LXVII
DEVOURING FRIENDS
“One of the greatest pests in the world is what I call the devouring friend,” said a woman the other day. “She is a bloodthirsty cannibal who gobbles you up alive, and you have no way of protecting yourself against her, because the sacred name of friendship bars the use of all the lethal weapons that you can use in defending yourself against other bores and social nuisances.
“Of course, the common or garden variety of devouring friend is the one who literally eats you out of house and home. She is a self-invited guest who drops you a little note saying that she is passing through your city or that she has to have a little dental work done or wants to consult a doctor or do some shopping, and she does so pine to see her darling Susan and talk over old times, and will it be convenient for her to come and spend a few days with you? All of which being translated simply means that she desires to graft a hotel bill off you.
“Anyway, she comes and camps in your spare room by the week, because she always manages to string out the dental work or the appointments with the doctor or the milliner. She should worry. For she is having a good time at no expense. Furthermore, by hints and insinuations she inveigles your husband into taking her to places of amusement that you have not felt that you could afford even when there were only two of you to pay for. And she runs your grocery bill up to the skies because she develops a taste for the most expensive food. And as you see her calmly consuming the price of your new dress you know exactly how a cornfield feels when a swarm of seven-year locusts settles down on it and goes into action.
“Then there are the devouring friends who eat up your time. I am a busy woman. I cannot afford to waste a minute. Unfortunately for me, I have a number of women friends who are rich and whose principal occupation in life is killing time. Now, these women know perfectly well that I not only do all of my own housework but that I make my children’s clothes and that if they kill a morning for me they upset my whole schedule and make my work pile up upon me so that my labor is twice as hard.
“But does that keep them from interrupting me? Lord, no. Every time Maud has a spat with her mother-in-law she will drop over and spend a whole morning giving me all the harrowing details. Every time Lulu’s husband gives her a new limousine I have to waste hours of my valuable time listening to a minute description of all its splendor. Every time Sallie and Susie want to be sympathized with or want to brag about their children they ruin the heart of a day’s work for me by backing me up against a wall and making me listen. And a dozen times a day I am interrupted by women who call me up over the telephone to hold long and fruitless conversations about nothing.
“Yet there is no possible way to protect my precious time against these friends who eat it up. They are all charming women. They like me and I like them. I want to retain their friendship, so I cannot shut my door in their faces when they come to see me. I can’t ask them to leave when they stay too long. I can’t ring off when they call me over the telephone. I can’t even say ‘damn’ aloud, no matter how much I am thinking it. But I know what the cynic meant when he said that if God would save him from his friends he would protect himself from his enemies.
“Then there are the devouring friends who swallow up all of your home life. My husband’s business is such that he has only one or two evenings at home a week. We would like to have these to ourselves to keep up our acquaintance or to go out on a little spree together. We have proclaimed this fact loudly and long to our friends and we refuse every invitation that it is possible to get out of for those two sacred occasions. But it doesn’t do a particle of good.
“Being an unusually charming and entertaining individual, my husband is regarded by my friends as a social tidbit—a particularly savory hors d’œuvre, as it were—and they gobble up our evenings together without the slightest compunction. If we won’t go to them, all right. They will come to us. So just about the time we are settling down for a real heart-to-heart talk, here come the Smiths to pass a pleasant evening with us, or the Joneses descend upon us and bear us off, shrieking and protesting, to listen to their new radio, or the Thompsons telephone that they are just coming over for a game of bridge.
“And there are the other devouring friends who nibble away at our independence like a mouse at a cheese, until some day we suddenly wake up to the fact that our freedom is all gone. We haven’t a vestige of liberty left. We dare not give a party and leave them out. We have to explain to them everything we do and tag meekly along in their footsteps. And there are other devouring friends who gnaw constantly on our sympathies by telling us all of their troubles and making us bear their burdens for them. They are ghouls who make us feed them our hearts to satisfy their morbid appetite for pity. Perhaps there is no way to get rid of devouring friends, but it certainly would add to the pleasures of life if we could swat them as we do other household pests.”