But they were all honest, these girls, and this very one who had offered her sneer, added in sober second thought:
"Though, to be sure, for the matter of that, neither did we, until you begun it. Well, let them come in; I don't care."
"And we want to do so much," said Miss Benedict, with enthusiasm; "if I were you I would take all the help I could get."
Meantime, the other schemes connected with this gigantic enterprise flourished. There seemed no end to the devices for money-making, all of them in somewhat new channels, too.
"Not a tidy in the enterprise," said Ruth Jennings, gravely, as she tried to explain some of the work to her mother. "Who ever heard of a church getting itself repaired without the aid of tidies and pin-cushions! I wonder when they began with such things, mother? Do you suppose St. Paul had to patronize fairs, and buy slippers and things, for the benefit of churches in Ephesus or Corinth?"
The bewildered mother, with a vague idea that Ruth was being almost irreverent, could not, for all that, decide how to answer her.
"For there isn't any religion in those things, of course," she said to the equally-puzzled father, "and it did sound ridiculous to hear St. Paul's name brought into it! That Miss Benedict has all sorts of new ideas."
In the course of time, the boys (who are quite likely to become interested in anything that has deeply interested the girls) were drawn into service. Here, too, the ways of working were unusual and suggestive. Miss Benedict heard of one who had promised to give all the cigars he would probably have smoked in two months' time, whereupon she made this eager comment:
"Oh, what a pity that it is not going to take us fifty years to repair the church! then we would get him to promise to give us the savings of cigars until it was done!"