In the flaunting yellow house on the hill the widow and daughters of the late Marmaduke Splurge, Esq., railroad-director and real-estate broker, fondled and hated each other.  Mrs. Marmaduke was a well-preserved woman, stylish, worldly-minded, and weak.  Miss Josephine, her eldest, was handsome, patronizing, passee, and a sentimental fool; Miss Adelaide, who came next, was handsome, eccentric, malicious, and sly; and Miss Madeline, the youngest, was handsome, distinguished-looking, intellectual, passionate, and proud.

Mrs. Marmaduke’s heart was set on marrying her daughters “advantageously,” and she gave all of her narrow mind to that thankless department.  Josephine insisted on a romantic attachment, and pursued a visionary spouse with all the ardor and obstinacy of first-rate stupidity.  Adelaide had the weakness to hate Josephine, the shrewdness to fear Madeline, and the viciousness to despise her mother; she skilfully and diligently devoted herself to the thwarting of the family.  Madeline waited, only waited,—­with a fierceness so dangerously still that it looked like patience,—­hated her insulting bondage, but waited, like Samson between the pillars upon which the house of Dagon stood, resolved to free herself, though she dragged down the edifice and were crushed among the wreck.

Mrs. Marmaduke talked tediously of the trials and responsibilities of conscientious mothers who have grown-up daughters to provide for, was given to frequent freshets of tears, consumed many “nervous pills” of the retired-clergyman-whose-sands-of-life-have-nearly-run-out sort, and netted bead purses for the Select Home for Poor Gentlemen’s Daughters.  Josephine let down her back hair dowdily, partook recklessly of poetry and pickles, read inordinately in bed,—­leaning all night on her elbow,—­and was threatened with spinal curvature and spiritualism.  Adelaide set invisible little traps in every nook and cranny, every cupboard and drawer, from basement to attic, and with a cheerful, innocent smile sat watching them night and day.  Madeline, fiercely calm, warned off the others, with pale lips and flashing eyes and bitter tongue, resenting en famille the devilish endearments she so sweetly suffered in company; but ever as she groped about in her soul’s blindness she felt for the central props of that house of Dagon.

All the good society of Hendrik said the Splurges were a charming family, a most attached and happy family, lovely in their lives and in death not to be divided, and that they looked sweetly in hoops.  And yet the Splurges had but few visitors; the young women of the neighborhood, when they called there, left always an essential part of their true selves behind them as they entered, and an ornamental part of their reputations when they took their departure; nor were the young men partial to the name,—­for Josephine bored them, and Adelaide taunted them, and Madeline snubbed them, and Mrs. Marmaduke pumped them, and the combined family confounded them.  Only Mr. Philip Withers was the intimate and encouraged habitue of the house.