The voice trailed into nothingness.  There was a sharp ring.  Mrs. Edes hung up her receiver.  She thought slowly that it was a strange circumstance that Mr. von Rosen should have a fainting or dead young Syrian girl in his house.  Then she rose from the divan, holding her head very stiffly, and began to dress.  She had just enough time to dress leisurely and catch the train.  She called on one of the two maids to assist her and was quite equipped, even to the little mink toque, fastened very carefully on her shining head, when there was a soft push at the door, and her twin daughters, Maida and Adelaide, entered.  They were eight years old, but looked younger.  They were almost exactly alike as to small, pretty features and pale blond colouring.  Maida scowled a little, and Adelaide did not, and people distinguished them by that when in doubt.

They stood and stared at their mother with a curious expression on their sharp, delicate little faces.  It was not exactly admiration, it was not wonder, nor envy, nor affection, yet tinctured by all.

Mrs. Edes looked at them.  “Maida,” said she, “do not wear that blue hair-ribbon again.  It is soiled.  Have you had your dinners?”

“Yes, mamma,” responded first one, then the other, Maida with the frown being slightly in the lead.

“Then you had better go to bed,” said Mrs. Edes, and the two little girls stood carefully aside to allow her to pass.

“Good night, children,” said Mrs. Edes without turning her mink-crowned head.  The little girls watched the last yellow swirl of their mother’s skirts, disappearing around the stair-landing, then Adelaide spoke.

“I mean to wear red, myself, when I’m grown up,” said she.

“Ho, just because Jim Carr likes red,” retorted Maida.  “As for me, I mean to have a gown just like hers, only a little deeper shade of yellow.”

Adelaide laughed, an unpleasantly snarling little laugh.  “Ho,” said she, “just because Val Thomas likes yellow.”

Then the coloured maid, Emma, who was cross because Mrs. Edes’ evening out had deprived her of her own, and had been ruthlessly hanging her mistress’s gown which she had worn to the club in a wad on a closet hook, disregarding its perfumed hanger, turned upon them.

“Heah, ye chillun,” said she, “your ma sid for you to go to baid.”

Each little girl had her white bed with a canopy of pink silk in a charming room.  There were garlands of rosebuds on the wallpaper and the furniture was covered with rosebud chintz.

While their mother was indignantly sailing across the North River, her daughters lay awake, building air-castles about themselves and their boy-lovers, which fevered their imaginations, and aged them horribly in a spiritual sense.

“Amy White’s mother plays dominoes with her every evening,” Maida remarked.  Her voice sounded incredibly old, full of faint derisiveness and satire, but absolutely non-complaining.