"At your next concert, mamma, I shall insist upon having 'please omit flowers' on the tickets," said Rosemary, severely. "I think I have thanked forty people for 'your exquisite roses'!"
"Poor, overworked little Rosemary!" laughed her stepmother.
"You can look for a new treasurer, too," said Theodore. "This sort of thing needs an expert accountant. No ordinary brain...! What with some of these women rubbing every item out three or four times, and others using pale green water for ink, nobody could get a balance."
Mrs. Bancroft, smiling serenely, leaned back in her chair,
"Aren't they unkind to me, Ann?" she complained. "They would expect a poor, forlorn old woman—Now, Rosemary!"
For Rosemary had interrupted her. Seating herself upon the arm of her stepmother's chair, she laid a firm hand over the speaker's mouth.
"Now she will fish, Ann," said Rosemary, calmly.
"Fish!" said Ann, indignantly. "After last night she doesn't have to FISH!"
"You bet she doesn't," said Theodore, affectionately. "Not she! She got enough compliments last night to last her a long while."
"I was ashamed of myself," confessed Rosemary, with her slow smile; "for, after all, WE'RE only her family! But father, Ted, and I went about the whole evening with broad, complacent grins—as if WE'D been doing something."