Ethel, eating as little as Amy--or even less--had escaped, miraculously, attenuation. At twenty she had been a plump little beauty. She was still plump. Her neck in her low-cut gown was lovely. Her figure was not fashionable, and she lacked Amy's look of race.
"They are all charming," Molly Winchell said. "Why don't you marry one of them, Murray?"
"Marriage," said Murray, "would spoil it."
"Spoil what?"
Murray turned on her his fine dark eyes. "They are such darlings--the three of them."
"You Turk!" Molly surveyed him over the top of her sapphire feather fan. "So that's it, is it? You want them all."
Murray thought vaguely it was something like that. For ten years he had had Amy and Ethel--Amy at twenty, fire and flame, Ethel at fifteen, with bronze locks and lovely color. In those years Anne had promised little in the way of beauty or charm. She had read voraciously, curled up in chairs or on rugs, and had waked now and then to his presence and a hot argument.
"Why don't you like Dickens, Murray?"
"Oh, his people, Anne--clowns."
"They're not!"
"Boors; beggars." He made a gesture of distaste.
"They're darlings--Mark Tapley and Ruth Pinch. Murray, if I had a beefsteak I'd make a beefsteak pie."
There was more of pathos in this than Murray imagined. There had been no beef on the Merryman table for many moons.
"Murray, did you ever eat tripe?"
"My dear child---"
"It sounds dee-licious when Toby Veck has it on a cold morning. And there's the cricket on the hearth and the teakettle singing. I'd love to hear a kettle sing like that, Murray; wouldn't you?"
But Murray wouldn't. He had the same kind of mind as Amy and Ethel. He did not like robust and hearty things or robust and hearty people. He wore a corset to keep his hips small, and stood up at teas and receptions with an almost military carriage. Of course he had to sit down at dinners, but he sat very straight. He, too, had family portraits and family silver, and he lived scrupulously up to them. His fortunes, unlike the Merrymans', had not declined. He had money enough and to spare. He could have made Amy or Ethel very comfortable if he had married either of them. But he had not wanted to marry. There had been a time when he had liked to think of Amy as presiding over his table. She would have fitted in perfectly with the old portraits and old silver and the family diamonds. Then Ethel had come along. She had not fitted in with the diamonds and portraits and silver, but she had stirred his pulses.
"Anywhere else but in Georgetown," old Molly Winchell was saying, "those girls would have been snapped up long ago. It's a poor matrimonial market."
Murray was complacently aware that he was geographically the only eligible man on the Merryman horizon. Unless Amy and Ethel could marry with distinction they would not marry at all. It was not lack of attraction which kept them single, but lack of suitors in their own set.
And now here was Anne, with Ethel's loveliness and Amy's look of race. There was also that look of angelic detachment from the things of earth.
So Murray's eyes rested on Anne with great content as she came and sat beside Molly Winchell.
Other eyes rested on her--Amy's with quick jealousy. "So now it's Anne," she said to herself as she perceived Murray's preoccupation. Five years ago she had said, "Now it's Ethel," as she had seen him turn to the fresher beauty. Before that she had dreamed of herself as loving and beloved. It had been hard to shut her eyes to that vision.
Yet--better Anne than an outsider. Amy had a fierce sense of proprietorship in Murray. If she gave him to Ethel, to Anne, he would be still in a sense hers. With Anne or Ethel she would share his future, partake of his present.
A third pair of eyes surveyed Anne with interest as she sat by Molly.
"Corking kid," said the owner of the eyes to himself.
His name was Maxwell Sears. He was not in the least like Murray Flint. He was from the Middle West, he was red-blooded, and he cared nothing for the past. He held it as a rather negligible honor that he had a Declaration-signing ancestor. The important things to Maxwell were that he was representing his district in Congress; that he was still young enough to carry his college ideals into politics, and that he had just invested a small portion of the fortune which his father had left him in a model stock farm in Illinois.
For the rest, he was big, broad-shouldered, clean-minded. Now and then he looked up at the stars, and what he saw there swayed him level with the men about him. Because of the stars he called no man a fool, except such as deemed himself wiser than the rest. Because he believed in the people they believed in him. It was that which had elected him. It was that which would elect him again.
"Corking kid," said Maxwell Sears, with his smiling eyes on Anne.
II
In the course of the evening Maxwell managed an introduction. He found Anne quaint and charming. That she was reading Dickens amused him. He had thought that no one read Dickens in these days. How did it happen?
She said that she had discovered him for herself--many years ago.
How many years?
Well, to be explicit, ten. She had been eleven when she had found a new world in the fat little books. They had a lot of old books. She loved them all. But Dickens more than any. Didn't he?
He did. "His heart beat with the heart of the common people. It was that which made him great."
"Murray hates him."
"Who is Murray?"
Anne pondered. "Well, he's a family friend. We girls were brought up on him."
"Brought up on him?"
"Yes. Anything Murray likes we are expected to like. If he doesn't like things we don't."
"Oh."
"He's over there by Mrs. Winchell."
Maxwell looked and knew the type. "But you don't agree about Dickens?"
"No. And Amy says that Murray's wiser than I. But I'm not sure. Amy thinks that all men are wiser than women."
Maxwell chuckled. Anne was refreshing. She was far from modern in her modes of thought. She was--he hunted for the word and found it--mid-Victorian in her attitude of mind.
He wondered what Winifred Reed would think of her. Winifred lived in Chicago. She was athletic and intellectual. She wrote tabloid dramas, drove her own car, dressed smartly, and took a great interest in Maxwell's career. She wrote to him once a week, and he always answered her letters. Now and then she failed to write, and he missed her letters and told her so. It was altogether a pleasant friendship.
She hated the idea of Maxwell's farm. She thought it a backward step. "Are you going to spend the precious years ahead of you in the company of cows?"
"There'll be pigs too, Winifred; and chickens. And, of course, my horses."
"You belong in a world of men. It's the secret of your success that men like you."
"My cows like me--and there's great comfort after the stress of a stormy session in the reposefulness of a pig."
"I wish you'd be serious."
"I am serious. Perhaps it's a throwback, Winifred. There is farmer blood in my veins."
It was something deeper than that. It was his virile joy in fundamentals. He loved his golden-eared Guernseys and his black Berkshires and his White Wyandottes--not because of their choiceness but because they were cows and pigs and chickens; and he kept a pair of pussy cats, half a dozen dogs, and as many horses, because man primitively had made friends of the dumb brutes upon whom the ease and safety of his life depended.
There was, rather strangely, something about Anne which fitted in with this atavistic idea. She was, more than Winifred, a hearthstone woman. A man might carry her over his threshold and find her when he came home o' nights. It was hard to visualize Winifred as waiting or watching or welcoming. She was always going somewhere with an air of having important things to do, and coming back with an air of having done them. Maxwell felt that these important things were not connected in any way with domestic matters. One did not, indeed, expect domesticity of Winifred.
Thus Anne, drawing upon him by mysterious forces, drew him also by her beauty and a certain wistfulness in her eyes. He had once had a dog, Amber Witch, whose eyes had held always a wistful question. He had tried to answer it. She had grown old on his hearth, yet always to the end of her eyes had asked. He hoped now that in some celestial hunting ground she had found an answer to that subtle need.
He told Anne about Amber Witch. "I have one of her puppies on my farm."
She was much interested. "I've never had a dog; or a cat."
He had, he said, a big pair of tabbies who slept in the hay and came up to the dairy when the milk was strained. There were two blue porcelain dishes for their sacred use. There was, he said, milk and to spare. He grew eloquent as he told of the number of quarts daily. He bragged of his butter. His cheeses had won prizes at county fairs. As for chickens--they had fresh eggs and broilers without end. He had his own hives, too, white-clover honey. And his housekeeper made hot biscuit. In a month or two there'd be asparagus and strawberries. Say! Yes, he was eloquent.