e prone to lurch and then thump at
the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in their grip. One
year later Emily was married to a young man whose father owned a large,
pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of Michigan.

That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly humorous in
the trend taken by affairs in the old house on Calumet. For Eva
married. Of all people, Eva! Married well, too, though he was a great
deal older than she. She went off in a hat she had copied from a French
model at Field's, and a suit she had contrived with a home dressmaker,
aided by pressing on the part of the little tailor in the basement over
on Thirty-first Street. It was the last of that, though. The next time
they saw her, she had on a hat that even she would have despaired of
copying, and a suit that sort of melted into your gaze. She moved to the
North Side (trust Eva for that), and Babe assumed the management of the
household on Calumet Avenue. It was rather a pinched little household
now, for the harness business shrank and shrank.

"I don't see how you can expect me to keep house decently on this!" Babe
would say contemptuously. Babe's nose, always a little inclined to
sharpness, had whittled down to a point of late. "If you knew what Ben
gives Eva."

"It's the best I can do, Sis. Business is something rotten."

"Ben says if you had the least bit of--" Ben was Eva's husband, and
quotable, as are all successful men.

"I don't care what Ben says," shouted Jo, goaded into rage. "I'm sick of
your everlasting Ben. Go and get a Ben of your own, why don't you, if
you're so stuck on the way he does things."

And Babe did. She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and she
captured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way, who had made
up his mind not to marry for years and years. Eva wanted to give her her
wedding things, but at that Jo broke into sudden rebellion.

"No sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister's wedding clothes, understand?
I guess I'm not broke--yet. I'll furnish the money for her things, and
there'll be enough of them, too."

Babe had as useless a trousseau, and as filled with extravagant
pink-and-blue and lacy and frilly things as any daughter of doting
parents. Jo seemed to find a grim pleasure in providing them. But it
left him pretty well pinched. After Babe's marriage (she insisted that
they call her Estelle now) Jo sold the house on Calumet. He and Carrie
took one of those