I
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.