Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her guests congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having thought to have it. The felicitations included recognition of the originality of her whole scheme. She had downed the hoary superstition that people had too much of a good time on Christmas to want any good time at all in the week following; and in acting upon the well-known fact that you never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one, she had made a movement of the highest social importance. These were the ideas which Verrian and the young man of the in-doors snow-storm urged upon her; his name was Bushwick, and he and Verrian found that they were very good-fellows after they had rather supposed the contrary. Mrs. Westangle received their ideas with the twittering reticence that deceived so many people when they supposed she knew what they were talking about. XII. At breakfast, where the guests were reasonably punctual, they were all able to observe, in the rapid succession in which they descended from their rooms, that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining brilliantly. “There isn’t enough for sleighing,” Mrs. Westangle proclaimed from the head of the table in her high twitter, “and there isn’t any coasting here in this flat country for miles.” “Then what are we going to do with it?” one of the young ladies humorously pouted. “That’s what I was going to suggest,” Mrs. Westangle replied. She pronounced it ‘sujjest’, but no one felt that it mattered. “And, of course,” she continued, “you needn’t any of you do it if you don’t like.” “We’ll all do it, Mrs. Westangle,” Bushwick said. “We are unanimous in that.” “Perhaps you’ll think it rather funny--odd,” she said. “The odder the better, I think,” Verrian ventured, and another man declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle would do was odd, though everything was original. “Well, there is such a thing as being too original,” she returned. Then she turned her head aside and looked down at something beside her plate and said, without lifting her eyes, “You know that in the Middle Ages there used to be flower-fights among the young nobility in Italy. The women held a tower, and the men attacked it with roses and flowers generally.” “Why, is this a speech?” Miss Macroyd interrupted. “A speech from the throne, yes,” Bushwick solemnly corrected her. “And she’s got it written down, like a queen--haven’t you, Mrs. Westangle?” “Yes, I thought it would be more respectful.” “She coming out,” Bushwick said to Verrian across the table. “And if I got mixed up I could go back and straighten it,” the hostess declared, with a good--humored candor that took the general fancy, “and you could understand without so much explaining. We haven’t got flowers enough at this season,” she went on, looking down again at the paper beside her plate, “but we happen to have plenty of snowballs, and the notion is to have the women occupy a snow tower and the men attack them with snowballs.”