I have it all planned just how I shall treat Dr. Maynard when he comes home--very distantly and as if so much society had made me a little blasé. When his name is sent up I shall keep him waiting in the little gold reception-room for about five minutes, and then glide into his presence, in a long clinging crêpe-de-chine dress. After I have shaken hands and said, "How pleasant it is to have you with us again," I'll ring for tea, then go back and sit down in the carved Italian armchair with the high back, dangle the ivory paper-cutter in one hand the way Ruth does, and inquire what sort of a passage he has had. If he should come this year I've just the gown to wear. It's black, with a gold cord around the waist. I look about twenty-nine in it, and awfully sophisticated. CHAPTER XIV Ruth's coming-out party cost over two thousand dollars, they say. Her dress alone was made by a dressmaker in Boston who won't "touch a thing" under a hundred and fifty; and Edith's--shimmering blue, draped with chiffon covered with green spangles, and here and there a crimson one (it looked just like the shining sides of a little wet brook trout)--simply spelled money. I tell you the whole party lived up to the gorgeousness of Edith's gown too. There were orchids frozen in ice, for a punch bowl, in the dining-room; Killarney roses by the dozens in the reception-room; chrysanthemums in big round red bunches in the living-room; and the stairway was wound with smilax and asparagus fern, with real birch trees--silvery bark and all--at intervals of four or five feet. There were extra electric lights, extra maids, extra everything; and on the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of October, there arrived a whole squad of caterers from Boston with cases large as trunks filled with pattie shells, a thousand tiny brown pyramids of potato croquettes, tanksful of mushrooms, crab meat, and sweet-breads, cratesful of Malaga grapes and actual strawberries imported from somewhere which they dipped in white fondant and then set away to cool in little frilled paper holders, all over the butler's pantry.