had she been born a few
generations earlier. But in Annie's day the ideal of social service had
been laid down by fashion, and she was consequently a tremendously
independent and energetic person, with small time for languishing airs.
She headed committees and boards, knew hundreds of working girls by
name, kept a secretary and a stenographer, and mentioned topics at big
dinners that would not have shocked either old Goodwife Melrose of
Boston, or Vrouw von Behrens of Nieu Amsterdam, for neither had the
faintest idea that such things, or their names, existed.

Withal, Annie was attractive, even her little affectations were
impressive, and as she went about from luncheons to meetings, swept up
to her model nursery to revel in her model boys, tossed aside regal furs
and tore off princely rings the better to play with them, wrapped her
beautiful figure in satins and jewels to descend to formal dinners, she
was almost as much admired and envied and copied as she might fondly
have hoped to be. She managed her life on modern lines of efficiency,
planned ahead what she wished, tutored herself not to think of anything
undesirable as being even in the range of possibility, trod lightly upon
the sensitive souls of others, and asked no quarter herself, aimed high,
and enjoyed her life and its countless successes to the full.

Of course there had been setbacks. Her brother Theodore, his most
unfortunate marriage to a servant, his intemperance, the general scandal
of his mother's violent detestation of his wife, all this was most
unpleasant. But Louison, the wife, upon sufficient pressure, had brought
her child to the Melroses, and had doubtfully disappeared, and Theodore
had returned from his wanderings to live, silent and unobtrusive, in his
mother's home, for several years, and to die with his daughter beside
him, and be duly laid in the Melrose plot at Woodlawn. And
Leslie--Leslie had repaid them all, for all of it.

Alice was another disappointment, or had been one, to Annie. For Alice,
after having achieved a most unexpectedly satisfactory marriage, and
having set up her household gods in the very shadow of her sister's
brilliant example, as it were, had met with that most unfortunate
accident. For a few years Annie had been utterly exasperated whenever
she thought of it. For Christopher was really an extraordinary husband
for Alice to hold, even in normal circumstances. He was so outrageously,
frightfully, irresistibly popu