’Oh, Marietta, how do you suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much?  I hope she won’t be disappointed.  I’ve done so much to it this last year, perhaps she won’t like it.  And oh, I was so tired because we weren’t able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!’

    ’Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia.  She’s
    only human.  I guess if the house is good enough for you and
    father it is good enough for her.’

    ’That’s just it, Marietta—­that’s just what came over me!
    Is what’s good enough for us good enough for Lydia?  Won’t
    anything, even the best, in Endbury be a come-down for her?’

The attainments of Mrs. Emery both as to wealth and social position, however, were not reached by her daughter Marietta and her husband, but in the determination to make it appear as if they were, Marietta thus exposes her own life of worry in a talk with her father: 

’Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid.  There aren’t any girls to be had lately.  It means that I have to be the other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the time.’  She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could not resist the relief that came from expression.  ’And the cost of living—­the necessities are bad enough, but the other things—­the things you have to have not to be out of everything!  I lie awake nights.  I think of it in church.  I can’t think of anything else but the way the expenses mount up.  Everybody getting so reckless and extravagant and I won’t go in debt!  I’ll come to it, though.  Everybody else does.  We’re the only people that haven’t oriental rugs now.  Why, the Gilberts—­and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen’s appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars—­well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid a hundred and sixty dollars for.  Mrs. Gilbert said they ’just had to have it, and you can always have what you have to have.’  It makes me sick!  Our parlor looks so common!  And the last dinner party we gave cost—­’

Another phase of the squirrel cage worry is expressed in this terse paragraph: 

’Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but Mother says they are so new you can’t tell what they are going to be.  She says they may get to be too common.’

Bye and bye it comes Lydia’s turn to decide what place she and her new husband are to take in Endbury society, and here is what one frank, sensible man says about it: