"I'll help you pick out just the right thing," responded Sadie, eager for the orgy of planning a new evening costume, while Margaret, as she glanced at Sadie's ill-fitting, gay plaid blouse of cheap silk, made by a cheap seamstress, and at the coquettish patch of black court plaster off her left eye, concealed her amusement at her vision of herself in a garb of her sister-in-law's devising.
"Daniel," she suddenly said, wishing to divert the talk from clothes, and curious, also, to "try out" her husband on a certain point, "I'm thirsty."
Daniel, not yet very far recovered from the attentive lover stage, jumped up at once to get her a drink, quite as he would have done before their marriage, and Margaret smiled as she saw Jennie and Sadie look shocked at what she knew they felt to be her very unwifely attitude.
"My dears," she told them while Daniel was gone, "I've got to try to keep him in training, you spoil him so dreadfully."
"How high dare she go, Danny, for her new dress?" Sadie inquired when her brother returned with the water.
"Well, what do you pay for a party dress?"
"My new white silk cost me sixteen-fifty."
"That's a showy, handsome dress all right. You may spend twenty dollars, Margaret," he said magnanimously.
"We'll go downtown right after breakfast on Monday morning, Margaret," said Sadie, "and pick out the goods and take it to Mrs. Snyder, my dressmaker. She charges five dollars to make a dress, but she gives you your money's worth; she makes them so nice and fancy. Your dresses ain't fussed up enough, Margaret."
Margaret wondered what would be the effect upon them if she told them that just the mere making of one of her "plain" gowns, by a good dressmaker, had cost nearly twice what Daniel "allowed" her for the goods, "findings," and making of a new one. But she decided to spare them the shock.