"Misery! And my curiosity has been actually on the boil! How many of those sticks do I need?"
"Let's all do the same basket," suggested Ethel Brown. "Then one lecture by Miss Dorothy Smith will do for all of us."
"Doesn't anybody else know how to make them?"
"Della and I do," replied Ethel Blue. "We're going to work on raffia, but you people might just as well all do one kind of basket. We can use any number of them, you know, so it doesn't make any difference if they are all alike."
"We'll start with a basket that measures three inches across the bottom and is two and a half inches deep," announced Dorothy, who was an expert basket maker. "You'll need eight spokes sixteen inches long and one nine inches long."
There was a general cutting and counting of rattan spokes.
"Are you ready? Take your knife and in four rattans make slits long enough to poke the other four rattans through."
"They're rather fat to get through," complained James.
"Make slits long enough to poke the other rattans through. Sharpen them to a point"