uggest," 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."

"Why," Bushwick said, "this is the snow-fort business of our boyhood!
Let's go out and fortify the ladies at once." He appealed to Verrian
and made a feint of pushing his chair back. "May we use water-soaked
snowballs, or must they all be soft and harmless?" he asked of Mrs.
Westangle, who was now the centre of a storm of applause and question
from the whole table.

She kept her head and referred again to her paper. "The missiles of the
assailants are to be very soft snowballs, hardly more than mere clots,
so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel
the assailants with harder snowballs."

"Oh," Miss Macroyd protested, "this is consulting the weakness of our
sex."

"In the fury of the onset we'll forget it," Verrian reassured her.

"Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?" she asked. "What is all our
athletic training to