y bought pearl earrings, too, but
Ethel took them back at once. "Fanny knows as well as I do myself that
I can't wear pearls!" she thought angrily. She exchanged them for opal
pendants. And then, in order to put a stop to Fanny's detestable
attempts "to make me look like a perfect fright," Ethel did start in and
shop. And as soon as she got well into it, what a fever it became!
Sternly eyeing herself in the mirrors of shops, she studied and made
mistakes by the score, and corrected and went on and on. "I'll look
right if kills me!"

One night she learned what Fanny Carr had had in mind when she came
"poking into our lives!" For Fanny was poor--she had long guessed that;
and Fanny had a house on Long Island, and only by a hair's--breadth now
did Ethel keep her from selling it to Joe as a surprise for his wife.

"Well, Fanny, what next?" thought Ethel that night. She had been awake
for hours, perfectly still and motionless, not to disturb her husband.
"For you are not through yet, Mrs. Carr. So long as we're rich and you
are poor and have no immediate husband, you're going to act like a
ravening wolf--aren't you, my own precious. You mean to break my hold
on him by keeping him thinking of her, of her! Now what am I to do
about it?" She frowned. She knew that she ought to talk frankly to Joe,
and get over this silly habit of never mentioning Amy's name! She grew
determined, but then weak. For what could she say to him about Amy?
What did she really want to say? "Do I know poor Amy was anything bad?
Wasn't she good to me? Would I care to try to talk against her? No.
And even if I did, you see, it would only hurt me with Joe--as it
should."

So she went on in different moods. And now she saw her sister's face
smiling out of clear violet eyes, and again she felt a small gloved hand
on her husband drawing him gently back--back and back into the past.
Why was Amy so much stronger now? "Because Fanny Carr has been clever
enough to take me out of the life I was making and pitch me into Amy's
life, where her hold on Joe was strongest. I'm in her setting. That's
the trouble!"

But she had Amy's friends to dine one night, as in her calmer moods she
knew was the only sensible course. And as they began arriving, by swift
degrees amid the buzz of talk which rose, Ethel could feel the room each
moment change and become Amy's home. And it was Amy's dinner, too. No
cooking of Emily's that night, for Joe had suggested a caterer. "The