Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/217

 was thought by more than one to strain near to the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to "Touch not, taste not, handle not!"

The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia herself to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,—"The lips that touch wine shall never touch mine." It is true that this legend appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to lips not touched by wine. It had, indeed, first been hung in the parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips. Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he proceeded to act as if he had forgotten that he was a gentleman.

Hence the card's seclusion in Marcella's boudoir. Hence, likewise, Marcella's subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand. She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic degeneration. According to these, "a single glass of wine or a measure of ale," taken daily for a year, suffices to produce some startling effects in color; while the result of "unrestrained indulgence for five years" is spectacular in the extreme.