u frighten the men--they think you are proud. Show a
little interest in them and see how pleased they will be!"

The twins looked dubious, and seized the first chance to escape. In
their own room they confronted each other dismally.

"Of course they will ask us, in our own house; we won't have to sit and
sit," said Cora with a sigh.

"But it's almost worse when they ask you for that reason," objected
Dora.

"I know! I feel so sorry for them, and so apologetic. If mother would
_only_ let us go and teach at Miss Browne's; then we could show we were
really good for something. We shouldn't have to shine at parties."

"We shouldn't have to go to them! Come on, let's do some Latin. I want
to forget the hateful thing."

Cora got down the books and drew their chairs up to the student-lamp. "I
know I shouldn't be such a stick if I didn't have to wear low neck," she
said. "I am always thinking about those awful collar-bones, and trying
to hold my shoulders so as not to make them worse."

"Oh, don't I know!" Dora had slipped on a soft red wrapper, and threw a
blue one to her sister. When they were curled up in their big, cushioned
chairs, they smiled appreciatively at each other.

"Isn't this nicer than any party ever invented?" they exclaimed. Dora
opened her books with energy, but Cora sat musing.

"I dare say that somewhere there are parties for our kind," she said,
finally. "Not with silly little chinless boys or popular men who are
always trying to get away, but men who study and care about things--who
go to Greece and dig ruins, for instance, or study sociology, and think
more about one's mind than one's collar-bones."

Dora shook her head. "But they don't go to parties!"

"Both Mr. Morton and Mr. White do, sometimes," Cora suggested. "They
aren't like the rest. I thought that tenement-house work they told us
about was most interesting. But they would call if they wanted to," she
added.

The twins in wrappers, bending over their books, had a certain
comeliness. There was even an austere beauty in their wide, high
foreheads, their fine, straight dark hair, their serious gray eyes and
sensitive mouths, pensive but not without humor and sweetness. But the
twins in evening dress, their unwilling hair flower-crowned and
bolstered into pompadours, their big-boned thinness contrasted with
Amelie's plump curves, their elbows betraying the red disks of serious
application, were quite another matter, and they knew it. Th