Life was full of trouble; she saw it on all sides.  But what trivial matters they were, after all, that troubled Elinor and Vera and Judy Moran!  Vera was eternally rushing into fresh, furious hospitalities, welcoming hordes of men and women she scarcely knew into her house; chattering, laughing, drinking; flattering the debutantes, screaming at the telephone, standing patient hours under the dressmaker’s hands; never rested, never satisfied, never stopping to think.  Judy Moran’s trouble was that she was too fat; nothing else really penetrated the shell of her indolent good nature.  Kenneth might be politely dropped from the family firm, her husband might die and be laid away, her brother-in-law commence an ugly suit for the reclamation of certain jewels and silver tableware, but all these things meant far less to Mrs. Moran than the unflattering truths her bedroom scales told her every morning.  She had reached the age of fifty without ever acquiring sufficient self-control to rid herself of the surplus forty pounds, yet she never buttered a muffin at breakfast time, or crushed a French pastry with her fork at noon, without an inward protest.  She spent large sums of money for corsets and gowns that would disguise her immense weight rather than deny herself one cup of creamed-and-sugared tea or one box of chocolates.  And she suffered whenever a casual photograph, or an unexpected glimpse of herself in a mirror, brought to her notice afresh the dreadful two hundred and twenty pounds.

And Elinor had her absurd and unnecessary troubles, rich man’s wife as she was now, and firmly established in the social group upon whose outskirts she had lingered so long.  The single state of her four sisters was a constant annoyance to her, especially as Peter was not fond of the girls, and liked to allude to them as “spinsters” and “old maids,” and to ask more entertaining and younger women to the house.  Elinor had never wanted a child, but in the third or fourth year of her marriage she had begun to perceive that it might be wise to give her worldly old husband an heir, much better that, at any cost, than to encourage his fondness for Barbara Oliphant’s boy, his namesake nephew, who was an officious, self-satisfied little lad of twelve.  But Nature refused to cooperate in Elinor’s maternal plans and Peter Junior did not make his appearance at the big house on the Avenue.  Elinor grew yearly noisier, more reckless, more shallow; she rushed about excitedly from place to place, sometimes with Peter, sometimes with one of her sisters; not happy in either case, but much given to quarrelsome questioning of life.  It was not that she could not get what she wanted so much as that she did not know her own mind and heart.  Whatever was momentarily tiresome or distasteful must be pushed out of her path, and as almost every friend and every human experience came sooner or later into this category, Elinor found herself stranded in the very centre of life.