She got up.

“Be nice to him, anyhow,” she said.  “He’s crazy about you, and when I think of you in that house!  It’s a wonderful house, Elizabeth.  She’s got a suite waiting for Wallie to be married before she furnishes it.”

Elizabeth looked around her virginal little room, with its painted dressing table, its chintz, and its white bed with the blue dress on it.

“I’m very well satisfied as I am,” she said.

While she smoothed her hair before the mirror Nina surveyed the room and her eyes lighted on the frock.

“Are you still wearing that shabby old thing?” she demanded.  “I do wish you’d get some proper clothes.  Are you going somewhere?”

“I’m going to the theater on Wednesday night.”

“Who with?” Nina in her family was highly colloquial.

“With Doctor Livingstone.”

“Are you joking?” Nina demanded.

“Joking?  Of course not.”

Nina sat down again on the bed, her eyes on her sister, curious and not a little apprehensive.

“It’s the first time it’s ever happened, to my knowledge,” she declared.  “I know he’s avoided me like poison.  I thought he hated women.  You know Clare Rossiter is—­”

Elizabeth turned suddenly.

“Clare is ridiculous,” she said.  “She hasn’t any reserve, or dignity, or anything else.  And I don’t see what my going to the theater with Dick Livingstone has to do with her anyhow.”

Nina raised her carefully plucked eyebrows.

“Really!” she said.  “You needn’t jump down my throat, you know.”  She considered, her eyes on her sister.  “Don’t go and throw yourself away on Dick Livingstone, Sis.  You’re too good-looking, and he hasn’t a cent.  A suburban practice, out all night, that tumble-down old house and two old people hung around your necks, for Doctor David is letting go pretty fast.  It just won’t do.  Besides, there’s a story going the rounds about him, that—­”

“I don’t want to hear it, if you don’t mind.”

She went to the door and opened it.

“I’ve hardly spoken a dozen words to him in my life.  But just remember this.  When I do find the man I want to marry, I shall make up my own mind.  As you did,” she added as a parting shot.

She was rather sorry as she went down the stairs.  She had begun to suspect what the family had never guessed, that Nina was not very happy.  More and more she saw in Nina’s passion for clothes and gaiety, for small possessions, an attempt to substitute them for real things.  She even suspected that sometimes Nina was a little lonely.

Wallie Sayre rose from a deep chair as she entered the living-room.

“Hello,” he said, “I was on the point of asking Central to give me this number so I could get you on the upstairs telephone.”

“Nina and I were talking.  I’m sorry.”

Wallie, in spite of Walter Wheeler’s opinion of him, was an engaging youth with a wide smile, an air of careless well-being, and an obstinate jaw.  What he wanted he went after and generally secured, and Elizabeth, enlightened by Nina, began to have a small anxious feeling that afternoon that what he wanted just now happened to be herself.