The reassured took another whiff.

“You can have mine,” she said directly afterwards; and there was an air of decision about her speech which brooked no opposition.  Yet Mitchell persisted.

“Oh, no,” he yelled; “you must learn how.  Just throw your head back and take ’em quick—­after the fashion that they eat raw eggs, don’t you know?”

“But she can’t,” said Clover.  “There’s too much, particularly as she isn’t used to them.  I’ll tell you, Miss Watkins,” he cried, hoisting his own voice to the masthead, “you eat the oysters, and leave the cocktail.  That’s the way to get gradually trained into the wheel.”

Aunt Mary thought some of obeying; she fished out one oyster, wiped it carefully with a bit of bread, regarded it with more than dubious countenance, and then suddenly decided not to.

“I’d rather be at home when I try experiments,” she said, decidedly; and the waiter carried off her cocktail and gave her food that was good beyond question thereafter.

The dinner went with zest.  It was an enlivening party that consumed it, and what they consumed with it enlivened them still more.  The gentlemen soon reached the point where they could laugh over jokes they could not understand, and the one lady member became equally merry over wit that she did not hear.  She forgot for the nonce that there were any phases of life in which she was not a believer, and whether this was owing to the surrounding gayety or to the champagne which they persuaded her to taste it is not my province to explain.

“Now we must lay our lines for events to come,” Jack said, when they advanced upon the dessert and prepared to occupy an extensive territory of ices, fruit, and jellied something or other.  “It would be a sin for Aunt Mary to leave this famous battlefield without a few honorable scars!  We must take her out in a bubble for one thing and—­”

“In mine!” cried Clover.  “To-morrow!  Why can’t she?—­I held up my hand first?”

“All right,” said Jack; “to-morrow she’s your’s.  At four o’clock.”

“She must have goggles,” cried Mitchell.  “She must have goggles and be all fixed up, and when you have got her the goggles and she has been all fixed up, I ask, as a last boon, that I may go along, just so as to see everyone who sees her.”

“We’ll all go,” Clover explained.  “I’ll ‘chuff’ her myself and then there’ll be room for everyone.”

“To the auto and to to-morrow!” cried Burnett, hastily pouring out a fresh toast, which even Aunt Mary applauded, not at all knowing what she was applauding.

“And now for the next day,” said Jack.  “I think I’ll give her a box-party.  Don’t you want to go to the theater in a box, Aunt Mary?”

“Go where in a box?” said Aunt Mary, starting a little.  “I didn’t quite catch that.”

“To the theater,” Jack yelled.

“To the theater,” repeated his aunt a trifle blankly, “I—­”