But despite her air of assurance and her own liking of her life, she felt the picture growing flat, and so she added quietly: 

“Oh, my friends aren’t all I’d like.  They never are, if you’ve anything in you.  If you really want to be somebody—­” and here her whole expression changed to one of resolute faith in herself—­“you need just one thing, money.  And you can’t do anything about that, you have to wait for your husband.  Joe’s a dear, of course, and he’s working hard.  And he’s getting it, too, he’s getting it!” A gleam of hunger almost fierce came into her clear violet eyes.  “I want a larger apartment—­I’ve picked out the very one.  And I want a car, a limousine.  I know just how I’ll paint it a mauve body with white wheels.  And I want a house on Long Island.  I’ve picked out the very spot—­just next to Fanny Carr’s new place.”

As her sister spoke of these ideals, again Ethel had that feeling of church, but only for a moment.

“Who’s Fanny Carr?” she asked alertly.

Amy was slowly combing her hair, and she smiled with kindly tolerance, for her little confession had brought back her faith in herself and her future.

“Fanny was a writer once—­”

“Oh, really!”

“Yes.  She ran a department on one of the papers.”  It had been the dress pattern page, but Amy did not mention that.  Instead she yawned complacently.  “Oh, she dropped it quick enough—­she thought it rather tiresome.  She’s one of the cleverest women I know.  She’d have got a long way up in the world, if it weren’t for her second husband—­”

“Her second?”

“Yes.  The first one didn’t do very well.  She told me once, ’If you want to get on, change your name at least once in every three years.’  Her second, as it happened, was no better than the first.  But she was clever enough by then to get an able lawyer; and when it came to the divorce, Fanny succeeded in keeping the house, the one out on Long Island.”

“Oh,” said Ethel tensely.  Her sister shot a look at her.

“I don’t care especially for Fanny’s ideas about husbands,” she said.  “But at least she has a love of a home.”  And Amy went on to explain to her sister the value and importance of being able to give “week ends.”  Again the gleam came into her eyes.

“It’s money, my dear, it’s money.  They are the same women in Newport exactly—­just like all the rest of us—­only they are richer.  That’s all—­but it is everything.  Put me in a big house out there, and my friends wouldn’t know me in a few years.”

A cloud came on her face as she looked in the glass.

“But that’s just the trouble.  A few years more and I’ll be too late.  You’ve got to get there while you’re young.  And there’s so little time.  You lose your looks.  It’s all very well for some women to talk about ideas and things—­and travel and—­and children.  I did, too, I talked a lot—­oh, how I wanted everything!  But one has to narrow