"Agreed," she answered. "And if I fail I will give you the finest dress suit a tailor can make."
You may be sure that the proud sister-in-law of a bishop never heard of this wager. The girls kept it a secret.
"It is not anything, after all," Jane said to her sisters. "Ellen not being town bred, it will exonerate her."
Ned did not like the idea very much, but Ellen seemed so delighted at the chance to show her skill that he did not have the heart to dampen her pleasure with a lecture on the improprieties.
"I must remember that she is a bloom of the fresh free countryside, where life is broader and less restrained by convention," he said to himself. So Ellen was left to win her wager with happiness.
One morning Mrs. Moore announced from behind the George III. coffee-urn bearing the arms of the Fish family that she had decided to give a ball. "As the wife of a physician and the sister of a bishop, I feel it my duty to do something for society. Not a bread-and-butter affair like old Mrs. Hone gives; nor should I care to entertain the mob of vulgarians Mrs. Van Pelt does. Something elegant for the representative families, William," she said, giving her spouse's coffee-cup a conciliatory dash of cream.
"Oh, you lovely, lovely mamsey!" the Moore girls chorus. "No, we can't sit still," they cry, heedless of her admonishment. About the table they pirouette and out into the hall, almost knocking over the haughty, stout Miss Rattlebones whom Thomas is leading to the doctor's office.
"Won't it be simply perfect?" they keep asking Ellen. "We will have the waltz,—the new dance so fashionable abroad, you know."
"And 'The Devil among the Tailors' they had at Matilda Hoffman's the other night," Jane added.
"The what? The devil something do I hear you say?" asks Mrs. Moore, rolling her eyes in a horrified fashion. "We will never have that indecent dance in my abode."