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202 "No! Gee! No! Honest, I didn't! Just made a bluff about having him to lunch some time."

"Well. … Oh, dear. … I don't want to hurt their feelings. But I don't see how I could stand another evening like this one. And suppose somebody like Dr. and Mrs. Angus came in when we had the Overbrooks there, and thought they were friends of ours!"

For a week they worried, "We really ought to invite Ed and his wife, poor devils!" But as they never saw the Overbrooks, they forgot them, and after a month or two they said, "That really was the best way, just to let it slide. It wouldn't be kind to them to have them here. They'd feel so out of place and hard-up in our home."

They did not speak of the Overbrooks again.