He was living in Laconia again, so engrossed did he become in his work. He dined with Carroll now and then, enjoyed long evenings at the Freemans’ and kept touch with the Hendersons; but he refused so many invitations to the winter functions that Dale protested. He dropped into the Central States Trust Company now and then to observe Shep in his new rôle of vice-president. Shep was happier in the position than he had expected to be. Carroll was seeing to it that he had real work to do, work that was well within his powers. He had charge of the savings department and was pleased when his old friends among the employees of the battery plant looked him up and opened accounts. The friends of the Mills family, where they took note of Shep’s transfer at all, saw in it a promotion. Bruce, specially importuned by telephone, went to one of Constance’s days at home, which drew a large attendance by reason of the promised presence of an English novelist whose recent severe criticism of American society and manners had made him the object of particular adoration to American women readers. Bud Henderson, who had carried a flask to the tea, went about protesting against the consideration shown the visitor. If, he said, an American writer criticized American women in any such fashion he would be lynched, but let an Englishman do it and women would steal the money out of their children’s banks to buy his books and lecture tickets. So spake Bud. If Bud had had two flasks he would have broken up the tea; restricted as he was, his protest against the Briton took the form of an utterly uncalled for attack upon the drama league delivered to an aunt of Maybelle’s who was president of the local society--a strong Volsteadian who thought Bud vulgar, which at times Bud, by any high social standard, indubitably was. However, if amid so many genuflections the eminent Briton was disturbed by Bud’s evil manners or criticisms, Bud possibly soothed his feelings by following him upstairs when the party was dispersing and demonstrating the manner in which American law is respected by drawing flasks from nine out of fifteen overcoats laid out on Constance’s guest room bed and pouring half a pint of excellent bourbon into the unresisting man of letters. This function was only an interlude in the city’s rather arid social waste. The local society, Bruce found, was an affair of curiously close groupings. The women of the ancestral crowd were so wary of the women who had floated in on the tide of industrial expansion that one might have thought the newcomers were, in spite of their prosperity, afflicted with leprosy....