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Updated: May 4, 2025
It took two meetings for us to discover what had clogged up the atmosphere and taken the prance out of things. Then we tumbled. The Payleys and Singers were educating us. They were fitting us to live in the rarified upper altitudes of refinement and to mingle with rank without stepping all over its feet.
DeLancey persuaded Hi Nott to buy a real city carriage, and the four have used it faithfully; only the Payleys and Singers live in different edges of town, and by the time Hi has hauled Sam and his sister across town to the Payleys, through Homeburg's April streets, which average a little more depth than width, and has hauled the four down to the theater, there are usually about three breakdowns.
People who called at the Payleys' evenings were the social lights of Homeburg, and whenever some lady wanted to discharge a few fireworks indicating her social position, she would form a hollow square around Mrs. Payley in public and get intimate with her in full view of everybody. Mrs. Payley ran the town, and everybody was comfortable and content about it until the Singers arrived.
Payley was willing to fight and be bled, so to speak, to give our town tone and inject a little excitement into our prairie lives now and then, we felt that the least we could do was to regard her as a social colossus. The Payleys were the only people in Homeburg who had lunch at noon, and as early as 1900 they ate it from the bare table.
It kept the Singers so busy supporting and encouraging it, that the Payleys were able to build the first modern house with a sleeping porch and individual bathrooms and about the time the Singers came back with a two-story bungalow full of chopped wood furniture, Mrs. Payley went abroad again and began to say: "The last time I was in Europe."
The Payleys' girl has been with them sixteen years, as I said before, and when she wants to go to the opera-house to an entertainment, Wert Payley makes young DeLancey Payley take her. It's the only use he's found for DeLancey as yet.
Then it's noon, and this is his hardest problem, because every one goes to dinner at noon except the Payleys and Singers, who have luncheon at one. If DeLancey can find Sam Singer, he is all right. But Sam, who used to loaf enthusiastically with him, has rosy ideas about Mabel Andrews now, and he is working hard in his father's bank and on the farms.
The Payleys and Singers still continued to compete, but we declined to fight and bleed for them and amused ourselves instead by watching them from the sidelines. Mrs. Payley joined the "When I was in Europe" brigade, and the Singers got the first automobile in town.
Too many Americans buy portable parlors with sixty-seven coats of varnish, and are then shocked and grieved to discover when too late that said parlors have gizzards just like any other automobile and that they should have been looked after. I said there were one hundred automobiles in Homeburg. I was mistaken. There are ninety-nine automobiles and one car. The Payleys own the car.
He ran around the country a good deal, however, tuning it up and trying it out, and as he was a sociable cuss, some of us always went with him. In fact, about every one rode in the Payley car that summer except the Payleys. Wert Payley used to stop me and ask if I could fix it up to take him along sometime when I went riding with his chauffeur, but I never would risk it.
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