"Meet here," said Maud, "and in the mean season I'll look up the subject further."
When Selina went home with her proposal, Mrs. Wistar was more concerned with the obligation than the nature of the entertaining. "Have what you please, Selina, so it's reasonably simple in its cost and we can afford it. I'm glad to have you do it for Miss Boswell."
Auntie demurred. "I like the idea of a party, too," she said, "but why not just a party? What does Selina, or what do the others know about a—— what is it you're proposing to have, Selina? A conversazione? It sounds to me like borrowed finery in another guise such as we let her wear to the musicale. Let's don't do it again, Lavinia. I don't fancy mental furbelows that are not her own any more than dressmaker furbelows. Let Selina give a plain party."
"Why should you want to discourage the child, Ann Eliza? If she and the others want to have a conversational evening. I can see no reasonable grounds for objection."
Accordingly the group met with Maud the next evening and Selina reported. "Mamma approves, but Miss Pocahontas looked a little startled when I said conversazione. Or maybe I imagined she did, for immediately she smiled charmingly and said, 'How very lovely!' Maudie, do you really think we'd better undertake it?"
Having originated an idea, Maud never was known to relinquish it. "Just as you please," largely, "as I said before if you don't want it, let me give it."
Selina surrendered. "You got our literary club at school into that debate with the boys from the high school," she reminded Maud uneasily however, "and what we thought at the time was applause from them, we found out afterward was laughter."
They all moved uneasily at the recollection, all but Amanthus and she had not been in it.
"It was the subject Maud insisted on, we can see that now," said Juliette bitterly, "'Resolved that the works of Alexander Pope are atheistical in their tendency.' We ought to have known they were laughing at us when they accepted it."