Mr. Foster did not seem in the mood to argue the question, but responded with genial good humor.  “Ah but, Mrs. Ried, you ought to gratify your daughter in her parting request.  That is only natural and courteous, is it not?”

Mrs. Ried felt called upon to reply.  “We have gratified so many of her requests already that the whole thing bids fair to be the most ridiculous proceeding that New York has ever witnessed.  Fancy a dozen rough boys banging and shouting through my house, eating cake enough to make them sick for a month, to say nothing of the quantity which they will stamp into my carpets, and all because they chance to belong to Abbie’s mission class!”

Ralph and Ester had joined the group in the meantime, and the former here interposed.

“That last argument isn’t valid, mother.  Haven’t I promised to hoe out the rooms myself, immediately after the conclusion of the solemn services?”

And Mr. Foster bestowed a sudden troubled look on Abbie, which she answered by saying in a low voice, “I should recall my invitations to them under such circumstances.”

“You will do no such thing,” her father replied sharply.  “The invitations are issued in your parents’ names, and we shall have no such senseless proceedings connected with them When you are in your own house you will doubtless be at liberty to do as you please; but in the meantime it would be well to remember that you belong to your father’s family at present.”

Ralph was watching the flushing cheek and quivering lip of his young sister, and at this point flung down the book with which he had been idly playing, with an impatient exclamation:  “It strikes me, father, that you are making a tremendous din about a little matter.  I don’t object to a glass of wine myself, almost under any circumstances, and I think this excruciating sensitiveness on the subject is absurd and ridiculous, and all that sort of thing; but at the same time I should be willing to undertake the job of smashing every wine bottle there is in the cellar at this moment, if I thought that Sis’ last hours in the body, or at least in the paternal mansion, would be made any more peaceful thereby.”

During this harangue the elder Mr. Ried had time to grow ashamed of his sharpness, and answered in his natural tone.  “I am precisely of your opinion, my son.  We are making ‘much ado about nothing.’  We certainly have often entertained company before, and Abbie has sipped her wine with the rest of us without sustaining very material injury thereby, so far as I can see.  And here is Ester, as stanch a church member as any of you, I believe, but that doesn’t seem to forbid her behaving in a rational manner, and partaking of whatever her friends provide for her entertainment.  Why can not the rest of you be equally sensible?”