So they, too, flung from them crinkling silk and diaphanous lace, high-heel shoon and the delicate body-harness never fashioned for free-limbed dryads of the Rose-Cross wilds; and they kept the electric signals going for ices and fruits and pitchers brimming with clear cold water; and they sat there in a circle like a thicket of fluttering pale-pink roses, until below the last guest had sped out into the unknown wastes of Gotham, and the poet's heavy step was on the stair. The poet was agitated--and like a humble bicolored quadruped of the Rose-Cross wilds, which, when agitated, sprays the air--so the poet, laboring obesely under his emotion, smiled with a sweetness so intolerable that the air seemed to be squirted full of saccharinity to the point of plethoric saturation. "My lambs," he murmured, fat hands clasped and dropped before him as straight as his rounded abdomen would permit; "my babes!" "Do you think," suggested Aphrodite, busy with her ice, "that we are going to enjoy this winter in Mr. Wayne's house?" "Enjoyment," breathed the poet in an overwhelming gush of sweetness, "is not in houses; it is in one's soul. What is wealth? Everything! Therefore it is of no value. What is poverty? Nothing! And, as it is the little things that are the most precious, so nothing, which is less than the very least, is precious beyond price. Thank you for listening; thank you for understanding. Bless you." And he wandered away, almost asphyxiated with his emotions. "I mean to have a gay winter--if I can ever get used to being laced in and pulled over by those dreadful garters," observed Aphrodite, stretching her smooth young limbs in comfort. "I suppose there would be trouble if we wore our country clothes on Broadway, wouldn't there?" asked Lissa wistfully. Chlorippe, aged thirteen, kicked off her sandals and stretched her pretty snowy feet: "They were never in the world made to fit into high-heeled shoes," she declared pensively, widening her little rosy toes. "But we might as well get used to all these things," sighed Philodice, rolling over among the cushions, a bunch of hothouse grapes suspended above her pink mouth. She ate one, looked at Dione, and yawned. "I'm going to practise wearing 'em an hour a day," said Aphrodite, "because I mean to go to the theater. It's worth the effort. Besides, if we just sit here in the house all day asking each other Greek riddles, we will never see anybody until Iole and Vanessa come back from their honeymoon and give teas and dinners for all sorts of interesting young men."