'Emily, I think; she doesn't say much, but she is more sensible than the
other two. Gladys wearies me with her absurd affectations; Zoe is well
enough, but what names!'

'Yes, Emily has certainly the best of the names,' Alice replied,
laughing.

'Are the Miss Brennans at home?' said Cecilia, when the maid opened the
hall-door.

'Yes, miss--I mean your ladyship--will you walk in?'

'You'll see, they'll keep us waiting a good half-hour while they put on
their best frocks,' said Cecilia, as she sat down in a faded arm-chair
in the middle of the room. A piano was rolled close against the wall,
the two rosewood cabinets were symmetrically placed on either side of
the farther window; from brass rods the thick, green curtains hung in
stiff folds, and, since the hanging of some water-colours, done by Zoe
before leaving school, no alterations, except the removal of the linen
covers from the furniture when visitors were expected, had been made in
the arrangement of the room.

The Brennan family consisted of three girls--Gladys, Zoe, and Emily.
Thirty-three, thirty-one, and thirty were their respective ages. Their
father and mother, dead some ten or a dozen years, had left them joint
proprietors of a small property that gossip had magnified to three
thousand. They were known as the heiresses of Kinvarra; snub noses and
blue eyes betrayed their Celtic blood; and every year they went to spend
a month at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, returning home with quite a