That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.

Emily wasn’t the kind of girl who would be left to pine.  There are too many Jo’s in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and then thump at the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in their grip.  One year later Emily was married to a young man whose father owned a large, pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of Michigan.

That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly humorous in the trend taken by affairs in the old house on Calumet.  For Eva married.  Of all people, Eva!  Married well, too, though he was a great deal older than she.  She went off in a hat she had copied from a French model at Field’s, and a suit she had contrived with a home dressmaker, aided by pressing on the part of the little tailor in the basement over on Thirty-first Street.  It was the last of that, though.  The next time they saw her, she had on a hat that even she would have despaired of copying, and a suit that sort of melted into your gaze.  She moved to the North Side (trust Eva for that), and Babe assumed the management of the household on Calumet Avenue.  It was rather a pinched little household now, for the harness business shrank and shrank.

“I don’t see how you can expect me to keep house decently on this!” Babe would say contemptuously.  Babe’s nose, always a little inclined to sharpness, had whittled down to a point of late.  “If you knew what Ben gives Eva.”

“It’s the best I can do, Sis.  Business is something rotten.”

“Ben says if you had the least bit of—­” Ben was Eva’s husband, and quotable, as are all successful men.

“I don’t care what Ben says,” shouted Jo, goaded into rage.  “I’m sick of your everlasting Ben.  Go and get a Ben of your own, why don’t you, if you’re so stuck on the way he does things.”

And Babe did.  She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and she captured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way, who had made up his mind not to marry for years and years.  Eva wanted to give her her wedding things, but at that Jo broke into sudden rebellion.

“No sir!  No Ben is going to buy my sister’s wedding clothes, understand?  I guess I’m not broke—­yet.  I’ll furnish the money for her things, and there’ll be enough of them, too.”

Babe had as useless a trousseau, and as filled with extravagant pink-and-blue and lacy and frilly things as any daughter of doting parents.  Jo seemed to find a grim pleasure in providing them.  But it left him pretty well pinched.  After Babe’s marriage (she insisted that they call her Estelle now) Jo sold the house on Calumet.  He and Carrie took one of those little flats that were springing up, seemingly over night, all through Chicago’s South Side.