; Rose and Norma
regarded Wolf as perfection in human form. They rarely met without
embraces, never without brightening eyes and light hearts.

That this attitude toward each other was only the result of the healthy
bodies and honest souls that Kate had given them they would hardly have
believed. That her resolute training had literally forced them to love
and depend upon themselves in a world where brothers and sisters as
habitually teased and annoyed each other, would have struck them as
fantastic. Perhaps Kate herself hardly knew the power of her own will
upon them. Her commands in their babyhood had not been couched in the
language of modern child-analysts, nor had she given, or been able to
give, any particular reason for her law. But the instinct by which she
drew Wolf's attention to his sister's goodness, or noted Wolf's
cleverness for Rose's benefit, was better than any reason. She summed
the situation up simply for the few friends she had, with the phrase:

"They're all crazy about each other, every one of them!"

Kate's parlour would have caused Annie von Behrens actual faintness. But
it was a delightful place to Rose and Wolf and their friends. The
cushioned divan on Sunday nights customarily held a row of them, the
upright ebony piano sifted popular music impartially upon the taboret,
the patent rocker, and the Rover rug. They laughed, gossiped, munched
candy, and experimented in love-making quite as happily as did Leslie
and her own intimates. They streamed out into the streets, and sauntered
along under the lights to the moving pictures, or on hot summer nights
they perched like tiers of birds on the steps, and the world and youth
seemed sweet to them. In Kate's dining-room, finished in black wood and
red paper, they made Welsh rarebits and fudge, and in Kate's spotless
kitchen odours of toast and coffee rose at unseemly hours.

Lately, Rose and Norma had been talking of changes. Rose was employed in
an office whose severe and beautiful interior decoration had cost
thousands of dollars, and Norma's Old Book Room was a study in dull
carved woods, Oriental rugs, dull bronzes, and flawless glass. The girls
began to feel that a plain cartridge paper and net curtains might well
replace the parlour's florid green scrolling and Nottingham lace. But
they did not worry about it; it served as a topic to amuse their leisure
hours. The subject was generally routed by a shrewd allusion, from Norma
or Wolf, to the so