course they stop at hotels way up the country for lunch, and the
women have got to have veils and special hats and coats, and so on.
Wayne Adams told me it stood him in about thirty dollars every time
he went out with the Whites. Wayne's got his own car now; his wife
kept at him day and night to get it. But he can't run it, so it's in
the garage half the time."

"That's the worst of motoring," said the lady with a thoughtful nod,
"the people who sell them think they've answered you when they say,
'But you don't run it economically. If you understood it, it
wouldn't cost you half so much!' And the alternative is, 'Get a man
at seventy-five dollars a month and save repairing and replacing
bills.' Nice for business, Barry, but very much overdone for
pleasure, I think. I myself hate those days spent with five people
you hardly know," she went on, "rushing over beautiful roads that
you hardly see, eating too much in strange hotels, and paying too
much for it. I sha'n't have a car. But tell me more about the
people. Who are the Adamses? Didn't you say Adams?"

"Wayne Adams; nice people, with two nice boys," he supplied; "but
she's like the rest. Wayne lies awake nights worrying about bills,
and she gives silver photograph-frames for bridge prizes. That white
stucco house where they're putting in an Italian garden, is the
Parker Lloyds. Mrs. Lloyd's a clever woman, and pretty too; but she
doesn't seem to have any sense. They've got a little girl, and
she'll tell you that Mabel never wore a stitch that wasn't hand-made
in her life. Lloyd had a nervous breakdown a few months ago--we all
knew it was nothing but money worry--but yesterday his wife said to
me in all good faith that he was too unselfish, he was wearing
himself out. She was trying to persuade him to put Mabel in school