with the strained, anxious expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida’s face when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast.  She usually put their letters by to read “when she was feeling up to it” and hastened to open others which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant.  Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days.  Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulky epistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune to mischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as to why her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon her account and because she was so much a public personage.

The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters, were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy.  They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far she dragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of them to live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York.  They thought that was the thing they most wanted.  But what they wanted, in the last analysis, was to be Cressida.  For twenty years she had been plunged in struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark, and afterward in the light,—­which, with her bad preparation, and with her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage.  During those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and vastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equal sharers in the finer rewards of her struggle.  When her brother Buchanan told me he thought Cressida ought “to make herself one of them,” he stated the converse of what he meant.  They coveted the qualities which had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it.  More than her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personal effectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live.

“Sometimes,” I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of those sloppily written letters, “sometimes I get discouraged.”

For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered in Cressida’s deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that the Signorina Garnet was “dificile.”  After dinner I usually found Cressida unincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself interesting to some one of the young women on board.  One evening, the third night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky was full of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges, Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown.