And here Maggie closed her story, which she had one day lately found in some book or paper, and had brought it up on this occasion for Lily's benefit, adding to it sundry embellishments of her own, which, as she thought, made it more telling and serviceable.
"But," said Lily, who took the moral to herself as it was intended she should do, "but we're not a meeting, and you're not a Quaker lady, Maggie. It's only a party."
"Only a party!" echoed Maggie, in an aggrieved tone, which told that this was adding insult to injury; "she says, 'Only a party'! Now, Lily, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I just want to tell you something."
And Maggie held up the bit of paper on which she had taken the pains to note down the sum Mrs. Rush had done for her, lest she should forget the number of minutes.
"You kept us waiting more than twenty minutes, Lily. Miss Ashton invited us at four, and you did not come till twenty minutes after; and there are four of us besides yourself, so there's one whole hour, and forty minutes,—which is 'most three-quarters of an hour,—one whole hour and forty minutes of party wasted, and only twenty minutes of it was your own."
"And I'm sure it's a great deal harder to have a party wasted than it is a meeting," said Belle.
"I never thought about it," said Lily, by no means offended, but considerably astonished at the way in which her short-comings were brought home to her. "I never thought of that, and I'm real sorry. I'll never do it again."
"Did the lady with the toothache ever tell the late lady she made her have it?" asked Bessie.
"Well, I'm not very sure," said Maggie, not willing to confess to total ignorance on this subject; "but I think she did."
"Then she wasn't very kind," said Bessie. "It would have been kinder if she hadn't spoken about it. She had lesson enough. I think that old Quaker lady was pretty cross, and I'm glad she's not my grandmamma."