Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt his duties as host.  While he droned, his brows popped up and down.  He interrupted himself, “Must stir ’em up.”  He worried at his wife, “Don’t you think I better stir ’em up?” He shouldered into the center of the room, and cried: 

“Let’s have some stunts, folks.”

“Yes, let’s!” shrieked Juanita Haydock.

“Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen.”

“You bet; that’s a slick stunt; do that, Dave!” cheered Chet Dashaway.

Mr. Dave Dyer obliged.

All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for their own stunts.

“Ella, come on and recite ‘Old Sweetheart of Mine,’ for us,” demanded Sam.

Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched her dry palms and blushed.  “Oh, you don’t want to hear that old thing again.”

“Sure we do!  You bet!” asserted Sam.

“My voice is in terrible shape tonight.”

“Tut!  Come on!”

Sam loudly explained to Carol, “Ella is our shark at elocuting.  She’s had professional training.  She studied singing and oratory and dramatic art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee.”

Miss Stowbody was reciting.  As encore to “An Old Sweetheart of Mine,” she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles.

There were four other stunts:  one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and Nat Hicks’s parody of Mark Antony’s funeral oration.

During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer’s hen-catching impersonation seven times, “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” nine times, the Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party instantly sank back into coma.

They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they did at their shops and homes.

The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening.  Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily pattered of children, sickness, and cooks—­their own shop-talk.  She was piqued.  She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in a drawing-room, fencing with clever men.  Her dejection was relieved by speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between the piano and the phonograph.  Did they rise from these housewifely personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs?

She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, “I won’t have my husband leaving me so soon!  I’m going over and pull the wretch’s ears.”  She rose with a jeune fille bow.  She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality.  She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott’s chair.