"I'm sure this party is quite an outlay for Aunt Maria," said Eva.
"Oh," said Alice, "she's making all her jellies, and blanc-manges, and ice creams in the house. You know how perfectly she always does things. I've been up helping her. She will have a splendid table. She was rather glorifying herself to me that she could get up so fine a show at so little expense."
"Well, she can," said Eva. "No one can get more for a given amount of money than Aunt Maria. I suppose that is one of the womanly virtues, and one can learn as much of it from her as anybody."
"Yes," said Alice, "if a stylish party is the thing to be demonstrated, Aunt Maria will get one up more successfully, more perfect in all points, and for less money, than any other woman in New York. She will have exactly the right people, and exactly the right things to give them. Her rooms will be lovely. She will be dressed herself to a T, and she will say just the right thing to everybody. All her nice silver and her pretty things will come out of their secret crypts and recesses to do honor to the occasion, and, for one night, all will be suavity and sociability personified; and then everything will go back into lavender, the silver to the safe, the chairs and lounges to their cover, the shades will come down, and her part of the world's debt of sociability will be done up for the year. Then she will add up the expense, and set it down in her account book, and that thing'll be finished and checked off."
"A mode of proceeding which she was very anxious to engraft upon me," said Eva; "but I am a poor stock. My instincts are for what she would call an expensive, chronic state of hospitality, as we live down here!"
"Well," said Jim, "when I get a house of my own, I'm going to do as you do."
"Jim has got sight of the domestic tea-kettle in the future," said Harry. "That's the first effect of his promotion."
"Oh, don't be in a hurry about setting up a house of your own," said Eva. "I'm afraid we should miss you here, and you're an institution, Jim; we couldn't get on without you."
"Oh, Jim ought not to give up to one what was meant for mankind," said Alice, hardily. "I think there would be a universal protest against his retiring to private life."