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 go for if you do?"

Mrs. Westangle read on:

"The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the
castle is carried or the assailing party are made prisoners by its
defenders."