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