CHAPTER XXVII.
EASTER LILIES.
The next afternoon Jim and I kept our appointment with the Van Arsdel's. We found one of the parlors transformed to a perfect bower of floral decorations. Stars and wreaths and crosses and crowns were either just finished or in process of rapid construction under fairy fingers. When I came in, Eva and Alice were busy on a gigantic cross, to be made entirely of lilies of the valley, of which some bushels were lying around on the carpet. Ida had joined the service, and was kneeling on the floor tying up the flowers in bunches to offer them to Eva.
"You see, Mr. Henderson, the difference between modern religion and the primitive Christians," she said. "Their cross was rough wood and hard nails; ours is lilies and roses made up in fashionable drawing-rooms."
"I'm afraid," said Eva, "our crown may prove much of the same material!"
"I sometimes wonder," said Ida, "whether all the money spent for flowers at Easter could not better be spent in some mode of relieving the poor."
"Well," said Eva, "I am sorry to bring up such a parallel, but isn't that just the same kind of remark that Judas made about the alabaster vase of ointment?"
"Yes," said I; "what could be more apparently useless than a mere perfume, losing itself in the air, and vanishing entirely? And yet the Saviour justified that lavish expenditure when it was the expression of a heart-feeling."
"But," said Ida, "don't you think it very difficult to mark the line where these services and offerings to religious worship become excessive?"