“That was just like him!” she remarked.  “But it’s all a mistake.  He paid me back that money five years ago.  You see he persuaded John to go into some kind of a business scheme with him and they lost all they put into it—­twenty-five thousand apiece.  It was all we had.  It wasn’t his fault, but after John died Mr. Clifford made me—­simply made me—­let him give the money back.  He must have written the letter before that and forgotten all about it!”

You’re Another!

  “We have strict statutes, and most biting laws.” 
      Measure for Measure, Act I, Scene 4.

    “I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no
    laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.”

    Montaigne.  Of Experience, Chapter XIII.

Mrs. Pierpont Pumpelly, lawful spouse of Vice President Pumpelly, of Cuban Crucible, erstwhile of Athens, Ohio, was fully conscious that even if she wasn’t the smartest thing on Fifth Avenue, her snappy little car was.  It was, as she said, a “perfec’ beejew!” The two robes of silver fox alone had cost eighty-five hundred dollars, but that was nothing; Mrs. Pumpelly—­in her stockings—­cost Pierpont at least ten times that every year.  But he could afford it with Cruce at 791.  So, having moved from Athens to the metropolis, they had a glorious time.  Out home the Pierpont had been simply a P. and no questions asked as to what it stood for; P. Pumpelly.  But whatever its past the P. had now blossomed definitely into Pierpont.

Though the said Pierpont produced the wherewithal, it was his wife, Edna, who attended to the disbursing of it.  She loved her husband, but regarded him socially as somewhat of a liability, and Society was now, as she informed everybody, her “meal yure.”

She had eaten her way straight through the meal—­opera box, pew at St. Simeon Stylites, Crystal Room, musicales, Carusals, hospital entertainments, Malted Milk for Freezing France, Inns for Indigent Italians, Biscuits for Bereft Belgians, dinner parties, lunch parties, supper parties, the whole thing; and a lot of the right people had come, too.

The fly in the ointment of her social happiness—­and unfortunately it happened to be an extremely gaudy butterfly indeed—­was her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Rutherford Wells, who obstinately refused to recognize her existence.

At home, in Athens, Edna would have resorted to the simple expedient of sending over the hired girl to borrow something.  But here there was nothing doing.  Mrs. Rutherford had probably never seen her own chef and Mrs. Pumpelly was afraid of hers.  Besides, even Edna recognized the lamentable fact that it was up to Mrs. Wells to call first, which she didn’t.  Once when the ladies had emerged simultaneously from their domiciles Mrs. Pumpelly had smilingly waddled forward a few steps with an ingratiating bow, but Mrs. Wells had looked over her head and hadn’t seen her.