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.
"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, spiritual. Anne had the look, indeed, of one who sees heavenly visions.
Amy had never had that look. She was dark and vivid. If at thirty the vividness was emphasized by artificial means the fault lay in Amy's sacrifice to her social ideals, She needed the butter which she denied herself. She needed cream, and eggs, and her doctor had told her so. And Amy had kept the knowledge to herself.
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."
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.
"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.