re seemed to be every reason to hope
that she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she had
not brought Julia, she would have had to bring Georgie, or some other
Garnet. Cressida's family was like that of the unpopular Prince of
Wales, of whom, when he died, some wag wrote:

_If it had been his brother,
Better him than another.
If it had been his sister,
No one would have missed her._

Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgie was aggressive and
intrusive. She was out to prove to the world, and more especially to
Ohio, that all the Garnets were as like Cressida as two peas. Both
sisters were club-women, social service workers, and directors in musical
societies, and they were continually travelling up and down the Middle
West to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one of
two sombre, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means of
locomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in some
inconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion from
Cressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxious
expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida's face
when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put their
letters by to read "when she was feeling up to it" and hastened to open
others which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant.
Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days.
Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulky
epistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune to
mischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as to
why her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon her
account and because she was so much a public personage.

The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters,
were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy.
They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far she
dragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of them
to live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York. They thought that
was the thing they most wanted. But what they wanted, in the last
analysis, was to _be_ Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged in
struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for
growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark,
and afterward in the light,--whi