Anne!"

"Well, I would!"

"I--I don't see how you can be so ordinary, Anne."

"Ordinary" in the lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in
the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the
Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own
complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for the Merrymans
were as old as Norman rule in England. They had come to America with
grants from the king, they had family portraits and family silver and
family diamonds, and now in this generation of orphaned girls, two of
them at least were fighting the last battles of family pride. The
fortunes of the Merrymans had declined, and Amy and Ethel, with their
backs, as it were, to the wall, were making a final stand.

"We must have evening clothes, we must entertain our friends, we must
pay for the family pew"; this was their nervous litany. The Merrymans
had always dressed and entertained and worshiped properly; hence it was
for lace or tulle or velvet, as the case might be, that their money
went. It went, too, for the very elegant and exclusive little dinners to
which, on rare occasions, their friends were bidden; and it went for the
high place in the synagogue from which they prayed their pharisaical
prayers.

"We thank thee, Lord, that we are not as others," prayed Amy and Ethel
fervently.

But Anne prayed no such prayers. She wanted to be like other people. She
wanted to eat and drink with the multitude, she wanted a warm, warm
heart, a groaning board. She wanted snugness and coziness and comfort.
And she grew up loving these things, and hating the pale walls of their
old house in Georgetown, the family portraits, the made-over dinner
gowns that her sisters wore, her own made-over party frocks.

"Can't I have a new one, Amy?"

"It's Ethel's turn."

So it was when Anne went to a certain diplomatic reception in a
made-over satin slip, hidden by a cloud of snowy tulle, that Murray
Flint first waked to the fact of her loveliness.

He had waked ten years earlier to the loveliness of Amy, and five years
later to the beauty of Ethel.

And now here was Anne!

"She's different though," he told old Molly Winchell; "more spiritual
than the others."

It was Anne's thinness which deceived him. It was an attractive
thinness. She was pale, with red lips, and the fat fair braids had given
way to a shining knot. She wore the family pearls, and the effect was,
as Murray had said,