Chapter 1

With the Merryman girls economy was a fine art. Money was spent by them to preserve the family traditions. Nothing else counted. Everything was sacrificed to the gods of yesterday.

Little Anne Merryman had shivered all her short life in the bleakness of this domestic ideal.

"Why can't I have butter on my bread?" she had demanded in her long-legged schoolgirl days, when she had worn her fair hair in a fat braid down her back.

The answers had never been satisfying. Well-bred people might, Amy indicated, go without butter. Their income was not elastic, and there were things more important.

"What things? Amy, I'm so hungry I could eat a house."

It was these expressions of Anne's about food which shocked Amy and Ethel.

"I'd sell my soul for a slice of roast beef."

"Anne!"

"Well, I would!"

"I—I don't see how you can be so ordinary, Anne."

"Ordinary" in the lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for the Merrymans were as old as Norman rule in England. They had come to America with grants from the king, they had family portraits and family silver and family diamonds, and now in this generation of orphaned girls, two of them at least were fighting the last battles of family pride. The fortunes of the Merrymans had declined, and Amy and Ethel, with their backs, as it were, to the wall, were making a final stand.

"We must have evening clothes, we must entertain our friends, we must pay for the family pew"; this was their nervous litany. The Merrymans had always dressed and entertained and worshiped properly; hence it was for lace or tulle or velvet, as the case might be, that their money went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical prayers.

"We thank thee, Lord, that we are not as others," prayed Amy and Ethel fervently.

But Anne prayed no such prayers. She wanted to be like other people. She wanted to eat and drink with the multitude, she wanted a warm, warm heart, a groaning board. She wanted snugness and coziness and comfort. And she grew up loving these things, and hating the pale walls of their old house in Georgetown, the family portraits, the made-over dinner gowns that her sisters wore, her own made-over party frocks.

"Can't I have a new one, Amy?"

"It's Ethel's turn."

So it was when Anne went to a certain diplomatic reception in a made-over satin slip, hidden by a cloud of snowy tulle, that Murray Flint first waked to the fact of her loveliness.

He had waked ten years earlier to the loveliness of Amy, and five years later to the beauty of Ethel.

And now here was Anne!

"She's different though," he told old Molly Winchell; "more spiritual than the others."

It was Anne's thinness which deceived him. It was an attractive thinness. She was pale, with red lips, and the fat fair braids had given way to a shining knot. She wore the family pearls, and the effect was, as Murray had said, spiritual. Anne had the look, indeed, of one who sees heavenly visions.

Amy had never had that look. She was dark and vivid. If at thirty the vividness was emphasized by artificial means the fault lay in Amy's sacrifice to her social ideals, She needed the butter which she denied herself. She needed cream, and eggs, and her doctor had told her so. And Amy had kept the knowledge to herself.

Ethel, eating as little as Amy—or even less—had escaped, miraculously, attenuation. At twenty she had been a plump little beauty. She was still plump. Her neck in her low-cut gown was lovely. Her figure was not fashionable, and she lacked Amy's look of race.

"They are all charming," Molly Winchell said. "Why don't you marry one of them, Murray?"

"Marriage," said Murray, "would spoil it."

"Spoil what?"

Murray turned on her his fine dark eyes. "They are such darlings—the three of them."

"You Turk!" Molly surveyed him over the top of her sapphire feather fan. "So that's it, is it? You want them all."

Murray thought vaguely it was something like that. For ten years he had had Amy and Ethel—Amy at twenty, fire and flame, Ethel at fifteen, with bronze locks and lovely color. In those years Anne had promised little in the way of beauty or charm. She had read voraciously, curled up in chairs or on rugs, and had waked now and then to his presence and a hot argument.

"Why don't you like Dickens, Murray?"

"Oh, his people, Anne—clowns."

"They're not!"

"Boors; beggars." He made a gesture of distaste.

"They're darlings—Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch. Murray, if I had a beefsteak I'd make a beefsteak pie."

There was more of pathos in this than Murray imagined. There had been no beef on the Merryman table for many moons.

"Murray, did you ever eat tripe?"

"My dear child—"

"It sounds dee-licious when Toby Veck has it on a cold morning. And there's the cricket on the hearth and the teakettle singing. I'd love to hear a kettle sing like that, Murray; wouldn't you?"

But Murray wouldn't. He had the same kind of mind as Amy and Ethel. He did not like robust and hearty things or robust and hearty people. He wore a corset to keep his hips small, and stood up at teas and receptions with an almost military carriage. Of course he had to sit down at dinners, but he sat very straight. He, too, had family portraits and family silver, and he lived scrupulously up to them. His fortunes, unlike the Merrymans', had not declined. He had money enough and to spare. He could have made Amy or Ethel very comfortable if he had married either of them. But he had not wanted to marry. There had been a time when he had liked to think of Amy as presiding over his table. She would have fitted in perfectly with the old portraits and old silver and the family diamonds. Then Ethel had come along. She had not fitted in with the diamonds and portraits and silver, but she had stirred his pulses.

"Anywhere else but in Georgetown," old Molly Winchell was saying, "those girls would have been snapped up long ago. It's a poor matrimonial market."

Murray was complacently aware that he was geographically the only eligible man on the Merryman horizon. Unless Amy and Ethel could marry with distinction they would not marry at all. It was not lack of attraction which kept them single, but lack of suitors in their own set.

And now here was Anne, with Ethel's loveliness and Amy's look of race. There was also that look of angelic detachment from the things of earth.

So Murray's eyes rested on Anne with great content as she came and sat beside Molly Winchell.

Other eyes rested on her—Amy's with quick jealousy. "So now it's Anne," she said to herself as she perceived Murray's preoccupation. Five years ago she had said, "Now it's Ethel," as she had seen him turn to the fresher beauty. Before that she had dreamed of herself as loving and beloved. It had been hard to shut her eyes to that vision.

Yet—better Anne than an outsider. Amy had a fierce sense of proprietorship in Murray. If she gave him to Ethel, to Anne, he would be still in a sense hers. With Anne or Ethel she would share his future, partake of his present.

A third pair of eyes surveyed Anne with interest as she sat by Molly.

"Corking kid," said the owner of the eyes to himself.

His name was Maxwell Sears. He was not in the least like Murray Flint. He was from the Middle West, he was red-blooded, and he cared nothing for the past. He held it as a rather negligible honor that he had a Declaration-signing ancestor. The important things to Maxwell were that he was representing his district in Congress; that he was still young enough to carry his college ideals into politics, and that he had just invested a small portion of the fortune which his father had left him in a model stock farm in Illinois.

For the rest, he was big, broad-shouldered, clean-minded. Now and then he looked up at the stars, and what he saw there swayed him level with the men about him. Because of the stars he called no man a fool, except such as deemed himself wiser than the rest. Because he believed in the people they believed in him. It was that which had elected him. It was that which would elect him again.

"Corking kid," said Maxwell Sears, with his smiling eyes on Anne.