Chapter 9

There are some people who simply can’t learn anything by experience. I am thinking particularly of Mrs. Edna [Pierpont] Pumpelly, _née_ Haskins, wife of Vice-President Pumpelly of the Cuban Crucible Steel Company, formerly of Athens, Ohio, and now of East Seventy-third Street, New York, New York. One would have thought that after her celebrated run-in with her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Rutherford Wells, in which the latter simply put it all over her, she would have acquired some sense. But she didn’t seem to. When L…