'd shake you! Comparing my darling rosebud quilt to
your miserable gray blankets! Just for that I'll make you eat an extra
pair of eggs."

There never was a sister like Norah. But then, who ever heard of a
brother-in-law like Max? No woman--not even a frazzled-out newspaper
woman--could receive the love and care that they gave me, and fail to
flourish under it. They had been Dad and Mother to me since the day when
Norah had tucked me under her arm and carried me away from New York. Sis
was an angel; a comforting, twentieth-century angel, with white apron
strings for wings, and a tempting tray in her hands in place of the hymn
books and palm leaves that the picture-book angels carry. She coaxed the
inevitable eggs and beef into more tempting forms than Mrs. Rorer ever
guessed at. She could disguise those two plain, nourishing articles of
diet so effectually that neither hen nor cow would have suspected either
of having once been part of her anatomy. Once I ate halfway through a
melting, fluffy, peach-bedecked plate of something before I discovered
that it was only another egg in disguise.

"Feel like eating a great big dinner to-day, Kidlet?" Norah would ask in
the morning as she stood at my bedside (with a glass of egg-something in
her hand, of course).

"Eat!"--horror and disgust shuddering through my voice--"Eat! Ugh!
Don't s-s-speak of it to me. And for pity's sake tell Frieda to shut
the kitchen door when you go down, will you? I can smell something like
ugh!--like pot roast, with gravy!" And I would turn my face to the wall.

Three hours later I would hear Sis coming softly up the stairs,
accompanied by a tinkling of china and glass. I would face her, all
protest.

"Didn't I tell you, Sis, that I couldn't eat a mouthful? Not a
mouthf--um-m-m-m! How perfectly scrumptious that looks! What's that
affair in the lettuce leaf? Oh, can't I begin on that divine-looking
pinky stuff in the tall glass? H'm? Oh, please!"

"I thought--" Norah would begin; and then she would snigger softly.

"Oh, well, that was hours ago," I would explain, loftily. "Perhaps I
could manage a bite or two now."

Whereupon I would demolish everything except the china and doilies.

It was at this point on the road to recovery, just halfway between
illness and health, that Norah and Max brought the great and
unsmiling Von Gerhard on the scene. It appeared that even New York was
respectfully aware of Von Gerhard, the nerve specialist, in spit