They were very familiar with the work of preparing the simple "refreshments" for University gatherings. Their mother always provided exactly the same viands, and long practice had made them letter-perfect in the moves to be made. When they had finished portioning off the lettuce-leaves and salad on the plates, they swiftly set each one on a fresh crêpe-paper napkin. Sylvia professed an undying hatred for paper napkins. "I don't see why," said Judith. "They're so much less bother than the other kind when you're only going to use them once, this way." "That's it," asserted Sylvia; "that's the very stingy, economical thing about them I hate, their _not_ being a bother! I'd like to use big, fine-damask ones, all shiny, that somebody had ironed twenty minutes, every one, like those we had at Eleanor Hubert's birthday party. And then I'd scrunch them up and throw them in the laundry if there was the least speck on them." "I wouldn't like the job of doing them up," said Judith. "Neither would I. I'd hate it! And I wouldn't," continued Sylvia, roaming at will in her enchanted garden; "I'd hire somebody to take all the bother of buying them and hemming them and doing them up and putting them on the table. All I'd do, would be to shake them out and lay them across my lap," she went through a dainty-fingered pantomime, "and never think a thing about how they got there. That's all _I_ want to do with napkins. But I do love 'em big and glossy. I could _kiss_ them!" Judith was almost alarmed at the wildness of Sylvia's imaginings. "Why, you talk as though you didn't have good sense tonight, Sylvie. It's the party. You always get so excited over parties." Judith considered it a "come-down" to get excited over anything. "Great Scotland! I guess I don't get excited over one of these _student_ parties!" Sylvia repudiated the idea. "All Father's 'favorite students' are such rough-necks. And it makes me tired to have all our freaks come out of their holes when we have company--Miss Lindström and Mr. Hecht and Cousin Parnelia and all." "The President comes," advanced Judith. Sylvia was sweeping in her iconoclasm. "What if he does--old fish-mouth! _He's_ nobody--he's a rough-neck himself. He used to be a Baptist minister. He's only President because he can talk the hayseeds in the Legislature into giving the University big appropriations. And anyhow, he only comes here because he _has_ to--part of his job. He doesn't like the freaks any better than I do. The last time he was here, I heard Cousin Parnelia trying to persuade him to have planchette write him a message from Abraham Lincoln. Isn't she the limit, anyhow!"