"I promise, Ma," he had said.

Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with a
completely ruined life.

They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style, too.
That is, Stell and Eva had. Carrie, the middle one, taught school over
on the West Side. In those days it took her almost two hours each way.
She said the kind of costume she required should have been corrugated
steel. But all three knew what was being worn, and they wore it--or
fairly faithful copies of it. Eva, the housekeeping sister, had a needle
knack. She could skim the State Street windows and come away with a
mental photograph of every separate tuck, hem, yoke, and ribbon. Heads
of departments showed her the things they kept in drawers, and she went
home and reproduced them with the aid of a two-dollar-a-day seamstress.
Stell, the youngest, was the beauty. They called her Babe. She wasn't
really a beauty, but some one had once told her that she looked like
Janice Meredith (it was when that work of fiction was at the height of
its popularity). For years afterward, whenever she went to parties, she
affected a single, fat curl over her right shoulder, with a rose stuck
through it.

Twenty-three years ago one's sisters did not strain at the household
leash, nor crave a career. Carrie taught school, and hated it. Eva kept
house expertly and complainingly. Babe's profession was being the family
beauty, and it took all her spare time. Eva always let her sleep until
ten.

This was Jo's household, and he was the nominal head of it. But it was
an empty title. The three women dominated his life. They weren't