Chapter 4

Summary

MRS. LUDLOW was the eldest 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” one. Mrs. Keyes, the second sister, was the wife of an officer in the United States Engineers, and as our history is not further concerned with her, it will be enough to say that she was indeed very pretty, and that she formed the ornament of those various military stations, chiefly in the unfashionable West, to which, to her deep chagrin, her husband was successively relegated. Lilian hadmarried a New York lawyer, a youngman with a loud voice and an enthusiasm for his profession; the match was not brilliant, any more than Edith's had been, 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 peremptory little boys, and the mistress of a house which presented a narrowness of new brown stone to Fifty-third Street, she had quite justified her claim to matrimony. She was short and plump, and, as people said, had improved since hermarriage; the two things in life of which she was most distinctly conscious were her husband's force in argument and her sister Isabel's originality. “I have never felt like Isabel's sister, and I am sure I never shall,” she had said to an intimate friend; a declaration which made it all the more creditable that she had been prolific in sisterly offices.

“I want to see her safely married—that's what I want to see,” she frequently remarked to her husband.

“Well, I must say I should have no particular desire to marry her,” Edmund Ludlow was accustomed to answer, in an extremely audible tone.

“I know you say that for argument; you always take the opposite ground. I don't see what you have against her, except that she is so original.”

“Well, I don't like originals; I like translations,” Mr. Ludlow had more than once replied. “Isabel is written in a foreign tongue. I can't make her out. She ought to marry an Armenian, or a Portuguese.”