The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia herself, to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,—­“The lips that touch wine shall never touch mine.”  It is true that this legend appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to lips not touched by wine.  It had, indeed, first been hung in the parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips.  Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he proceeded to act as if he had forgotten that he was a gentleman.

Hence the card’s seclusion in Marcella’s boudoir.  Hence, likewise, Marcella’s subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand.  She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic degeneration.  According to these, “a single glass of wine or a measure of ale,” taken daily for a year, suffices to produce some startling effects in color; while the result of “unrestrained indulgence for five years” is spectacular in the extreme.

Besides these disconcerting color effects Marcella enacted a brief but pithy drama in which she touched a lighted match to a tablespoonful of alcohol, to show the true nature of the stuff and to symbolize the fate of its votaries.

With charts and with blazing spirit, with tracts and with figures to prove that we spend “more for the staff of death than for the staff of life,” Marcella was prepared to move upon the unsuspicious Miss Caroline.  Nor was she alone in such readiness for a good work.  The ladies all felt that their profligate sister should be brought to sign the pledge.

And they called upon Miss Caroline with precisely this end in view—­called singly, and by twos and threes.  But for some reason they seemed always to find obstacles in the way of bringing forward this most vital topic.  If they had only discovered Miss Caroline in her cups, or if her shaded rooms had been littered with empty rum bottles and pervaded by the fumes of strong drink, or if she had audaciously offered them wine, doubtless the thing would have been easy.  But none of these helpful phenomena could be observed, and Miss Caroline had a way of leading the talk which would have made any reference to her unfortunate habits seem ungraceful.  It would be far too much to say that she charmed them, but all of her callers were interested, many of them were entertained, and a few became her warm defenders.  Aunt Delia McCormick surprised every one by aligning herself with this latter minority.  She declared, after her first call, that Miss Caroline was “a dear”; and after the second call, that she was “a poor dear,” and she forthwith became of service to the newcomer in a thousand ways known only to the masonry of housekeeping.