"You've been out almost as long as she," Isabel replied; "she can
have left the house but a short time before you came in."

Mrs. Touchett looked at the girl without resentment; she appeared
to enjoy a bold retort and to be disposed to be gracious.
"Perhaps she hasn't had so good an excuse as I. Tell her at any
rate that she must come and see me this evening at that horrid
hotel. She may bring her husband if she likes, but she needn't
bring you. I shall see plenty of you later."



CHAPTER IV

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" 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 ornament
of those various military stations, chiefly in the unfashionable
West, to which, to her deep chagrin, her husband was successively
relegated. 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 peremptory little boys
and the mistress of a wedge of brown stone violently driven into