“The Embroidery Club meets here tomorrow, Evadne,” exclaimed Marion, “and I don’t believe you have touched your table scarf since they were here before.  What will Celeste Follingsby think?  She works so rapidly, and her drawn work is a perfect poem.”

“No, I have not,” confessed Evadne.  “It seems such silly work, to draw threads apart and then sew them together again.”

Isabelle elevated her eyebrows with a look of horror.

Louis laughed.  “She’s a hopeless case, Isabelle.  You’ll never convert her into an elegant trifler.  You might as well throw up the contract.”

“It seems to me, Evadne,” said his sister icily, “that you might have a little regard for the decorums of society.  Don’t, I beg of you, give utterance to such heresies before the girls.  And I wish you would not call it my Bible.  I did not make it.”

“That is quite true, Evadne,” said Louis gravely.  “If she had, there would have been a good deal left out.”

Isabella shot an angry glance at him but made no remark.  Her brother’s sarcasms were always received in silence.

“Eva,” she said after a pause, “I intend to call you by that name in future,—­your full one is too troublesome.”

Evadne shivered.  Her father was the only one who had ever abbreviated her name.  “I shall not answer to it,” she said quietly.

“Why, pray?”

“Because, I suppose, in common with the rest of the lower animals, I have a natural repugnance to being cut in two.”

“How tiresome you are!” exclaimed Isabelle with a pout.  “I do not object to my first syllable.  All the girls at school call me Isa.  Mamma, did you remember to order the tulle for our wings?  Claude Rivers has finished hers and they are perfectly sweet.  She showed them to me this afternoon.”

“Wings, Isabelle!  What in the world are you up to now?”

“A Butterfly Social, Papa.  We must raise money in some way.  The church is frightfully in debt.”

“That is a deplorable fact, but I did not know butterflies were famed as financiers.”

“Oh, of course it is just for the novelty of the thing.  The last social we had was a Mother Goose, and we have had Brownie suppers and Pink teas and everything else we could think of.  We must have something to attract, you know.”

“I wonder if it really pays?” ventured Marion.  “It never seems to me there is much left, after you deduct the cost of the preparation.  People might as well give the money outright.  It would save them a world of trouble.”

“Why, you silly child, it is to promote sociability in the church.  As to the trouble, of course we do not count that.  We must expect to make sacrifices.”

“But they do not make the church any more sociable,” said Marion boldly, who, having struck for freedom of thought, was following up her advantage.  “The same people take part every time and the others are left outside.”