Amy herself felt new youth these days.  Relieved of the first uneasiness with which she had gone to Ohio to bring her young sister to New York, surprised and delighted at finding how the awkward girl she had known had developed since the last time they had met, Amy now took Ethel about to get her “clothes fit to be seen in.”  And as with intent little glances she kept studying “Ethel’s type” in order to set off her charms, the slightly bored expression, the look of disillusionment left Amy’s pretty countenance.  For Ethel’s freshness had given to Amy new zest and belief in her own life, in its purpose and importance.  To get Ethel clothes, to show her about, to find her friends, to give her a gay winter in town and later to make a good match for her—­these aims loomed large in Amy’s mind.  She felt her own youth returning, and she prolonged this period.  She wanted Ethel all to herself.  She even shut her husband out.

“You can rest up a bit,” she told him, “for what’s coming later on.”  And Joe, with a good-natured groan at the prospect of late hours ahead, made the most of the rest allowed to him.

Each morning the two sisters fared forth in a taxi.  And Amy began to reveal to her sister the dazzling world of shops in New York:  shops large and small, American, French and English, shops for gowns and hats and shoes, and furs and gloves and corsets.  At numberless counters they studied and counselled, and lunching at Sherry’s they shopped on.  And the shimmer and sheen of pretty things made life a glamourous mirage, in which Ethel could feel herself rapidly becoming a New Yorker, gaining assurance day by day, feeling “her type” emerge in the glass where she studied herself with impatient delight.

There were little reminders now and then of what she had left behind her.  One day in a department store, as they stood before a counter looking at silk stockings, all at once to Ethel’s ears came the deep tones of an organ, and turning with a low cry of surprise she looked over the bustling throngs of women to an organ loft above, where a girl was singing a solo in a high sweet soprano voice.  In a flash to Ethel’s mind there came a vivid picture of the old yellow church at home.  And with a queer expression looking about her at the crowds, she exclaimed, “How funny!” She was again reminded of church when one afternoon in a large darkened chamber she sat with scores of women whose eyes were fixed as though in devotion upon a softly lighted stage where “models” kept appearing.  What lovely figures some of them had.  Others rather took her breath, and gave her the feeling she’d had before in her sister’s bedroom.  But then as her eye was caught again by the rapt faces all about, she chuckled to herself and thought, “There ought to be candles and incense here!”

She was appalled at the prices.  And as the exciting days wore on, uneasily in her room at night she would sit down with pencil and paper and ask, “How much did I spend today?” Her father had left her nothing but the shabby old frame house.  This she had sold to a friend of his, and the small fund thus secured she had resolved to husband.