Mrs. Ludlow was the eldest¹ of the three sisters, and was usually thought the most sensible; the classification being in general that Lilian was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the “intellectual” superior. Mrs. Keyes, the second of the group, was the wife of an officer of the United States Engineers, and as our history is not further concerned with her it will suffice that she was indeed very pretty and that she formed the ornament² of those various military stations, chiefly in the unfashionable West, to which, to her deep chagrin³, her husband was successively relegated⁴. Lilian had married a New York lawyer, a young man with a loud voice and an enthusiasm for his profession; the match was not brilliant, any more than Edith’s, but Lilian had occasionally been spoken of as a young woman who might be thankful to marry at all — she was so much plainer than her sisters. She was, however, very happy, and now, as the mother of two peremptory⁵ little boys and the mistress of a wedge of brown stone violently driven into Fifty-third Street, seemed to exult⁶ in her condition as in a bold escape. She was short and solid, and her claim to figure was questioned, but she was conceded presence, though not majesty⁷; she had moreover, as people said, improved since her marriage, and the two things in life of which she was most distinctly conscious were her husband’s force in argument and her sister Isabel’s originality⁸. “I’ve never kept up with Isabel — it would have taken all my time,” she had often remarked; in spite of which, however, she held her rather wistfully in sight; watching her as a motherly spaniel might watch a free greyhound. “I want to see her safely married — that’s what I want to see,” she frequently

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