“Saturday came and I rode down to Laura’s, trying to avoid the posters. It was an awfully nice luncheon and Geraldine wore her new green. Beautiful dress but it makes her look bunchy. Well, any way we had just gotten to mushroom timbales—don’t you love timbales? I wonder how they make them—. Well, we were at timbales when the ’phone rang and the maid said someone wanted me. It was Mary, our cook, and she said a messenger boy had just brought some theater tickets and should she send them to me or was I coming back before the matinee. My heart leaped within me, but I calmed myself by considering that they were probably tickets for Stereopticon Views of Palestine, for Aunt Myra is always sending me that kind of thing. So I managed to contain myself sufficiently to ask details. My dear, can you imagine the tumult and wild joy raised in my bosom when Mary read over the tickets and found they were for ‘The Golden Quest’ and there were six of them? I told her to send them to Laura’s and then I tore back to the dining room. You should have heard the shrieks of jubilation. We beat the table with our forks and sang the opening chorus. Six tickets and six girls and all in our happy clothes, the matinee only an hour off and they had all wanted to see it as much as I. When the first wild burst was over, it occurred to me to wonder where the tickets came from. At first they seemed a direct answer to prayer, but I began to think there must be a more palpable source. It wasn’t Daddy. He had not forgiven me enough yet to be so horribly generous. And the only other person was Aunt Myra and she is old fashioned and Presbyterian.” “What has that to do with it, Cora?” “Why, it means she regards me as a raging heathen and never shows me any consideration as her niece, but a great deal of attention as a soul to be saved. She sends me little books and a weekly paper, and when a missionary visits her house she invites me over. She hopes to show me the beauties of a Higher Life, but it only sets me against Presbyterianism, because all the missionaries make noises with their soup and it must be awful to belong to a church like that.” “Cora, you are a disgrace to a civilized family. And besides, it may after all have been your aunt that sent the tickets, hoping to win you through kindness.” “Mabel, you rave! Aunt Myra regards the theater as the clearest manifestation of the Evil One on earth, and her saintly little Caddie is not allowed to look at a poster. A nephew is visiting them now, and I dare say they are taking him to the midweek lectures on Genesis in the Light of Arabian Topography. I know Aunt hopes to win him to her church, as he has heaps of money and they need a new chapel. As he belongs to her side of the family I suppose he trots along, and perhaps leads the experience meeting. I should not wonder if he wears a lawn tie in the morning,—that is a special mark of sanctity, you know.”