm of
+gewgaws.  Since she had no time to make, she must buy.
+
+The length of her list sent her to the cheaper counters, but she was
+not permitted to browse among them.  At Strouther and Streckfuss's, Mr.
+Strouther came up and said with reeking unctuousness:
+
+"Vat is Mees Bootlonk doink down here amonkst all this tresh?  Come see
+our importet novelties."
+
+And he led her to a region where the minimum price was MBBA-BDJA, which
+meant that it cost 12.25 and could be safely marked down to 23.75.
+
+She eluded him and got back to the 25-cent realm only to be apprehended
+by Mr. Streckfuss, who beamed:
+
+"Ah, nothink is here for a lady like you are.  Only fine kvality suits
+such a taste you got."
+
+By almost superfeminine strength she evaded purchasing anything.  She
+went to other shops only to be haled to the expensive counters.
+Storekeepers simply would not discuss cheap things with the
+millionairess-elect.
+
+She crept home and threw herself on her husband's mercy.  He had none
+and she lighted hard.  It was the first of December, and in addition to
+his monthly rage, Mr. Budlong was working himself up to his regular
+pre-Christmas frenzy, when he always felt poor and talked poorer to
+keep the family in check.
+
+His face was a study when he had heard his wife's state of mind.
+Forthwith he delivered the annual address on Christmas folly that one
+hears from fathers of families all round the world at this time:
+
+"Christmas has quit being a sign of people's affections," Mr. Budlong
+thundered.  "It has become a public menace.  It's worse than Wall
+Street.  Wall Street is supposed have started as the thermometer of the
+country's business and now it's gone and got so goldum big that the
+thermometer is makin' the weather.  When Wall Street feels muggy it's
+got to rain and the sun don't dare shine without takin' a peek at the
+thermometer first off.
+
+"Christmas ain't any longer an opportunity to show good will to your
+neighbors.  It's a time when you got to show off before your neighbors.
+You women make yourselves and us men sick the way you carry on all
+through December.  And the children!--they're worse'n the grown-ups.
+
+"Old-fashioned Christmas was like old-fashioned circuses--mostly meant
+for the young ones.  Nowadays circuses have growed so big and so
+improper that nobody would dast take a child to one, or if you do, they
+get crazy notions.
+
+"When I was a boy, if I got a drum and a tin horn I was so happy I
+couldn't keep quiet.  But last Christmas little Ulie Junior cried all
+day because he got a 'leven dollar automobile when he wanted a
+areaplane big enough to carry the cat over the barn.
+
+"This Christmas trust business ought to be investigated by the gov'ment
+and dissolved.  Talk about your tariff schedules! What we need is
+somebody to pare down this Christmas gouge.  It's the one kind of tax
+you can't swear off.
+
+"And as for you--why, you're goin' daffy.  Other years I didn't mind so
+much.  You spent a lot of time and some money on your annual splurge,
+but I will say, you took in better'n you gave.  But now you're on the
+other side the fence.  These Carthage women have got you on the run.
+You'll have to give 'em twice as good as they send or you're gone.
+You're gone anyway.  If you gave each one of 'em a gold platter full of
+diamonds they'd say you'd inherited Aunt Ida's stinginess as well as
+her money."
+
+Mrs. Budlong went on twisting her fingers: "Oh, of course you're right,
+Ule.  But what's the use of being right when it's so hateful?  All I
+can think of is that Everybody in town is going to give me a present!
+Everybody!"
+
+"Can't you take your last year's presents and pass 'em along to other
+folks?"
+
+"Everybody would recognize them, and I'd be the talk of the town."
+
+"You're that anyway, so what difference does it make?"
+
+"I'd rather die."
+
+"You'd save a lot of money and trouble if you did."
+
+"Just look at the list of presents I must give."
+
+She handed him a bundle of papers.  He pushed up his spectacles and put
+on his reading glasses, and instantly snorted:
+
+"Say!  What is this? the town directory?"
+
+He had not read far down the list when he missed one important name.
+"You've overlooked Mrs. Alsop."
+
+"Oh, her!  I've quarreled with her.  We don't speak, thank heaven."
+
+"It would be money In your pocket, if you didn't speak to anybody.
+Gosh!" he slapped his knee.  "I have an idea.  Stop speaking to
+everybody."
+
+"Don't he silly."
+
+"I mean it."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FOILED
+
+Ulysses S. G. Budlong was a man fertile in ideas and unflinching in
+their execution.  Otherwise he would never have attained his present
+unquestioned supremacy, as the leading hay and feed merchant in
+Carthage.
+
+"It's as easy as falling off a log," he urged.  "You women are always
+spatting about something.  Now's your chance to capitalize your spats."
+
+"Men are such im-boo-hoo-ciles!" was Mrs. Budlong's comment, as she
+began to weep.  Her husband patted her with a timid awkwardness as if
+she were the nose of a strange horse.  "There! there! we'll fix this up
+fine.  What did you quarrel with Mrs. Alsop about?"
+
+"She told Sally Swezey and Sally Swezey told me--that I used my
+Carthage presents to send to relatives in other towns."
+
+"She flattered you at that," said Mr. Budlong unconsolingly.  "But
+don't you dream of forgiving her till after Christmas."
+
+Mrs. Budlong was having such a good cry, and enjoying the optical hath
+so heartily, that her grief became very precious to her.  It suggested
+what a beautiful thing grief is to those who make a fine art of it.
+
+She smiled wet-liddedly.  "There is nothing in your idea, Ulie, but it
+has suggested a good one to me.  I'll announce that I can't celebrate
+Christmas because of our great grief for Aunt Ida."
+
+"Great grief!" Mr.  Budlong echoed.  "Why, you couldn't have celebrated
+Aunt Ida's finish more joyous without you'd serenaded her in Woodlawn
+with a brass band."
+
+"Ulysses Budlong! you ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying such a
+thing!"  But she suddenly heard, in fancy, the laugh that would go up
+if she sprung such an excuse.  She gave in:
+
+"We'll have to quarrel with somebody then.  But what excuse is there?"
+
+"Women don't need any real excuse.  You simply telephone Sally Swezey
+that a certain person told you--and you won't name any names--that she
+had been making fun of you and you'd be much obliged if she never spoke
+to you again for you'd certainly never speak to her again."
+
+"But how do I know Sally Swezey has been making fun of me?"
+
+"Oh, there ain't any doubt but what everybody in town is doing that."
+
+"Ulysses Budlong! how can you talk so!"
+
+"If people without money couldn't make fun of people with--what
+consolation would they have?  Anyway, it's not me but the other folks
+you're supposed to quarrel with.  You spend an hour at that telephone
+and you can get the whole town by the ears."
+
+"But I can't use the same excuse for everybody."
+
+"You'll think up plenty once you put your mind to it."  And with that
+another excuse came in pat.  Came in howling and flagrant.
+
+Ulysses Junior burst into the room, as if he had forgotten the presence
+of the door.  He was yelping like a coyote and from his tiny nose an
+astonishing amount of blood was spouting.
+
+"What on earth is the matter!" the startled mother gasped.  "Come here
+to me, you poor child---and be careful not to bleed on the new rug."
+
+Ulysses' articulation was impeded with sobs and the oscillations of
+three semi-detached teeth, that waved in the breeze as he screamed:
+"Little Clarence Detwiller LICKED me!  so he did! and I on'y p-pushed
+him off his sled into a puddle of ice wa-wa-water and he attackted me
+and kicked my f-f-Face-ace off."
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Budlong were so elated with the same idea that they forgot
+to console their heart-broken offspring with more than Mr. Budlong's
+curt, "First teeth anyway; saves you a trip to the dentist."  He nodded
+to his wife.
+
+"Just the excuse we were looking for."
+
+"Sent direct from heaven," nodded Mrs. Budlong.  "You call up Roscoe
+Detwiller this minute and tell him his son has criminal tendencies and
+ought to be in jail and will undoubtedly die on the gallows.  Then he
+won't speak to you to-morrow."
+
+"You bet he won't.  He'll just quietly do to me what his boy did to
+Ulie.  No, my dear, you tell all that to Mrs. Detwiller yourself."
+
+Mrs. Budlong tossed her head with fine contempt.  "What cowards men
+are! always shielding themselves behind women's skirts.  Well, if
+you're afraid, I'm not.  I'll give her the biggest talking to she ever
+had in her born days."
+
+She rose with fortitude and started to the telephone, sneered at it and
+glared at it.  Her husband stood by her to support her in the hour of
+need.  He watched her ask for the number, and snap ferociously at the
+central.  Then she fell panicky again and held the transmitter to him
+appealingly.  He waved her away scornfully.
+
+She set her teeth hard and there was grimness in her eye and tone as
+she said: "Is this you, Mrs. Detwiller! ---- Oh, yes, thank you, I'm
+very well.  I wanted to tell you-m ---- oh, yes, he's well, too.  But
+what I started to say was ---- Yes, so Ulie says! ------ Yes, right in
+the face ------ Oh, of course, ------ Naturally ------ Boys will be
+------ ------ Oh, I'm sorry you punished him.  He's such a sweet child
+------ ------ Oh, don't think of it.  I'm sure it was all Ulie's fault.
+It will teach him better next time.  He's so rough! ------ ------ Oh,
+really, how awfully sweet of you.  Good night, dear."
+
+She stuck the receiver on the hook and looked for a hook to hang
+herself on.  Her eyes were shifty with shame as she mumbled:
+
+"I couldn't get a word in edgeways.  She apologized."
+
+"She apologized!" Mr. Budlong roared.  "Why, you ate out of her hand.
+And you were going to show me what a coward I-- Butter wouldn't have
+melted--say, why didn't you kiss her?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong was suffering a greater dismay than remorse.  "What d'you
+suppose that cat of a Clara Detwiller's going to do?" she moaned.
+"She's going to make her boy send Ulie a nice Christmas present!  And
+now we'll have to buy one for Ulie to give to him!"
+
+"Well, of all the--oh, you're a great manager, you are!  You call up a
+woman to get rid of giving one Christmas present, and now you've got to
+give two.  Here! where you going?"
+
+"I'm going to that phone and tell Mrs. Detwiller what I think of her."
+
+"You keep away from that phone.  Before you could ring off again her
+husband would have a Christmas present wished onto ME!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FOILED AGAIN
+
+The next morning Mrs. Budlong arose from dreams of finding bargains
+after all.  She felt a spirit in her feet that led her, who knows
+how, to the Christmas-window street.  But the crowds and the prices
+and the servility of the salesfolk drove her out again.
+
+On her laggard way home she saw Sally Swezey, lean and lanky and
+somehow reminding her of a flamingo.  Sally espied her from afar and
+stepped a little higher.  Mrs. Budlong remembered her husband's
+suggestion.  She made a quick resolution to do or die.  Her cheek was
+cold and white and her heart beat loud and fast, but she tried to set
+her double chin into a square jaw, and she passed Sally Swezey as if
+Sally Swezey were a lamp-post by the curb--a common lamp-post by the
+curb, and nothing more.
+
+She heard Sally's gush of greeting stop short as if someone had
+turned a faucet in her throat; she heard a gulp; then she heard a
+strangled silence.  Then she heard Sally call her name tentatively,
+tenderly, reproachfully.  Then she heard no more.  And she knew no
+more till her feet somehow carried her home.  But she had hardly time
+to flop into a rocker and utter a prayer of gratitude and pride for
+having been vouchsafed the courage to snub a Carthaginian before
+Br-r-rr!--the relentless telephone was on her trail.  She knew just
+who it was and she braced herself to meet one of Sally's
+sharp-tongued assaults.  But Sally said--in part:
+
+"Oh, you poor darling dear, is that you? and how are you now?  I was
+So alarmed for you.  You looked So ill and worn and--aren't the
+Christmas crowds awful this year? and nothing fit to buy and such
+prices!  and--you must be just worn out.  You really must spare
+yourself, for do you Know what you Did, dearest.  You went right By
+me without Seeing me, or Answering me!  Yes, you did!  I was so
+startled that I didn't have brains enough to run after you and assist
+you home.  I'm so glad you got there alive and I Do hope you're
+feeling better and I'm so aShamed of myself for letting you go all
+that way aLone in that pitiful conDition.  Can you ever forGive me?"
+
+When Mr. Budlong came home for luncheon, Mrs. Budlong told him the
+whole story.  He glared at her with an I-give-you-up expression and
+growled:
+
+"And when she said all that, what did you say?"
+
+"I don't know." Mrs.  Budlong faltered.  "All I know is that she's
+coming over this afternoon with a lot of that wine jelly I gave her
+the receipt for."
+
+"And what do you intend to do this time?" Mr. Budlong demanded.  The
+skeptic in his tone stung her to revolt.  She could usually be strong
+in the presence of her husband.  She looked at least like Mrs.
+Boadicea as she said:
+
+"I intend to tell Sally Swezey what you told me to.  And I will
+accept no  apologies, none whatever."
+
+When Mr. Budlong came home to dinner she avoided his gaze.  She
+confessed that she had changed her program.  She hadn't the heart to
+insult poor Sally, and she had admitted that she was a hit dizzy and
+qualmish and she had--well, she--she--
+
+Mr. Budlong finished for her fiercely:
+
+"I know! You ate a lot of her wine jelly, and you told her she was a
+love and you kissed her good-by, and would she excuse you from coming
+to the door because you were still a little wobbly."
+
+Mrs. Budlong looked at him in surprise: "She told you!"
+
+"Nah!  I haven't seen her."
+
+"Then how on earth did you ever guess?" she babbled.
+
+"It was my womanly intuition!" he snarled, and that evening he went
+down town and sat in the hotel lobby for a couple of hours.  He
+usually did this anyway--in summer he sat on the sidewalk--but this
+evening, he did it with a certain implication of escape.  He
+expressed renunciation in the mere shutting of the door.
+
+On the way home Mr. Budlong was busy with schemes.  His mind turned
+again to his son.
+
+In a smallish town, a growing boy is an unfailing source of _casus
+belli_.
+
+As an inciter of feuds there was something almost Balkan or Moroccan
+about Ulysses Budlong Junior.  Nearly every day he had come charging
+into the house with bad news in some form or other.  Some rock or
+snowball he had cast with the most innocent of intentions had gone
+through a window or a milk wagon or somebody's silk hat.  Or he had
+pulled a small girl's hair, or taken the skates away from a helpless
+urchin.  He had bad luck too in picking victims with belligerent big
+brothers.
+
+Mr. Budlong recognized these desperado traits and he fully expected
+Ulysses Junior to make him the father of a convict.  Suddenly now
+despair became hope.  Let Mrs. Budlong capitalize her spats; he would
+promote Ulie's.  The affair Detwiller had turned out badly, but Mr.
+Budlong would not yield to one defeat.  He watched eagerly for the
+next misdemeanor of his young hopeless.  He relied on him to embroil,
+as it were, all Europe in an international conflict.
+
+But the dove of peace seemed to have alighted on Ulysses' shoulder.
+He even began to go to Sunday School--the Methodist this year because
+they had given the largest cornucopias in town the Christmas before.
+And he talked nothing but Golden Texts till Mr. Budlong began to fear
+that he would one day be the father of a parson.
+
+Meanwhile, Mrs. Budlong grew bellicose again.  She snubbed people
+right and left, but they generously imputed it to absent-mindedness.
+She failed to go to the dinner party the Teeples gave in her honor,
+and she sent no excuse.  This was the unpardonable sin in Carthage
+and the Budlong chairs sat vacant through the dinner.
+
+But Mrs. Teeple graciously assumed that she was ill and sent over the
+cut flowers off the table.  And she hoped the poor dear would feel
+better soon.
+
+A few days later Mrs. Budlong's pet Maltese kitten was done to nine
+deaths at once by the Disney's fox terrier.  Mrs. Budlong mourned the
+kitten, but there was consolation in the thought that she could now
+cut the Disneys off her list.
+
+Before she could get the kitten decently interred in the back yard,
+Mrs. Disney was at the front door.  She flung her arms round Mrs.
+Budlong and wept, declaring that she had resolved to give the
+murderous terrier away to a farmer, and had already sent to Chicago
+for a pedigreed Angora to replace the Maltese.  It would arrive the
+day before Christmas.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+WORSE, AND MORE OF IT
+
+As if that were not enough for one day, in the afternoon Johnetta
+Ackerley called.  She saw Mrs. Budlong at an upper window and waved to
+her as she came along the walk.  When the cook arrived upstairs like a
+grand piano moving in, Mrs. Budlong said in an icy tone:
+
+"Not at home."
+
+"But I told her you was.  And she seen you at the windy."
+
+"Not!--at!--home!"
+
+"But I'm after telling her--"
+
+Mrs. Budlong could be as stern as steel with her husband or her
+servants.  She cowed Brigida into lumbering downstairs with the
+message.  Mrs. Budlong went to the window to triumph over her victim's
+retreat in a panic of confusion.
+
+Instead, she heard a light patter of footsteps and Johnetta Ackerley
+hurried into the room.
+
+"Oh, my dear, are you ill?  Pardon my coming right up, but the cook
+takes so long and I was so worried for fear you were--but you aren't,
+are you?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong was at bay.  She glared at the intruder and threw up her
+chin.  Johnetta stared at her aghast.
+
+"Why, my dear! you aren't mad at me, are you?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong smiled bitterly, and said nothing.  Johnetta shrilled:
+
+"Why, what have I done?"
+
+As a matter of fact, what had she done?  All that Mrs. Budlong could
+think of was her husband's unused suggestion for a war with Sally
+Swezey.  She spoke through locked teeth:
+
+"It's not what you've done but what you've said."
+
+"Why, what have I said?"
+
+"You know well enough what you've been saying behind my back, and you
+needn't think that people don't come and tell me.  I name no names, but
+I know!  Oh, I know!"
+
+Now, of course, everybody says things behind everybody else's back that
+nobody would care to have repeated to anybody.  Through Johnetta
+Ackerley's memory dashed a hundred caustic comments she had made on
+Mrs. Budlong.  She blushed and sighed, turned away and closed the door
+after her, like the last line of an elegy.
+
+A surge of triumph swept over Mrs. Budlong.  Success at last.
+
+Then the door opened and Johnetta reappeared on the sill with a look of
+angelic contrition.
+
+"I hardly know what to say," she said.  "Of course, I must admit I did
+rather forget myself.  It was at the last meeting of the Progressive
+Euchre Club and everybody was criticizing you for having solid gold
+prizes when they were at your house.  They said it was vulgar
+ostentation.  I didn't say anything for the longest time, but finally
+when they all said your money had gone to your head, hadn't it, I admit
+I did mumble, 'It seems so.'  But it is only what everybody else says
+all the time, and I assure you I didn't really mean it.  Of course
+nobody can behave just the same after they are a millionaire as they
+did before.  But I am awfully fond of you and--and--"
+
+"It was most disloyal," said Mrs. Budlong.  "And to think that after
+tearing me to pieces behind my back, you could come and call on me."
+
+It was a fine speech, but after she heard herself say it, Mrs. Budlong
+had a sinking feeling that if she herself had never called on anybody
+she had not criticized she would have stayed at home all her life.  But
+Johnetta Ackerley took another line.  She threw herself on Mrs.
+Budlong's mercy, and if Mrs. Budlong boasted of anything more than
+another it was her mercy.
+
+"I have just been at the church," said Johnetta, "helping to decorate
+it for Christmas week, and I was hanging up a big motto 'Peace on
+Earth, Good Will to Men' and I think it ought to apply to women, too.
+I grovel in apology and I pray you to forgive me.  You can't refuse
+your forgiveness when I implore it, can you?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong wanted to but could not and the two women fell about each
+other's throats and exchanged moan for moan.  As they were comfortably
+dabbing each other's tears from their cheeks and sniffing their own and
+laughing cosily after the rain, Johnetta giggled and sobbed at once:
+
+"The idea of your thinking I didn't just love you--and me working my
+fingers to the bone making a Christmas present for you!"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A WELL-LAID PLAN
+
+In the Civil War there were over two thousand battles and the details
+could not be reported in a lifetime.  But their result can be stated in
+a phrase.  The same brevity must apply to the campaigns, the
+stratagems, ballistics and tactics of Mrs. Budlong:  numberless efforts
+at secession ended as a lost cause.
+
+There was one more desperate struggle.  While only a few days stood
+between her and her famous Christmas afternoons, she and her dour
+husband were having a bitter council of war.  She had another attack of
+inspiration.
+
+"I have it! the very thing!  Why haven't we thought of it before?
+Quarantine!"
+
+"Quarantine?" echoed Mr. Budlong as if the word were gibberish.
+
+"Yes.  If we had something contagious in the house and a quarantine on,
+people couldn't come here with their odious gifts and they would be so
+afraid to get ours that they'd be much obliged to us for not sending
+them any."
+
+For the first time in years Mr. Budlong paid Mrs. Budlong a sincere
+homage:
+
+"You're a genius.  It takes a woman to squirm out of a difficulty after
+all."
+
+He was so excited he actually kissed her--and he hadn't finished his
+evening paper at that!
+
+This overjoyed her so far that she fairly glowed.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad you approve, Ulie dear.  And you'll help me, won't
+you?"
+
+"You bet I will, ducky dove."
+
+"That's glorious.  Now which will you pretend to have, yellow fever or
+smallpox or--"
+
+"Which will _I_ pretend to have?  Do you mean to say that you expect ME
+to go bed with a fatal disease?"
+
+"It doesn't have to be fatal, my love.  Just so long as it's
+contagious, you know."
+
+"Well, of all th--what's to happen to my business?"
+
+"Why, you can call it a vacation.  And you can pretend to get well
+after Christmas; or you can have the doctor say it wasn't yellow fever
+after all."
+
+"But I stay in bed for several days, eh?"
+
+"Oh, you can move round all you want, just so 's't you don't go
+outdoors, and keep away from the windows."
+
+Mr. Budlong's admiration was reverting to its normal state.  He growled:
+
+"You women would be an awful joke, if you were only a little funnier.
+If you're so keen on this quarantine business you quarantine yourself.
+You can have yellow fever, or scarlet, or green or any color you
+like--robin's egg blue fever for all I care."
+
+"But, my darling, I can't be having those things!  You know I don't
+believe in them this year, since I became a--oh, it wouldn't do at all
+for Me.  But You could have it because You believe in diseases."
+
+"You bet I do, and I believe you've got softening of the brain."  He
+paced the floor in an effort to keep up with his temper.  Eventually he
+stopped short.  He remembered that his son had failed to help the
+family out in its distress.  He said:
+
+"Let Ulie have something."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+GANG AGLEY AGAIN
+
+Mrs. Budlong felt a certain superstitious uneasiness, but was finally
+won over, and Ulie was unanimously elected the scapegoat--or in more
+modern form, the goat.
+
+Ulie was in bed at the time sleeping like an innocent cherub and
+smiling in his sleep.  He was dreaming of a great invention: he would
+set a figure-4 trap near his fireplace and snare Santa Claus by the
+foot.  Then from a safe ambush under the bed, he would assail the old
+gentleman with his nigger-shooter till he laid him low, whereupon he
+could rifle the entire pack at his leisure, and select what he
+wanted.  Ulie had not been attending Sabbath School in vain.  The
+lesson of the week concerned David and Goliath.
+
+Prom such dreams as these Ulie woke the next morning to be told that
+he need not leave his bed.  He had scarlet fever and must keep close
+under his cover.
+
+"Scarlet nothin'!" was Ulie's reply.  "I gotter go to a meetin' of
+the Youth's Helpin' Hand Socirety this afternoon and I'll be darned
+if I stay in any dog-on bed."
+
+Mr. Budlong finally persuaded him--Ulie wasn't dressed yet and it
+hurts worse on the bare hide.  Then Mr. Budlong hurried down town to
+bribe a doctor and borrow a red placard of the board of health.  He
+was just rounding the corner on the way home when he caught sight of
+Ulie descending from the window by means of a knotted sheet.  Ulie
+had only a nightgown on, and owing to the heavy wind it wasn't much
+on.
+
+He dropped to the ground before Mr. Budlong could reach him, then
+darted away across lots barefooted through the snow towards the
+Detwillers'.  Mr. Budlong treed him just before he reached the
+neighbors.  But the boy would not come down till his father promised
+immunity both from punishment and from scarlet fever.
+
+The Detwillers were arriving on the run, so the father promised, hid
+the scarlet fever propaganda in his inside pocket, wrapped Ulie in
+his own overcoat and carried him home.  There was so much dread of
+pneumonia that the guilty parents could not include Ulie in any more
+schemes.  And they could think of no schemes.  The day before the Day
+Before Christmas found them in a panic.  The Day Before found them
+grimly resolved to stand siege.
+
+On the blessed Eve they sat before their cheerless fire-front and
+stared at the packages that had been pouring in all day long.  The
+old postman had staggered under the final load and hinted so broadly
+for a Christmas present that he got one--the first breach in their
+solemn resolve.
+
+They had excepted Ulie, of course, from the embargo.  But they had
+been in such a flurry that they had postponed him till they forgot
+him entirely.  The doorbell was rung so incessantly throughout the
+evening that the cook sat on the hall stairs to be handy.  She piled
+the packages up on the piano till they spilled off.  The piano lamp
+was gradually sinking beneath the encroaching tide.  Presents were
+brought in wagons, carriages, buggies, carts, by coachmen, gardeners,
+cooks, maids, messenger boys, and children of all ages and dimensions.
+
+On any other occasion Mrs. Budlong would have been running here and
+there, peeking into parcels and restraining her curiosity till the
+next day out of sheer joy in curiosity.  Now she opened never a
+bundle.  She could only think of the morrow when all of these donors
+found that reciprocity had gone down to defeat.  The Budlongs avoided
+each other's eyes.  They were thinking the same thing.  The strain
+endured till it tested their metal to the breaking point.  When three
+enormous packages were brought to the door by the Detwillers' hired
+man, Mrs. Budlong broke out hysterically:
+
+"I just can't stand it."
+
+"Hell!" roared Mr. Budlong.  "Get on your hat and coat.  We'll go
+down and buy everything that's left in town."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+AN AMAZING CHRISTMAS
+
+Holiday bargains in Carthage were not brilliant.  After being pawed
+over for several weeks, they were depressing indeed.  When the Budlongs
+strode into Strouther and Streckfuss's, it was nearly ten o'clock at
+night.  The sales-wretches, mostly pathetic spinsters of both sexes,
+were gaunt and jaded.  They yawned incessantly and held on to the
+counters.
+
+Even Messrs. Strouther and Streckfuss had the nap worn off their plushy
+sleekness.  They were surveying the wreckage, and dolefully realizing
+that some of the Christmas bills would not be paid by the Fourth of
+July.
+
+When the Budlongs made their irruption, they were not received
+cordially.  Word had gone abroad that the Budlongs were buying all
+their Christmas presents out of town.  They must be, for they bought
+none in.  This treachery to home industry was bitterly resented.  Then
+Budlong galvanized everybody with a cry like a flash of lightning:
+
+"I want to buy nearly everything in the shop.  Get busy."
+
+It was too late to select.  Mr. and Mrs. Budlong with their lengthy
+list in hand sprinted up one aisle and down another, pointing,
+prodding, rarely pausing to say "How much?" but monotonously chanting:
+"Gimme this!  Gimme that!  Gimme two of these!  Gimme six of them!
+Gimme that!  Gimme this!  Gimme them!"
+
+They bought glaring garden jars and ghastly vases, scarf pins that
+would disturb the peace, silly bisque figurines for mantels and
+what-nots, combs and brushes that would raise the hair on end instead
+of allaying it, oxidized silverized lead pencils, button hooks, tooth
+brushes, nail files, cuticle knives, pin cushions, ink stands, paper
+weights, picture frames, bits of lace and intimate white things with
+ribbons in them--Mr. Budlong turned away while she priced these.
+
+Strouther and Streckfuss were in a panic of joy at the situation.  They
+managed in the excitement to work off a number of old horrors that had
+been refused for years and years--ancient, dust-stained landmarks on
+the shelves.  Mr. Strouther showed the things, Mr. Streckfuss wrote the
+list of purchases,--he made many mistakes in prices, but strangely
+never to his own damage; and the entire staff of assistants followed,
+taking down, and wrapping up, and rushing parcels to the door, where
+they were bundled onto a wagon.
+
+Mr. Budlong should have been a medieval general.  He pillaged that
+store with the thoroughness of the Crusaders looting Constantinople.
+
+The town clock was striking midnight as the Budlongs dragged themselves
+home.  There was much yet to be done.  Parcels must be opened, price
+tags removed, gifts done up in pink tissue paper and gold twine, cards
+must be inscribed and inserted and the parcels rewrapped and addressed.
+The Strouther and Streckfuss driver had been hired at an exorbitant
+cost to sit up and deliver the gifts.  The horses had not been
+consulted.  They leaned on each other and slept, dreaming of oats.
+
+The Budlong parlor was soon a hideous scene.  The husband would open a
+bundle and sing out, "Who's this big immense pink and purple cuspidor
+for?"
+
+"That's a jardineer," Mrs. Budlong would gasp.  "It's a return for that
+horrible cat those hateful Disneys are going to inflict on me.  Here's
+the card."
+
+She handed him a holly-wreathed pasteboard on which she had written,
+"For Mr. and Mrs. Disney with most affectionate Yuletide greetings."
+
+She indited cards as fast as she could think up phrases.  She sought
+for variety, but the effort was maddening.  She wrote, "Very merry
+Christmas," "The merriest of Xmases," "A merry merry Yuletide," "A
+Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year," "Christmas Greetings," "Xmas
+Greetings," "Yuletide Greetings," "Wishing you a--" "With loving wishes
+for--" "Affectionate," and so on and so on and on and on.  She
+scribbled and scrawled till slumber drugged her and her pen went crazy.
+When she fell asleep she was writing "A Yuly Newmas and a Happy X-Year
+to Swally Sezey."
+
+The delivery man pounded on the door and wild-eyed Budlong let him in
+from the night.  The man whispered that he'd have to start at once if
+he was to make the rounds before his horses laid down on him.
+
+Mr. Budlong called his wife, but she did not answer.  He shook her and
+she threatened to roll off the chair on to a divan.  Mr. Budlong
+straightened her out and gazed at her in hopeless pity.  He stared at
+the chaos of bundles.
+
+He seized the pack of cards from his wife's chubby fingers and ran here
+and there jabbing pasteboards into bundles, regardless.
+
+That is how Myra Eppley acquired an ash tray lined with cigar bands,
+and why old Mr. Clute was amazed to receive a card offering him Mrs.
+Budlong's "loving and affectionate greetings."  He was more amazed when
+he opened the bundle.  It had ribbons in it.
+
+There were other amazements in town the next morning.  In fact, it was
+the amazingest Christmas Carthage had ever had.
+
+As fast as Mr. Budlong stuffed cards into bundles, he loaded bundles
+into the driver's arms as if they were sticks of wood.  The driver
+stacked them up in his wagon.  He made seven trips in all and some of
+the cards fell out and were stuck in still wronger bundles than before.
+But both the driver and Mr. Budlong were too sleepy to care.  The
+driver finally mounted his seat and called out from the dark:
+
+"Say, Mr. Budlong, where do I leave these packages--on the porch, or do
+I ring the bell?"
+
+"Chuck 'em through the windows!  The more glass you break the better
+I'll like it."
+
+"All right, sir.  Get ap!  Good night, sir, and wishing you a Merry
+Christmas!"
+
+"Merry ------" said Mr. Budlong, reaching for a rock.  But even the
+stones were frozen to the ground and the driver escaped.  As Mr.
+Budlong closed his front door, a thread of crimson spun out along the
+East as if somebody were going to wrap the whole world up in a red
+string.  He did not want it.  He yawned at it.
+
+An hour or so later, Ulie awoke and sat up with a start.  To his
+intense confusion, he bumped the top of his little skull on the bottom
+of his little bed.
+
+He was calling for help when he realized that he had fallen asleep in
+his ambush.  He peered forth to see if he had snared Santa Claus.
+
+The figure-4 trap was erect and intact, but empty.  He crawled out and
+ran to the row of stockings he had hung on the mantelpiece as a decoy.
+
+The stockings were empty.
+
+With a shriek of disappointed rage, Ulie dashed into his parents' room
+to protest.
+
+Their bed was empty.
+
+He ran through the house, stumbled down stairs and into the back
+parlor.  His father was snoring on a mattress of Yuletide parcels.  His
+mother was curled up on a divan under the smoking piano lamp.  Her
+hands were clutching strands of gold cord and her hair was pillowed in
+pink tissue paper.  She was burbling in her sleep.
+
+Little Ulie bent down to hear what she was saying.  He made out faintly;
+
+"Mishing you a Werry Muschris and a Nappy Hoosier."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Mrs. Budlong's Christmas Presents, by Rupert Hughes
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12881 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12881 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12881)
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+Project Gutenberg's Mrs. Budlong's Christmas Presents, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Mrs. Budlong's Christmas Presents
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Release Date: July 11, 2004 [EBook #12881]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. BUDLONG'S CHRISTMAS PRESENTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BUDLONG'S CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
+
+BY
+
+RUPERT HUGHES
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "EXCUSE ME," "THE OLD NEST," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+MCMXII
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+    I  AT THE SIGN OF THE PIANO LAMP
+   II  CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN
+  III  MISTRESS OF THE REVELS
+   IV  ONLY A MILLIONAIRE
+    V  THE BITER BIT
+   VI  DESPAIR AND AN IDEA
+  VII  FOILED
+ VIII  FOILED AGAIN
+   IX  WORSE, AND MORE OF IT
+    X  A WELL LAID PLAN
+   XI  GANG AGLEY AGAIN
+  XII  AN AMAZING CHRISTMAS
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BUDLONG'S CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
+
+I
+
+AT THE SIGN OF THE PIANO LAMP
+
+The morning after Christmas Eve is the worst morning-after there is.
+The very house suffers the headache that follows a prolonged spree.
+Remorse stalks at large; remorse for the things one gave--and did not
+give--and got.
+
+Everybody must act a general glee which can be felt only
+specifically, if at all.  Everybody must exclaim about everything Oh!
+and Ah! and How Sweet of You! and Isn't it Perfectly Dear! The very
+THING I Wanted! and How DID you EVER Guess it?
+
+Christmas morning in the town of Carthage is a day when most of the
+people keep close at home, for Christmas is another passover.  It is
+Santa Claus that passes over.
+
+People in Carthage are not rich; the shops are not grandiose, and
+inter-family presents are apt to be trivial and futile--or worse yet,
+utile.
+
+The Carthaginian mother generally finds that Father has credited the
+hat she got last fall, to this Christmas; the elder brothers receive
+warm under-things and the young ones brass-toed boots, mitts and
+mufflers.  The girls may find something ornamental in their
+stockings, and their stockings may be silk or nearly--but then girls
+have to be foolishly diked up anyway, or they will never be married
+out.  Dressing up daughters comes under the head of window-display or
+coupons, and is charged off to publicity.
+
+Nearly everybody in Carthage--except Mrs. Ulysses S. G.
+Budlong--celebrates Christmas behind closed doors.  People find it
+easier to rhapsodize when the collateral is not shown.  It is amazing
+how far a Carthaginian can go on the most meager donation.  The
+formula is usually: "We had Such a lovely Christmas at our house.
+What did I get?  Oh, so many things I can't reMember!"
+
+But Mrs. Ulysses S. G. Budlong does not celebrate her Christmasses
+behind closed doors--or rather she did not: a strange change came
+over her this last Christmas.  She used to open her doors
+wide--metaphorically, that is; for there was a storm-door with a
+spring on it to keep the cold draught out of the hall.
+
+As regular as Christmas itself was the oh-quite-informal reception
+Mrs. Budlong gave to mitigate the ineffable stupidity of Christmas
+afternoon: that dolorous period when one meditates the ancient
+platitude that anticipation is better than realization; and suddenly
+understands why it is blesseder to give than to receive: because one
+does not have to wear what one gives away.
+
+On Christmas Mrs. U. S. G. Budlong took all the gifts she had
+gleaned, and piled them on and around the baby grand piano in the
+back parlor.  There was a piano lamp there, one of those illuminated
+umbrellas--about as large and as useful as a date-palm tree.
+
+Along about that time in the afternoon when the Christmas dinner
+becomes a matter of hopeless remorse, Mrs. Budlong's neighbors were
+expected to drop in and view the loot under the lamp.  It looked like
+hospitality, but it felt like hostility.  She passed her neighbors
+under the yoke and gloated over her guests, while seeming to
+overgloat her gifts.
+
+But she got the gifts.  There was no question of that.  By hook or by
+crook she saw to it that the bazaar under the piano lamp always
+groaned.
+
+One of the chief engines for keeping up the display was the display
+itself.  Everybody who knew Mrs. Budlong--and not to know Mrs.
+Budlong was to argue oneself unknown--knew that he or she would be
+invited to this Christmas triumph.  And being invited rather implied
+being represented in the tribute.
+
+Hence ensued a curious rivalry in Carthage.  People vied with each
+other in giving Mrs. Budlong presents; not that they loved Mrs.
+Budlong more, but that they loved comparisons less.
+
+The rivalry had grown to ridiculous proportions.  But of course Mrs.
+Budlong did not care how ridiculous it grew; for it could hardly have
+escaped her shrewd eyes how largely it advantaged her that people
+should give her presents in order to show other people that some
+people needn't think they could show off before other people without
+having other people show that they could show off, too, as well as
+other people could.  The pyschology must be correct, for it is
+incoherent.
+
+Mrs. Budlong herself was never known to break any of the
+commandments, but in her back parlor her neighbors made flitters of
+the one against coveting thy neighbor's and-so-forth and so-on.
+
+It was when Mr. and Mrs. County Road Supervisor Detwiller were
+walking home from one of these occasions, that Mr. Detwiller was
+saying: "Well, ain't Mizzes Budlong the niftiest little gift-getter
+that ever held up a train?  How on earth did We happen to get stung?"
+
+"I don't know, Roscoe.  It's one of those things you can't get out of
+without getting out of town too.  Here we've been and gone and
+skimped our own children to buy something that would show up good in
+Mrs. Budlong's back parlor, and when I laid eyes on it in all that
+clutter--why, if it didn't look like something the cat brought in,
+I'll eat it!"
+
+Mr. Detwiller had only one consolation--and he grinned over it:
+
+"Well, there's no use cryin' over spilt gifts.  But did you see how
+she stuck old Widower Clute for that Japanese porcelain vace--I
+notice she called it vahs?"
+
+"Porcelain?" sniffed Mrs. Detwiller.  "Paper musshay!"
+
+"Well, getting even a paper--what you said--from old Clute is equal
+to extracting solid gold from anybody else.  He's the stingiest man
+in sev'n states.  He don't care any more for a two dollar bill than
+he does for his right eye.  I bet she gave him ether before he let
+go."
+
+"Oh, she works all the old bachelors and widowers that way," said
+Mrs. Detwiller, with a mixture of contempt and awe.  "Invites 'em to
+a dinner party or two around Christmas marketing time, and begins to
+talk about how pretty the shops are and how tempting everything she
+wants is; says she saw a nimitation bronze clock at Strouther and
+Streckfuss's that it almost broke her heart to leave there.  But o'
+course she couldn't afford to buy those kind of things for herself
+now when she's got to remember all her dear friends, and she runs on
+and on and the old batch growls, 'Stung again!' and goes to Strouther
+and Streckfuss's and tells Mr. Streckfuss to send Mrs. Budlong that
+blamed bronze clock she was admiring.  And that's how she gets
+things.  I could do it myself if I'd a mind to."
+
+Mr. Detwiller felt that there was more envy than truth in this last
+remark, and he was rash enough to speak up for justice: "You could if
+you'd a mind to?  Yep.  If you'd a mind to!  That's what somebody
+said about Shakespeare's plays.  'I could a wrote 'em myself if I'd a
+mind to,' says he, and somebody else said, 'Yes, if you'd a mind to,'
+he says.  And that's about it.  Any body could do what Mizzes Budlong
+does if they had the mind to; but the thing is, she's got the mind
+to.  She goes after the gifts--and gits 'em.  She don't almost git
+'em, and she ain't goin' to git 'em.  She gits 'em.  And what gits me
+is how she gits 'em."
+
+"Roscoe Detwiller, if you're goin' to praise that woman in the
+presence of your own lawful wife, I'll never speak to you the longest
+day I live." "Who's praisin' her?  I was just sayin'--"
+
+"Why, Roscoe Detwiller, you did, too!  And I should think you'd be
+ashamed of yourself."
+
+"Say, what ails you?  Why, I was roastin' her to beat the band."
+
+"And to think that on Christmas day of all days I should live to hear
+my own husband that I've loved and cherished and worked my fingers to
+the bone and never got any thanks and other women keepin' two and
+three hired girls, and after him denyin' his own children things to
+get expensive presents for a shameless creature like that Budlong
+woman--"
+
+All over Carthage on Christmas afternoons couples were similarly at
+loggerheads over Mrs. Budlong's annual triumph.
+
+Now of course Mrs. Budlong did not get all those presents without
+giving presents.  Not in Carthage!  It might have been possible to
+bamboozle these people one Christmas, but never another.  Mrs.
+Budlong gave heaps of presents.  Christmas was an industry with her,
+an ambition; Christmas was her career.  It had long ago lost its
+religious significance for her, as for nearly everybody else in
+Carthage.  Even Mr. Frankenstein (the Pantatorium magnate) is one of
+the most ardent advertisers of Christmas bargains, while Isidore
+Strouther and Esau Streckfuss are "almost persuaded" every December.
+They might be entirely persuaded if it were not for the scenes they
+witness in their aisles during the last weeks of Yuletide and the
+aftermath of trying to collect from the Gentile husbands during
+Billtide.
+
+Mrs.  Budlong's Christmas presents were of two sorts: those she made
+herself and those she made her husband pay for.  He was the typical
+husband who never fails to settle his wife's bills, so long as he may
+raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an
+expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford.
+Then he subsides until the first of the next month.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CHRONICLES OF A CRAFTSMAN
+
+Mrs. Budlong's campaign was undertaken with the same farsightedness
+as a magazine editor's.  On or about the Fourth of July she began to
+worry and plan.  By the second week in August she had her tatting
+well under way.  By the middle of September she was getting in her
+embroidered doilies.  The earliest frost rarely surprised her with
+her quilts untufted.  And when the first snow flew, her sachet bags
+were all stuffed and smelly.
+
+She was very feminine in her sense of the value of her own time.  At
+missionary meetings she would shed tears over the pathetic pictures
+of Oriental women who spent a year weaving a rug which would sell for
+a paltry hundred dollars and last a mere century or two.  Then she
+would cheerfully devote fifteen days of incessant stitching at
+something she carried round in a sort of drumhead.  At the end of
+that time she would have completed a more or less intolerable piece
+of colored fabric which she called a "drape" or a "throw."  It could
+not be duplicated at a shop for less than $1.75, and it would wash
+perhaps three times.
+
+Mr. Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at
+the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses
+and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of
+starvation the first week.  But he never told Mrs. Budlong this.
+Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it
+kept her mysteriously contented.  She was stitching herself to her
+own home all the time.
+
+The Christmas presents Mrs. Budlong made herself were not all a
+matter of needle and thread.  Not at all!  One year she turned her
+sewing room into a smithy.  She gave Mr. and Mrs. Doctor Tisnower the
+loveliest hand-hammered brass coal scuttle that ever was seen--and
+with a purple ribbon tied to its tail.  They kept flowers in it
+several summers, till one cruel winter a new servant put coal in it
+and completely scuttled it.
+
+The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass
+version of a C. D. Gibson drawing.  The lady and gentleman looked as
+if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and
+smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something.  And the
+plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall
+paper.  But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of
+changing the paper some day.  It stayed there until the fateful
+evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was
+just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the
+wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and
+bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur's skull.  Mr. Chur said something
+that may have been Damocles.  But he did not propose, and Mrs.
+Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.
+
+The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted
+velvet.  They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be.  Mrs.
+Budlong's first landscape might as well have been painted on the side
+of her Scotch collie.
+
+Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy
+tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering
+rage.  It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the
+church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible.
+Dr. Torpadie was a very soothing preacher, but no one slept o'sermons
+during the reign of that pulpit cloth.
+
+Mrs. Budlong was so elated over the success of it, however, that she
+announced her intention of going in for stained glass.  She planned a
+series of the sweetest windows to replace those already in the
+church.  But she never got nearer to that than painted china.
+
+The painted china era was a dire era.  The cups would break and the
+colors would run, and they never came out what she expected after
+they were fired.  Of course she knew that the pigments must suffer
+alteration in the furnace, but there was always a surprise beyond
+surprise.
+
+She soon became accustomed to getting green roses with crimson
+leaves, and deep blue apple blossoms against a pure white sky, but
+when she finished one complete set of table china in fifty pieces,
+each cup and saucer with a flower on it, the result looked so
+startlingly like something from a medical museum, that she never
+dared give the set away.  She lent it to the cook to eat her meals
+on.  The set went fast.
+
+During this epoch Master Ulysses Budlong Jr. was studying at school a
+physiology ornamented with a few pictures in color representing the
+stomachs of alcohol specialists.  They were intended, perhaps, to
+frighten little school children from frequenting saloons during
+recess, or to warn them not to put whisky on their porridge.
+
+It was at this time that Mrs. Budlong spent two weeks' hard labor
+painting Easter lilies on an umbrella jug.  When it came home from
+the furnace, her husband stared at it and mumbled:
+
+"It's artistic, but what is it?"
+
+Little Ulysses shrieked: "Oh, I know!" and darting away, returned
+with his physiology opened at one of those gastric sunsets,
+and--well, it was this that impelled Mrs. Budlong to a solemn pledge
+never to paint china again--a pledge she has nobly kept.
+
+From smeared china she went to that art in which a woman buys
+something at a store, pulls out half of it, and calls the remnant
+drawn work.  A season of this was succeeded by a mania for sofa
+cushions.  It fairly snowed sofa cushions all over Carthage that
+Christmas; and Yale, Harvard and Princeton pillows could be found in
+homes that had never known even a night school alumnus.
+
+There ensued a sober period of burnt wood and a period of burnt
+leather, during which excited neighbors with a keen sense of smell
+called the fire department three times and the board of health once.
+And now Indian heads broke out all over town and the walls looked as
+if a shoemaker's apron had been chosen for the national pennant.
+
+There were various other spasms of manufacture, each of them
+fashionable at its time and foolish at anytime.  As Mr. Detwiller
+said:
+
+"Somebody ought to write a history of Mrs. Budlong's Christmas
+presents.  It would tell the complete story of all the darned fool
+fads that American women have been up to for twenty years."
+
+But foolish soever, Mrs. Budlong was fair.  A keen sense of
+sportsmanship led her to give full notice to such people as she
+planned to honor with her gifts.  She knew how embarrassing it is to
+receive presents from one to whom no present has been sent, and she
+made it a point of honor somehow to forewarn her prospective
+beneficiaries betimes.  Her favorite method was the classic device of
+pretending to let slip a secret.  For instance:
+
+"Yesterday morning, my dear, I had the Strangest exPerience.  It was
+just ten o'clock.  I remember the hour so exactly because for the
+last few days I have made it a rule to begin work on your Christmas
+present just at ten--Oh, but I didn't mean to tell you.  It was to be
+a surprise.  No, don't ask me, I won't give you an inkling, but I
+really think it will please you.  It's something you've been needing
+for Such a long time."
+
+And she left the victim to writhe from then on to Christmas, trying
+alternately to imagine what gift was impending and what would be an
+appropriate counter-gift.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MISTRESS OF THE REVELS
+
+In more ways than one Mrs. Budlong kept Carthage on the writhe.
+Christmas was merely the climax of a ceaseless activity.  All the
+year round she was at work like a yeast alert in a soggy dough.
+
+She was forever getting up things.  She was one of those terrible
+women who return calls on time or a little ahead.  That made it
+necessary for you to return hers earlier.  If you didn't, she called
+you up on the telephone and asked you why you hadn't.  You had to
+promise to come over at once or she'd talk to you till your ear was
+welded to the telephone.  Then if you broke your promise she called
+you up about that.  She got in from fifty-two to a hundred and four
+calls a year, where one or two would have amply sufficed for all she
+had to say.
+
+It was due to her that Carthage had such a lively social
+existence--for its size.  Once, when she fell ill, the people felt
+suddenly as passengers feel when a street car is suddenly braked back
+on its haunches.  All Carthage found itself wavering and poised on
+tiptoe and clinging to straps; and then it sogged back on its heels
+and waited till the car should resume progress.  Mrs. Budlong was the
+town's motorman--or "motorneer," as they say in Carthage.
+
+Before she was out of bed, she had invitations abroad for a
+convalescent tea, and everybody said, "Here we go again!"
+
+If strangers visited Carthage, Mrs. Budlong counted them her clients
+the moment they arrived.  Of course, the merely commercial visitors
+she left to the hackmen at the station, but friends or relatives of
+prominent people could not escape Mrs. Budlong's well-meant
+attentions.  It was sometimes embarrassing when relatives
+appeared--for everybody has Concealed Relatives that he is perfectly
+willing to leave in concealment.
+
+Mrs. Alex. (pronounced Ellick) Stubblebine never forgave Mrs. Budlong
+for dragging into the limelight some obscure cousins of her husband's
+who had drifted into Carthage to borrow money on their farm.  Mrs.
+Stubblebine was always bragging about her people, her own people that
+is.  Her husband's people, of course, were after all only
+Stubblebines, while her maiden name was Dilatush; and the Dilatushes,
+as everybody knew, were related by marriage to the Tatums.
+
+But these were Stubblebines that came to town.  Mrs. Stubblebine
+could hardly slam the door in their faces, but she would fain have
+locked the doors after them.  She would not even invite them out on
+the front porch.  She told them the back porch was cosier and less
+conspicuous.  And then Mrs. Budlong had to call up on the telephone
+and sing out in her telephoniest tone:
+
+"Oh, my dear, I've just this minute heard you have guests--some of
+your dear husband's relatives.  Now they must come to me to dinner
+to-morrow.  Oh, it isn't the slightest trouble, I asSure you.  I'm
+giving a little party anyway.  I won't take no for an answer."
+
+And she wouldn't.  Mrs. Stubblebine fairly perspired excuses, but
+Mrs. Budlong finally grew so suspicious that she had to accept; or
+leave the impression that the relatives were burglars or
+counterfeiters in hiding.  And they were not--they were pitifully
+honest.
+
+The result was even worse than she feared.  Mr. Stubblebine's cousin
+was so shy that he never said a word except when it was pulled out of
+him, and then he said, "Yes, ma'am"!
+
+In Carthage when you are at a dinner party and you don't quite catch
+the last remark, you don't snap "What?" or "How?" or "Wha' jew say?"
+Whatever your home habits may be, at a dinner party or before
+comp'ny, you raise your eyebrows gracefully and murmur, "I beg your
+pardon."
+
+But Mr. Stubblebine's rural cousin grunted "Huh?"--like an Indian
+chief trying to scare a white general.  And he was perfectly frank
+about the intimate processes of mastication.
+
+And when he dropped a batch of scalloped oysters into his watch
+pocket he solemnly fished them-out with a souvenir after-dinner
+coffee spoon having the Statue of Liberty for a handle and Brooklyn
+Bridge in the bowl.
+
+And the wretch's wife was so nervous that she talked all the time
+about people the others had never seen or heard of.  And she said she
+"never used tomattus."  And she wasn't ashamed of what she was
+chewing either.
+
+Mrs. Stubblebine would have felt much obliged to fate if she had been
+presented with an apoplectic stroke.  But she had to sit the dinner
+out.  From what she said to her poor husband afterward, however, one
+might have gathered that he picked out those relatives just to spite
+her, when as a matter of fact he had always loathed them and
+regretted them and the next day he borrowed enough money to lend them
+and send them back to the soil.
+
+Mrs. Budlong had constituted herself Entertainment Committee for all
+sorts of visitors.  If a young girl came home from boarding school
+with a classmate, the real hostess had hardly time to show her to the
+spare room, and say, "This is the bathroom, round here; watch out for
+the step.  And if the water don't run just wait--" when the telephone
+would go Brrrrr!  And there would be Mrs. Budlong brandishing an
+invitation to a dinner party.
+
+When the supply of guests ran low she would visit the sick.  If a
+worn-out housewife slept late some morning to catch up, Mrs. Budlong
+would hear of it and rush over with a broth or something.  It is said
+that old Miss Malkin got out of bed with an unfinished attack of
+pneumonia, just to keep from eating any more of Mrs. Budlong's wine
+jellies.
+
+In Carthage one pays for the telephone by the year.  The company lost
+money on Mrs. Budlong's wire.  As a telephoner she was simply
+interminable.  She would spend a weekend at the instrument while the
+prisoner at the other extreme of the wire shifted from ear to ear,
+sagged along the wall, postponed household duties, made signals of
+distress to other members of the family, and generally cursed Mr.
+Alexander Graham Bell for his ingenuity.
+
+Three wall telephones were changed to table phones on Mrs. Budlong's
+account, and Mrs. Talbot had hers put by the bed.  She used to take
+naps while Mrs. Budlong talked and she trained herself to murmur,
+"Yes, dear," at intervals in her sleep.
+
+By means like this Mrs. Budlong kept Carthage more or less under her
+thumb.  Carthage squirmed but it could not crawl out from under.
+
+This is the story of how the thumb was removed for good and all.  It
+was Mrs. Budlong herself that removed it.  Carthage could never have
+pried it up.
+
+And strange to say the thumb came off because it grew popular.
+
+Hitherto Mrs. Budlong had never been truly popular.  People were
+merely afraid of her.  She was a whipper-in, a social bush-beater,
+driving the populace from cover like partridges.  She would not let
+the town rest.  The merchants alone admired her, for she was the
+cause of much buying of new shoes, new hats, new clothes, fine
+groceries, olives, Malaga grapes, salted almonds, raisins, English
+walnuts and other things that one eats only at parties.  She was the
+first woman in Carthage that ever gave a luncheon and called it
+breakfast, as years before she had been the first hostess to give a
+dinner at any time except in the middle of the day.  Also, she was
+the first person there to say, "Come to me" when she meant "Come to
+our house."  It had a Scriptural sound and was thought shocking until
+Carthage grew used to it.
+
+It was due to her that several elderly men were forced into their
+first evening dress.  They had thought to escape through life without
+that ordeal.  Old Clute would have preferred to be fitted for a pine
+box, and would have felt about as comfortable in it.  He tried to
+compromise with the tailor on a garment that could serve as a Prince
+Albert by day and a "swaller tail" by night, but Mr. Kweskin could
+not manage it even though his Christian name was Moses.
+
+So Mr. Clute blamed Mrs. Budlong for yet another expense.  Husbands
+all over town were blaming Mrs. Budlong for running their families
+into fool extravagances.  Mothers were blaming her for dragging them
+round by the nose and leaving them no rest.  But everybody in town
+resentfully obeyed Mrs. Budlong, though Mrs. Roscoe Detwiller wanted
+to organize a HomeKeepers Union, and strike.  For the women never
+dared trust themselves about the house in a wrapper, since Mrs.
+Budlong might happen in as like as not--rather liker than not.
+
+And then, just as the town was fermenting for revolt, Mrs. Budlong
+came into a lot of money.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ONLY A MILLIONAIRE
+
+That is, Mr. Budlong came into a lot of money.  Which meant that Mr.
+Budlong would be permitted to take care of it while his wife got rid of
+it.  One of those relatives, very common in fiction, and not altogether
+unknown in real life, finally let go of her money at the behest of her
+impatient undertaker.  The Budlongs had the pleasure of seeing the
+glorious news of their good fortune in big headlines in the Carthage
+papers.
+
+It was the only display Mr. Budlong ever received in that paper without
+paying for it--excepting the time when he ran for Mayor on the
+opposition ticket and was referred to in letters an inch high as
+"Candidate Nipped-in-the-Budlong."
+
+But now the cornucopia of plenty had burst wide open on the front
+porch.  It seemed as if they would have to wade through gold dollars to
+get to their front gate--when the money was collected.  When the money
+was collected.
+
+And now it was Mrs.  Budlong's telephone that rang and rang.  It was
+she that was called up and called up.  It was she that sagged along the
+wall and shifted from foot to foot, from elbow to elbow and ear to ear.
+
+After living in Carthage all her life she was suddenly, as it were,
+welcomed to the city as a distinguished visiting stranger.  And now she
+had no need to invite people to return their calls.  They came
+spontaneously.  Sometimes there were a dozen calling at once.  It was a
+reception every day.  There were overflow meetings in the room which
+Mrs. Budlong called Mr. Budlong's "den." This was the place where she
+kept the furniture that she didn't dare keep in the parlor.
+
+People who had never come to see her in spite of her prehensile
+telephone, dropped in to pay up some musty old call that had lain
+unreturned for years.  People who had always come formally, even
+funereally, rushed in as informally and with as devouring an enthusiasm
+as old chums.  People who used to run in informally now drove up in
+vehicles from MacMulkin's livery stable; or if they came in their own
+turn-outs they had the tops washed and the harness polished, and the
+gardener and furnaceman who drove, had his hat brushed, was not allowed
+to smoke, and was urged to sit up straight and for heaven's sake to
+keep his foot off the dashboard.
+
+People who had been in the habit of devoting a day or two to 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 she decided to give a
+large dinner to wipe off a great number at once.  But now when she
+calculated that the olives, the turkey, the Malaga grapes, the English
+walnuts, the salted almonds and a man from the hotel to wait on table,
+would total up twenty-five dollars or so, she found herself figuring
+how much twenty-five dollars would amount to in twenty-five years at
+compound interest.
+
+She grew frantic to be quit of Carthage--to rub it off her visiting
+list.  Unconsciously her motto became Cato's ruthless _Carthago delenda
+est_.
+
+But she could neither delete Carthage from her map, nor free her feet
+from its dust.  Her husband's business required him yet awhile.  Even
+to close it up took time.  And he would not, and could not, borrow
+money on Aunt Ida's estate till he was sure that it was his.
+
+But all the while the festival reveled on.  People in Carthage to whom
+New York was an inaccessible Carcassone, were now planning to visit
+Mrs. Budlong there at the palatial home she had described.  Some of
+them frankly told her they were coming to see her.  Wealth took on a
+new discomfort.
+
+Sally Swezey afflicted the telephone with gossip: "As Mrs. Talbot was
+saying only yes'day, my dear, so many folks have threatened to visit
+you in your home on Fifth Avenue that you'll have to hang hammocks in
+your front yard."
+
+And now they had spoiled even her future for her.  What pride could she
+take in having a gorgeous home on Fifth Avenue with all these Carthage
+people rocking on the front porch.  Probably some warm evening when
+Mrs. Hotel Vanderbilt was driving by in her new barouche, it would be
+just like Roscoe Detwiller to turn in at the gate, flounce down on the
+top step and sit there with his vest unbuttoned, and his seersucker
+coat under his arm, while he mopped the inside of his hat with his
+handkerchief.
+
+But that was the discomfort of the morrow.  To-day had its own spawn.
+One morning she was called to the telephone by the merciless Sallie
+Swezey with a new infliction.  There was something almost ghoulish in
+Mrs. Swezey's cackling glee as she sang out across the wire:
+
+"We're all so glad, my dear, that the next meeting of the Progressive
+Euchre is to be at your house."
+
+Mrs. Budlong's chin dropped.  She had quite forgotten this.  Sallie
+chortled on:
+
+"And say, do you know what?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Everybody says you're going to give solid gold prizes and that even
+your booby prize will be handsomer than the first prize was at Mrs.
+Detwiller's."
+
+"Ha, ha!" laughed Mrs. Budlong in a tone that sounded just like the
+spelling.
+
+Mrs. Budlong's wealth seemed to be accepted as a sort of municipal
+legacy.  All Carthage assumed to own it in community, and to enjoy it
+with her.  Her walls rang with the hilarity of her neighbors.  But her
+laughter took on more and more the sound of icicles snapping from the
+eaves of a shed.
+
+She became the logical candidate for all the chief offices in clubs and
+societies and circles.  She suddenly found herself seven or eight
+presidents and at least eleven chairwomen.  The richest woman in town
+heretofore was Mrs. Foster Herpers, wife of the pole and shaft
+manufacturer.  He owned about half of the real estate in town, but his
+wife had to distill expenses out of him in pennies.  With a profound
+sigh of relief she resigned all her honors in Mrs. Budlong's favor.
+
+Being president chiefly meant lending one's house for meetings as well
+as one's china and tea and sandwiches, and being five dollars ahead of
+anybody else in every subscription.  Mrs. Budlong was panic-stricken
+with her own success, for there is nothing harder to handle than a
+dam-break of prosperity.
+
+Worse yet, Mr. Budlong was ceasing to be the meek thing of yore.  Every
+day was the first of the month with him.
+
+It was well on in November when he flung himself into a Morris chair
+one evening and groaned aloud:
+
+"I don't believe Aunt Ida ever left any money.  If she did I don't
+believe we'll ever get any of it.  And if we do, I know we'll not have
+a sniff at it before January.  One of the lawyers has been called
+abroad on another case.  We've got to stay in Carthage, at least over
+Christmas."
+
+"Christmas!" The word crackled and sputtered in Mrs. Budlong's brain
+like a fuse in the dark.  The past month had been so packed with other
+excitements that she had forgotten the very word.  Now it blew up and
+came down as if one of her own unstable Christmas trees had toppled
+over on her with all its ropes of tinsel, its lambent tapers, and its
+eggshell splendors.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE BITER BIT
+
+First, Mrs. Budlong felt amazement that she could have so ignored the
+very focus of her former ambition.  Then she felt shame at her
+unpreparedness.  She caught the evening paper out of her husband's
+lap to find the date.  November ninth and not a Christmas thing
+begun.  Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her
+that Christmas was coming, for by the middle of November all the
+magazines put on their holly and their chromos of the three Magi and
+their Santa Clauses, as women put on summer straw hats at Easter.
+
+Mrs. Budlong's hands sought and wrung each other as if in mutual
+reproach.  They had been pouring tea and passing wafers when they
+should have been Dorcassing at their Christmas tasks.  It had been
+left for her husband of all people to warn her that her own special
+Bacchanal was imminent.
+
+If he had been a day later, the neighbors would have anticipated him
+as well as the magazines.  The Christmas idea seemed to strike the
+whole town at once.  Mrs. Budlong became the victim of her own
+classic device of pretending to let slip a secret.  The townswomen
+shamelessly turned her own formula against her.
+
+Mrs. Detwiller met her at church and said:
+
+"Yesterday morning at eleven I had the most curious presentiment, my
+dear.  I remember the hour so exactly because I've been making it a
+rule to begin work on your Christmas present every morning at--  Oh,
+but I didn't inTend to let you know.  No, dearie, I won't tell you
+what it is.  But I can't help believing it's Just what you'll need in
+New York."
+
+Myra Eppley, with whom Mrs. Budlong had never exchanged Christmas
+presents, at all, but with whom an intimacy had sprung up since Mrs.
+Budlong came into the reputation of her money--Myra Eppley had the
+effrontery to call up on the telephone and say:
+
+"Would you mind telling me, my dear, the shade of wall paper you're
+going to have in your New York parlor, because I'm making you the
+daintiest little--well, no matter, but will you tell me?"
+
+Poor Mrs. Budlong almost swooned from the telephone.  She did not
+know what the color of her wall paper would be in New York.  She did
+not know that she would ever have wall paper in New York.  She only
+knew that Myra Eppley, too, was calling her "my dear."  Myra Eppley
+also was going to give her a Christmas present.  And would have to be
+given one.
+
+Mrs. Budlong had received fair warning, but she felt about as
+grateful as a wayfarer feels to the rattlesnake that whizzes "Make
+r-r-r-ready for the corrroner-r-r."
+
+Next, young Mrs. Chur (Editha Cinnamon as was, for she had finally
+landed Mr. Chur in spite of the accident--or because of it) called up
+to say:
+
+"Oh, my dear, my husband wants to know what brand of cigars your
+husband smokes; and would you tell me, dearie--it's rather personal,
+but--what size bath-slippers you wear?"
+
+When Sally Swezey came to the Progressive Euchre skirmish at Mrs.
+Budlong's she noted with joy that her hint had borne fruit.  The
+prizes were indeed of solid gold.  Mr. Budlong did not learn it till
+the first of the following month when the bill came in from Jim
+Henderson's jewelry store.
+
+As if she had not done enough in forcing solid gold prizes on Mr.
+Budlong, Sally had to say:
+
+"I'm just dying to see your back parlor, my dear, this next Christmas
+afternoon.  It has always been a sight for sore eyes; but this
+Christmas it will be a perfect wonder, for I do declare everybody in
+town is going to send you something nice."
+
+This conviction was already chilling Mrs. Budlong's marrow.  Of old
+she would have rejoiced at the golden triumph, but now she could only
+realize that if everybody in Carthage sent her something nice, it was
+because everybody in Carthage expected something nicer.  And her
+Christmas crops were hopelessly backward.  At a time when she should
+be half done, she could not even begin.  She had not tatted or
+smeared or hammered a thing.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DESPAIR AND AN IDEA
+
+Days and days went by in a stupor of dull hopelessness.  Thanksgiving
+came and the Budlong turkey might as well have been a crow.  In
+desperation she decided to make a tentative exploration of the shops
+now burgeoning with Christmas splendor; every window a spasm of
+gewgaws.  Since she had no time to make, she must buy.
+
+The length of her list sent her to the cheaper counters, but she was
+not permitted to browse among them.  At Strouther and Streckfuss's, Mr.
+Strouther came up and said with reeking unctuousness:
+
+"Vat is Mees Bootlonk doink down here amonkst all this tresh?  Come see
+our importet novelties."
+
+And he led her to a region where the minimum price was MBBA-BDJA, which
+meant that it cost 12.25 and could be safely marked down to 23.75.
+
+She eluded him and got back to the 25-cent realm only to be apprehended
+by Mr. Streckfuss, who beamed:
+
+"Ah, nothink is here for a lady like you are.  Only fine kvality suits
+such a taste you got."
+
+By almost superfeminine strength she evaded purchasing anything.  She
+went to other shops only to be haled to the expensive counters.
+Storekeepers simply would not discuss cheap things with the
+millionairess-elect.
+
+She crept home and threw herself on her husband's mercy.  He had none
+and she lighted hard.  It was the first of December, and in addition to
+his monthly rage, Mr. Budlong was working himself up to his regular
+pre-Christmas frenzy, when he always felt poor and talked poorer to
+keep the family in check.
+
+His face was a study when he had heard his wife's state of mind.
+Forthwith he delivered the annual address on Christmas folly that one
+hears from fathers of families all round the world at this time:
+
+"Christmas has quit being a sign of people's affections," Mr. Budlong
+thundered.  "It has become a public menace.  It's worse than Wall
+Street.  Wall Street is supposed have started as the thermometer of the
+country's business and now it's gone and got so goldum big that the
+thermometer is makin' the weather.  When Wall Street feels muggy it's
+got to rain and the sun don't dare shine without takin' a peek at the
+thermometer first off.
+
+"Christmas ain't any longer an opportunity to show good will to your
+neighbors.  It's a time when you got to show off before your neighbors.
+You women make yourselves and us men sick the way you carry on all
+through December.  And the children!--they're worse'n the grown-ups.
+
+"Old-fashioned Christmas was like old-fashioned circuses--mostly meant
+for the young ones.  Nowadays circuses have growed so big and so
+improper that nobody would dast take a child to one, or if you do, they
+get crazy notions.
+
+"When I was a boy, if I got a drum and a tin horn I was so happy I
+couldn't keep quiet.  But last Christmas little Ulie Junior cried all
+day because he got a 'leven dollar automobile when he wanted a
+areaplane big enough to carry the cat over the barn.
+
+"This Christmas trust business ought to be investigated by the gov'ment
+and dissolved.  Talk about your tariff schedules! What we need is
+somebody to pare down this Christmas gouge.  It's the one kind of tax
+you can't swear off.
+
+"And as for you--why, you're goin' daffy.  Other years I didn't mind so
+much.  You spent a lot of time and some money on your annual splurge,
+but I will say, you took in better'n you gave.  But now you're on the
+other side the fence.  These Carthage women have got you on the run.
+You'll have to give 'em twice as good as they send or you're gone.
+You're gone anyway.  If you gave each one of 'em a gold platter full of
+diamonds they'd say you'd inherited Aunt Ida's stinginess as well as
+her money."
+
+Mrs. Budlong went on twisting her fingers: "Oh, of course you're right,
+Ule.  But what's the use of being right when it's so hateful?  All I
+can think of is that Everybody in town is going to give me a present!
+Everybody!"
+
+"Can't you take your last year's presents and pass 'em along to other
+folks?"
+
+"Everybody would recognize them, and I'd be the talk of the town."
+
+"You're that anyway, so what difference does it make?"
+
+"I'd rather die."
+
+"You'd save a lot of money and trouble if you did."
+
+"Just look at the list of presents I must give."
+
+She handed him a bundle of papers.  He pushed up his spectacles and put
+on his reading glasses, and instantly snorted:
+
+"Say!  What is this? the town directory?"
+
+He had not read far down the list when he missed one important name.
+"You've overlooked Mrs. Alsop."
+
+"Oh, her!  I've quarreled with her.  We don't speak, thank heaven."
+
+"It would be money In your pocket, if you didn't speak to anybody.
+Gosh!" he slapped his knee.  "I have an idea.  Stop speaking to
+everybody."
+
+"Don't he silly."
+
+"I mean it."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FOILED
+
+Ulysses S. G. Budlong was a man fertile in ideas and unflinching in
+their execution.  Otherwise he would never have attained his present
+unquestioned supremacy, as the leading hay and feed merchant in
+Carthage.
+
+"It's as easy as falling off a log," he urged.  "You women are always
+spatting about something.  Now's your chance to capitalize your spats."
+
+"Men are such im-boo-hoo-ciles!" was Mrs. Budlong's comment, as she
+began to weep.  Her husband patted her with a timid awkwardness as if
+she were the nose of a strange horse.  "There! there! we'll fix this up
+fine.  What did you quarrel with Mrs. Alsop about?"
+
+"She told Sally Swezey and Sally Swezey told me--that I used my
+Carthage presents to send to relatives in other towns."
+
+"She flattered you at that," said Mr. Budlong unconsolingly.  "But
+don't you dream of forgiving her till after Christmas."
+
+Mrs. Budlong was having such a good cry, and enjoying the optical hath
+so heartily, that her grief became very precious to her.  It suggested
+what a beautiful thing grief is to those who make a fine art of it.
+
+She smiled wet-liddedly.  "There is nothing in your idea, Ulie, but it
+has suggested a good one to me.  I'll announce that I can't celebrate
+Christmas because of our great grief for Aunt Ida."
+
+"Great grief!" Mr.  Budlong echoed.  "Why, you couldn't have celebrated
+Aunt Ida's finish more joyous without you'd serenaded her in Woodlawn
+with a brass band."
+
+"Ulysses Budlong! you ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying such a
+thing!"  But she suddenly heard, in fancy, the laugh that would go up
+if she sprung such an excuse.  She gave in:
+
+"We'll have to quarrel with somebody then.  But what excuse is there?"
+
+"Women don't need any real excuse.  You simply telephone Sally Swezey
+that a certain person told you--and you won't name any names--that she
+had been making fun of you and you'd be much obliged if she never spoke
+to you again for you'd certainly never speak to her again."
+
+"But how do I know Sally Swezey has been making fun of me?"
+
+"Oh, there ain't any doubt but what everybody in town is doing that."
+
+"Ulysses Budlong! how can you talk so!"
+
+"If people without money couldn't make fun of people with--what
+consolation would they have?  Anyway, it's not me but the other folks
+you're supposed to quarrel with.  You spend an hour at that telephone
+and you can get the whole town by the ears."
+
+"But I can't use the same excuse for everybody."
+
+"You'll think up plenty once you put your mind to it."  And with that
+another excuse came in pat.  Came in howling and flagrant.
+
+Ulysses Junior burst into the room, as if he had forgotten the presence
+of the door.  He was yelping like a coyote and from his tiny nose an
+astonishing amount of blood was spouting.
+
+"What on earth is the matter!" the startled mother gasped.  "Come here
+to me, you poor child---and be careful not to bleed on the new rug."
+
+Ulysses' articulation was impeded with sobs and the oscillations of
+three semi-detached teeth, that waved in the breeze as he screamed:
+"Little Clarence Detwiller LICKED me!  so he did! and I on'y p-pushed
+him off his sled into a puddle of ice wa-wa-water and he attackted me
+and kicked my f-f-Face-ace off."
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Budlong were so elated with the same idea that they forgot
+to console their heart-broken offspring with more than Mr. Budlong's
+curt, "First teeth anyway; saves you a trip to the dentist."  He nodded
+to his wife.
+
+"Just the excuse we were looking for."
+
+"Sent direct from heaven," nodded Mrs. Budlong.  "You call up Roscoe
+Detwiller this minute and tell him his son has criminal tendencies and
+ought to be in jail and will undoubtedly die on the gallows.  Then he
+won't speak to you to-morrow."
+
+"You bet he won't.  He'll just quietly do to me what his boy did to
+Ulie.  No, my dear, you tell all that to Mrs. Detwiller yourself."
+
+Mrs. Budlong tossed her head with fine contempt.  "What cowards men
+are! always shielding themselves behind women's skirts.  Well, if
+you're afraid, I'm not.  I'll give her the biggest talking to she ever
+had in her born days."
+
+She rose with fortitude and started to the telephone, sneered at it and
+glared at it.  Her husband stood by her to support her in the hour of
+need.  He watched her ask for the number, and snap ferociously at the
+central.  Then she fell panicky again and held the transmitter to him
+appealingly.  He waved her away scornfully.
+
+She set her teeth hard and there was grimness in her eye and tone as
+she said: "Is this you, Mrs. Detwiller! ---- Oh, yes, thank you, I'm
+very well.  I wanted to tell you-m ---- oh, yes, he's well, too.  But
+what I started to say was ---- Yes, so Ulie says! ------ Yes, right in
+the face ------ Oh, of course, ------ Naturally ------ Boys will be
+------ ------ Oh, I'm sorry you punished him.  He's such a sweet child
+------ ------ Oh, don't think of it.  I'm sure it was all Ulie's fault.
+It will teach him better next time.  He's so rough! ------ ------ Oh,
+really, how awfully sweet of you.  Good night, dear."
+
+She stuck the receiver on the hook and looked for a hook to hang
+herself on.  Her eyes were shifty with shame as she mumbled:
+
+"I couldn't get a word in edgeways.  She apologized."
+
+"She apologized!" Mr. Budlong roared.  "Why, you ate out of her hand.
+And you were going to show me what a coward I-- Butter wouldn't have
+melted--say, why didn't you kiss her?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong was suffering a greater dismay than remorse.  "What d'you
+suppose that cat of a Clara Detwiller's going to do?" she moaned.
+"She's going to make her boy send Ulie a nice Christmas present!  And
+now we'll have to buy one for Ulie to give to him!"
+
+"Well, of all the--oh, you're a great manager, you are!  You call up a
+woman to get rid of giving one Christmas present, and now you've got to
+give two.  Here! where you going?"
+
+"I'm going to that phone and tell Mrs. Detwiller what I think of her."
+
+"You keep away from that phone.  Before you could ring off again her
+husband would have a Christmas present wished onto ME!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FOILED AGAIN
+
+The next morning Mrs. Budlong arose from dreams of finding bargains
+after all.  She felt a spirit in her feet that led her, who knows
+how, to the Christmas-window street.  But the crowds and the prices
+and the servility of the salesfolk drove her out again.
+
+On her laggard way home she saw Sally Swezey, lean and lanky and
+somehow reminding her of a flamingo.  Sally espied her from afar and
+stepped a little higher.  Mrs. Budlong remembered her husband's
+suggestion.  She made a quick resolution to do or die.  Her cheek was
+cold and white and her heart beat loud and fast, but she tried to set
+her double chin into a square jaw, and she passed Sally Swezey as if
+Sally Swezey were a lamp-post by the curb--a common lamp-post by the
+curb, and nothing more.
+
+She heard Sally's gush of greeting stop short as if someone had
+turned a faucet in her throat; she heard a gulp; then she heard a
+strangled silence.  Then she heard Sally call her name tentatively,
+tenderly, reproachfully.  Then she heard no more.  And she knew no
+more till her feet somehow carried her home.  But she had hardly time
+to flop into a rocker and utter a prayer of gratitude and pride for
+having been vouchsafed the courage to snub a Carthaginian before
+Br-r-rr!--the relentless telephone was on her trail.  She knew just
+who it was and she braced herself to meet one of Sally's
+sharp-tongued assaults.  But Sally said--in part:
+
+"Oh, you poor darling dear, is that you? and how are you now?  I was
+So alarmed for you.  You looked So ill and worn and--aren't the
+Christmas crowds awful this year? and nothing fit to buy and such
+prices!  and--you must be just worn out.  You really must spare
+yourself, for do you Know what you Did, dearest.  You went right By
+me without Seeing me, or Answering me!  Yes, you did!  I was so
+startled that I didn't have brains enough to run after you and assist
+you home.  I'm so glad you got there alive and I Do hope you're
+feeling better and I'm so aShamed of myself for letting you go all
+that way aLone in that pitiful conDition.  Can you ever forGive me?"
+
+When Mr. Budlong came home for luncheon, Mrs. Budlong told him the
+whole story.  He glared at her with an I-give-you-up expression and
+growled:
+
+"And when she said all that, what did you say?"
+
+"I don't know." Mrs.  Budlong faltered.  "All I know is that she's
+coming over this afternoon with a lot of that wine jelly I gave her
+the receipt for."
+
+"And what do you intend to do this time?" Mr. Budlong demanded.  The
+skeptic in his tone stung her to revolt.  She could usually be strong
+in the presence of her husband.  She looked at least like Mrs.
+Boadicea as she said:
+
+"I intend to tell Sally Swezey what you told me to.  And I will
+accept no  apologies, none whatever."
+
+When Mr. Budlong came home to dinner she avoided his gaze.  She
+confessed that she had changed her program.  She hadn't the heart to
+insult poor Sally, and she had admitted that she was a hit dizzy and
+qualmish and she had--well, she--she--
+
+Mr. Budlong finished for her fiercely:
+
+"I know! You ate a lot of her wine jelly, and you told her she was a
+love and you kissed her good-by, and would she excuse you from coming
+to the door because you were still a little wobbly."
+
+Mrs. Budlong looked at him in surprise: "She told you!"
+
+"Nah!  I haven't seen her."
+
+"Then how on earth did you ever guess?" she babbled.
+
+"It was my womanly intuition!" he snarled, and that evening he went
+down town and sat in the hotel lobby for a couple of hours.  He
+usually did this anyway--in summer he sat on the sidewalk--but this
+evening, he did it with a certain implication of escape.  He
+expressed renunciation in the mere shutting of the door.
+
+On the way home Mr. Budlong was busy with schemes.  His mind turned
+again to his son.
+
+In a smallish town, a growing boy is an unfailing source of _casus
+belli_.
+
+As an inciter of feuds there was something almost Balkan or Moroccan
+about Ulysses Budlong Junior.  Nearly every day he had come charging
+into the house with bad news in some form or other.  Some rock or
+snowball he had cast with the most innocent of intentions had gone
+through a window or a milk wagon or somebody's silk hat.  Or he had
+pulled a small girl's hair, or taken the skates away from a helpless
+urchin.  He had bad luck too in picking victims with belligerent big
+brothers.
+
+Mr. Budlong recognized these desperado traits and he fully expected
+Ulysses Junior to make him the father of a convict.  Suddenly now
+despair became hope.  Let Mrs. Budlong capitalize her spats; he would
+promote Ulie's.  The affair Detwiller had turned out badly, but Mr.
+Budlong would not yield to one defeat.  He watched eagerly for the
+next misdemeanor of his young hopeless.  He relied on him to embroil,
+as it were, all Europe in an international conflict.
+
+But the dove of peace seemed to have alighted on Ulysses' shoulder.
+He even began to go to Sunday School--the Methodist this year because
+they had given the largest cornucopias in town the Christmas before.
+And he talked nothing but Golden Texts till Mr. Budlong began to fear
+that he would one day be the father of a parson.
+
+Meanwhile, Mrs. Budlong grew bellicose again.  She snubbed people
+right and left, but they generously imputed it to absent-mindedness.
+She failed to go to the dinner party the Teeples gave in her honor,
+and she sent no excuse.  This was the unpardonable sin in Carthage
+and the Budlong chairs sat vacant through the dinner.
+
+But Mrs. Teeple graciously assumed that she was ill and sent over the
+cut flowers off the table.  And she hoped the poor dear would feel
+better soon.
+
+A few days later Mrs. Budlong's pet Maltese kitten was done to nine
+deaths at once by the Disney's fox terrier.  Mrs. Budlong mourned the
+kitten, but there was consolation in the thought that she could now
+cut the Disneys off her list.
+
+Before she could get the kitten decently interred in the back yard,
+Mrs. Disney was at the front door.  She flung her arms round Mrs.
+Budlong and wept, declaring that she had resolved to give the
+murderous terrier away to a farmer, and had already sent to Chicago
+for a pedigreed Angora to replace the Maltese.  It would arrive the
+day before Christmas.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+WORSE, AND MORE OF IT
+
+As if that were not enough for one day, in the afternoon Johnetta
+Ackerley called.  She saw Mrs. Budlong at an upper window and waved to
+her as she came along the walk.  When the cook arrived upstairs like a
+grand piano moving in, Mrs. Budlong said in an icy tone:
+
+"Not at home."
+
+"But I told her you was.  And she seen you at the windy."
+
+"Not!--at!--home!"
+
+"But I'm after telling her--"
+
+Mrs. Budlong could be as stern as steel with her husband or her
+servants.  She cowed Brigida into lumbering downstairs with the
+message.  Mrs. Budlong went to the window to triumph over her victim's
+retreat in a panic of confusion.
+
+Instead, she heard a light patter of footsteps and Johnetta Ackerley
+hurried into the room.
+
+"Oh, my dear, are you ill?  Pardon my coming right up, but the cook
+takes so long and I was so worried for fear you were--but you aren't,
+are you?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong was at bay.  She glared at the intruder and threw up her
+chin.  Johnetta stared at her aghast.
+
+"Why, my dear! you aren't mad at me, are you?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong smiled bitterly, and said nothing.  Johnetta shrilled:
+
+"Why, what have I done?"
+
+As a matter of fact, what had she done?  All that Mrs. Budlong could
+think of was her husband's unused suggestion for a war with Sally
+Swezey.  She spoke through locked teeth:
+
+"It's not what you've done but what you've said."
+
+"Why, what have I said?"
+
+"You know well enough what you've been saying behind my back, and you
+needn't think that people don't come and tell me.  I name no names, but
+I know!  Oh, I know!"
+
+Now, of course, everybody says things behind everybody else's back that
+nobody would care to have repeated to anybody.  Through Johnetta
+Ackerley's memory dashed a hundred caustic comments she had made on
+Mrs. Budlong.  She blushed and sighed, turned away and closed the door
+after her, like the last line of an elegy.
+
+A surge of triumph swept over Mrs. Budlong.  Success at last.
+
+Then the door opened and Johnetta reappeared on the sill with a look of
+angelic contrition.
+
+"I hardly know what to say," she said.  "Of course, I must admit I did
+rather forget myself.  It was at the last meeting of the Progressive
+Euchre Club and everybody was criticizing you for having solid gold
+prizes when they were at your house.  They said it was vulgar
+ostentation.  I didn't say anything for the longest time, but finally
+when they all said your money had gone to your head, hadn't it, I admit
+I did mumble, 'It seems so.'  But it is only what everybody else says
+all the time, and I assure you I didn't really mean it.  Of course
+nobody can behave just the same after they are a millionaire as they
+did before.  But I am awfully fond of you and--and--"
+
+"It was most disloyal," said Mrs. Budlong.  "And to think that after
+tearing me to pieces behind my back, you could come and call on me."
+
+It was a fine speech, but after she heard herself say it, Mrs. Budlong
+had a sinking feeling that if she herself had never called on anybody
+she had not criticized she would have stayed at home all her life.  But
+Johnetta Ackerley took another line.  She threw herself on Mrs.
+Budlong's mercy, and if Mrs. Budlong boasted of anything more than
+another it was her mercy.
+
+"I have just been at the church," said Johnetta, "helping to decorate
+it for Christmas week, and I was hanging up a big motto 'Peace on
+Earth, Good Will to Men' and I think it ought to apply to women, too.
+I grovel in apology and I pray you to forgive me.  You can't refuse
+your forgiveness when I implore it, can you?"
+
+Mrs. Budlong wanted to but could not and the two women fell about each
+other's throats and exchanged moan for moan.  As they were comfortably
+dabbing each other's tears from their cheeks and sniffing their own and
+laughing cosily after the rain, Johnetta giggled and sobbed at once:
+
+"The idea of your thinking I didn't just love you--and me working my
+fingers to the bone making a Christmas present for you!"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A WELL-LAID PLAN
+
+In the Civil War there were over two thousand battles and the details
+could not be reported in a lifetime.  But their result can be stated in
+a phrase.  The same brevity must apply to the campaigns, the
+stratagems, ballistics and tactics of Mrs. Budlong:  numberless efforts
+at secession ended as a lost cause.
+
+There was one more desperate struggle.  While only a few days stood
+between her and her famous Christmas afternoons, she and her dour
+husband were having a bitter council of war.  She had another attack of
+inspiration.
+
+"I have it! the very thing!  Why haven't we thought of it before?
+Quarantine!"
+
+"Quarantine?" echoed Mr. Budlong as if the word were gibberish.
+
+"Yes.  If we had something contagious in the house and a quarantine on,
+people couldn't come here with their odious gifts and they would be so
+afraid to get ours that they'd be much obliged to us for not sending
+them any."
+
+For the first time in years Mr. Budlong paid Mrs. Budlong a sincere
+homage:
+
+"You're a genius.  It takes a woman to squirm out of a difficulty after
+all."
+
+He was so excited he actually kissed her--and he hadn't finished his
+evening paper at that!
+
+This overjoyed her so far that she fairly glowed.
+
+"Oh, I'm so glad you approve, Ulie dear.  And you'll help me, won't
+you?"
+
+"You bet I will, ducky dove."
+
+"That's glorious.  Now which will you pretend to have, yellow fever or
+smallpox or--"
+
+"Which will _I_ pretend to have?  Do you mean to say that you expect ME
+to go bed with a fatal disease?"
+
+"It doesn't have to be fatal, my love.  Just so long as it's
+contagious, you know."
+
+"Well, of all th--what's to happen to my business?"
+
+"Why, you can call it a vacation.  And you can pretend to get well
+after Christmas; or you can have the doctor say it wasn't yellow fever
+after all."
+
+"But I stay in bed for several days, eh?"
+
+"Oh, you can move round all you want, just so 's't you don't go
+outdoors, and keep away from the windows."
+
+Mr. Budlong's admiration was reverting to its normal state.  He growled:
+
+"You women would be an awful joke, if you were only a little funnier.
+If you're so keen on this quarantine business you quarantine yourself.
+You can have yellow fever, or scarlet, or green or any color you
+like--robin's egg blue fever for all I care."
+
+"But, my darling, I can't be having those things!  You know I don't
+believe in them this year, since I became a--oh, it wouldn't do at all
+for Me.  But You could have it because You believe in diseases."
+
+"You bet I do, and I believe you've got softening of the brain."  He
+paced the floor in an effort to keep up with his temper.  Eventually he
+stopped short.  He remembered that his son had failed to help the
+family out in its distress.  He said:
+
+"Let Ulie have something."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+GANG AGLEY AGAIN
+
+Mrs. Budlong felt a certain superstitious uneasiness, but was finally
+won over, and Ulie was unanimously elected the scapegoat--or in more
+modern form, the goat.
+
+Ulie was in bed at the time sleeping like an innocent cherub and
+smiling in his sleep.  He was dreaming of a great invention: he would
+set a figure-4 trap near his fireplace and snare Santa Claus by the
+foot.  Then from a safe ambush under the bed, he would assail the old
+gentleman with his nigger-shooter till he laid him low, whereupon he
+could rifle the entire pack at his leisure, and select what he
+wanted.  Ulie had not been attending Sabbath School in vain.  The
+lesson of the week concerned David and Goliath.
+
+Prom such dreams as these Ulie woke the next morning to be told that
+he need not leave his bed.  He had scarlet fever and must keep close
+under his cover.
+
+"Scarlet nothin'!" was Ulie's reply.  "I gotter go to a meetin' of
+the Youth's Helpin' Hand Socirety this afternoon and I'll be darned
+if I stay in any dog-on bed."
+
+Mr. Budlong finally persuaded him--Ulie wasn't dressed yet and it
+hurts worse on the bare hide.  Then Mr. Budlong hurried down town to
+bribe a doctor and borrow a red placard of the board of health.  He
+was just rounding the corner on the way home when he caught sight of
+Ulie descending from the window by means of a knotted sheet.  Ulie
+had only a nightgown on, and owing to the heavy wind it wasn't much
+on.
+
+He dropped to the ground before Mr. Budlong could reach him, then
+darted away across lots barefooted through the snow towards the
+Detwillers'.  Mr. Budlong treed him just before he reached the
+neighbors.  But the boy would not come down till his father promised
+immunity both from punishment and from scarlet fever.
+
+The Detwillers were arriving on the run, so the father promised, hid
+the scarlet fever propaganda in his inside pocket, wrapped Ulie in
+his own overcoat and carried him home.  There was so much dread of
+pneumonia that the guilty parents could not include Ulie in any more
+schemes.  And they could think of no schemes.  The day before the Day
+Before Christmas found them in a panic.  The Day Before found them
+grimly resolved to stand siege.
+
+On the blessed Eve they sat before their cheerless fire-front and
+stared at the packages that had been pouring in all day long.  The
+old postman had staggered under the final load and hinted so broadly
+for a Christmas present that he got one--the first breach in their
+solemn resolve.
+
+They had excepted Ulie, of course, from the embargo.  But they had
+been in such a flurry that they had postponed him till they forgot
+him entirely.  The doorbell was rung so incessantly throughout the
+evening that the cook sat on the hall stairs to be handy.  She piled
+the packages up on the piano till they spilled off.  The piano lamp
+was gradually sinking beneath the encroaching tide.  Presents were
+brought in wagons, carriages, buggies, carts, by coachmen, gardeners,
+cooks, maids, messenger boys, and children of all ages and dimensions.
+
+On any other occasion Mrs. Budlong would have been running here and
+there, peeking into parcels and restraining her curiosity till the
+next day out of sheer joy in curiosity.  Now she opened never a
+bundle.  She could only think of the morrow when all of these donors
+found that reciprocity had gone down to defeat.  The Budlongs avoided
+each other's eyes.  They were thinking the same thing.  The strain
+endured till it tested their metal to the breaking point.  When three
+enormous packages were brought to the door by the Detwillers' hired
+man, Mrs. Budlong broke out hysterically:
+
+"I just can't stand it."
+
+"Hell!" roared Mr. Budlong.  "Get on your hat and coat.  We'll go
+down and buy everything that's left in town."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+AN AMAZING CHRISTMAS
+
+Holiday bargains in Carthage were not brilliant.  After being pawed
+over for several weeks, they were depressing indeed.  When the Budlongs
+strode into Strouther and Streckfuss's, it was nearly ten o'clock at
+night.  The sales-wretches, mostly pathetic spinsters of both sexes,
+were gaunt and jaded.  They yawned incessantly and held on to the
+counters.
+
+Even Messrs. Strouther and Streckfuss had the nap worn off their plushy
+sleekness.  They were surveying the wreckage, and dolefully realizing
+that some of the Christmas bills would not be paid by the Fourth of
+July.
+
+When the Budlongs made their irruption, they were not received
+cordially.  Word had gone abroad that the Budlongs were buying all
+their Christmas presents out of town.  They must be, for they bought
+none in.  This treachery to home industry was bitterly resented.  Then
+Budlong galvanized everybody with a cry like a flash of lightning:
+
+"I want to buy nearly everything in the shop.  Get busy."
+
+It was too late to select.  Mr. and Mrs. Budlong with their lengthy
+list in hand sprinted up one aisle and down another, pointing,
+prodding, rarely pausing to say "How much?" but monotonously chanting:
+"Gimme this!  Gimme that!  Gimme two of these!  Gimme six of them!
+Gimme that!  Gimme this!  Gimme them!"
+
+They bought glaring garden jars and ghastly vases, scarf pins that
+would disturb the peace, silly bisque figurines for mantels and
+what-nots, combs and brushes that would raise the hair on end instead
+of allaying it, oxidized silverized lead pencils, button hooks, tooth
+brushes, nail files, cuticle knives, pin cushions, ink stands, paper
+weights, picture frames, bits of lace and intimate white things with
+ribbons in them--Mr. Budlong turned away while she priced these.
+
+Strouther and Streckfuss were in a panic of joy at the situation.  They
+managed in the excitement to work off a number of old horrors that had
+been refused for years and years--ancient, dust-stained landmarks on
+the shelves.  Mr. Strouther showed the things, Mr. Streckfuss wrote the
+list of purchases,--he made many mistakes in prices, but strangely
+never to his own damage; and the entire staff of assistants followed,
+taking down, and wrapping up, and rushing parcels to the door, where
+they were bundled onto a wagon.
+
+Mr. Budlong should have been a medieval general.  He pillaged that
+store with the thoroughness of the Crusaders looting Constantinople.
+
+The town clock was striking midnight as the Budlongs dragged themselves
+home.  There was much yet to be done.  Parcels must be opened, price
+tags removed, gifts done up in pink tissue paper and gold twine, cards
+must be inscribed and inserted and the parcels rewrapped and addressed.
+The Strouther and Streckfuss driver had been hired at an exorbitant
+cost to sit up and deliver the gifts.  The horses had not been
+consulted.  They leaned on each other and slept, dreaming of oats.
+
+The Budlong parlor was soon a hideous scene.  The husband would open a
+bundle and sing out, "Who's this big immense pink and purple cuspidor
+for?"
+
+"That's a jardineer," Mrs. Budlong would gasp.  "It's a return for that
+horrible cat those hateful Disneys are going to inflict on me.  Here's
+the card."
+
+She handed him a holly-wreathed pasteboard on which she had written,
+"For Mr. and Mrs. Disney with most affectionate Yuletide greetings."
+
+She indited cards as fast as she could think up phrases.  She sought
+for variety, but the effort was maddening.  She wrote, "Very merry
+Christmas," "The merriest of Xmases," "A merry merry Yuletide," "A
+Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year," "Christmas Greetings," "Xmas
+Greetings," "Yuletide Greetings," "Wishing you a--" "With loving wishes
+for--" "Affectionate," and so on and so on and on and on.  She
+scribbled and scrawled till slumber drugged her and her pen went crazy.
+When she fell asleep she was writing "A Yuly Newmas and a Happy X-Year
+to Swally Sezey."
+
+The delivery man pounded on the door and wild-eyed Budlong let him in
+from the night.  The man whispered that he'd have to start at once if
+he was to make the rounds before his horses laid down on him.
+
+Mr. Budlong called his wife, but she did not answer.  He shook her and
+she threatened to roll off the chair on to a divan.  Mr. Budlong
+straightened her out and gazed at her in hopeless pity.  He stared at
+the chaos of bundles.
+
+He seized the pack of cards from his wife's chubby fingers and ran here
+and there jabbing pasteboards into bundles, regardless.
+
+That is how Myra Eppley acquired an ash tray lined with cigar bands,
+and why old Mr. Clute was amazed to receive a card offering him Mrs.
+Budlong's "loving and affectionate greetings."  He was more amazed when
+he opened the bundle.  It had ribbons in it.
+
+There were other amazements in town the next morning.  In fact, it was
+the amazingest Christmas Carthage had ever had.
+
+As fast as Mr. Budlong stuffed cards into bundles, he loaded bundles
+into the driver's arms as if they were sticks of wood.  The driver
+stacked them up in his wagon.  He made seven trips in all and some of
+the cards fell out and were stuck in still wronger bundles than before.
+But both the driver and Mr. Budlong were too sleepy to care.  The
+driver finally mounted his seat and called out from the dark:
+
+"Say, Mr. Budlong, where do I leave these packages--on the porch, or do
+I ring the bell?"
+
+"Chuck 'em through the windows!  The more glass you break the better
+I'll like it."
+
+"All right, sir.  Get ap!  Good night, sir, and wishing you a Merry
+Christmas!"
+
+"Merry ------" said Mr. Budlong, reaching for a rock.  But even the
+stones were frozen to the ground and the driver escaped.  As Mr.
+Budlong closed his front door, a thread of crimson spun out along the
+East as if somebody were going to wrap the whole world up in a red
+string.  He did not want it.  He yawned at it.
+
+An hour or so later, Ulie awoke and sat up with a start.  To his
+intense confusion, he bumped the top of his little skull on the bottom
+of his little bed.
+
+He was calling for help when he realized that he had fallen asleep in
+his ambush.  He peered forth to see if he had snared Santa Claus.
+
+The figure-4 trap was erect and intact, but empty.  He crawled out and
+ran to the row of stockings he had hung on the mantelpiece as a decoy.
+
+The stockings were empty.
+
+With a shriek of disappointed rage, Ulie dashed into his parents' room
+to protest.
+
+Their bed was empty.
+
+He ran through the house, stumbled down stairs and into the back
+parlor.  His father was snoring on a mattress of Yuletide parcels.  His
+mother was curled up on a divan under the smoking piano lamp.  Her
+hands were clutching strands of gold cord and her hair was pillowed in
+pink tissue paper.  She was burbling in her sleep.
+
+Little Ulie bent down to hear what she was saying.  He made out faintly;
+
+"Mishing you a Werry Muschris and a Nappy Hoosier."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Mrs. Budlong's Christmas Presents, by Rupert Hughes
+
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