"She's gone into the city on regular spending sprees and Mert's wild. He can't touch the farm and he's afraid Mary'll have that lump of money all spent before he gets out of bed. Everybody's hoping she will and advising her to buy every blessed thing she ever had a hankering for and things she never even heard of. Mrs. Brownlee, the president of the Civic League, even told her to buy a dish-washing machine, and heavens, if Mary didn't go right down and buy it. Doc Philipps advised her to buy herself the very best springs and mattress on the market--that it would help her back to sleep decently of nights. She's having hot-water heat put in and is going to do her washing with an electric washer. Seth Curtis put her up to that. And as soon as Mert gets better she's going visiting her sister in Colorado. She says she'll likely die of homesickness but that she's just got to go off somewhere to get used to and learn to wear properly all the new clothes she's got. "Well, Mary's buying all these labor-saving machines got the whole town to thinking and spending. Dick's put in a new cash register they say is nice enough to have in the parlor. It made Jessie Williams buy a lot of new silver that she didn't need no more than a cat needs a match-box. But she got it and she gave a luncheon the other day to some of the South End crowd and tried to get just about all that silver on the table, I guess. Of course, it looked mighty nice but when the women came to eat they didn't know what to do with it. They got pretty miserable, all sticking to just the one knife and fork and spoon. And Jessie got so rattled that she just about forgot to use the stuff too. And finally old Mrs. Vingie, that Jessie asked just to have the news spread, got up mad as a hornet and marched out, saying she was too old to be insulted. "Until a week ago Bessie Williams wouldn't speak to Alex. You know her hair's got awful white this last year and of course, her being kind of stout, she does look older than Al. But she says that's no reason why, when a peddler comes to the door with anything, Al needs to let the man think she's his mother. "Mrs. Jerry Dustin's been to see Uncle Tony's portraiture hanging in the art gallery. She says it's so lifelike it made her cry. And she's awful happy about Peter. Peter's been posing for a picture for Bernard Rollins and while he was in the studio he got to fooling with the paints and brushes, and lo and behold, if he didn't daub up something that looked like his mother's face when she's smiling. They say Rollins jumped he was so surprised and he put the boy through some paces and swore he'd make a better artist out of him than he was himself. So there you are, and now Mrs. Dustin is dreaming of Peter in Italy, Peter in Rome, Peter everywhere in creation, and her tagging along with his brushes and dust rags. So she's happy.