wn dreams. Their heads are in the
clouds, and they don't know it."

"I think myself that Nancy is making a mistake."

"More of a mistake than she understands." The lightness left Eve's voice.
She was silent as she ate an orange and drank a cup of clear coffee.
Eve's fashionable and adorable thinness was the result of abstinence and
of exercise. Facing daily Aunt Maude's plumpness, she had sacrificed ease
and appetite on the altar of grace and beauty.

Yet Aunt Maude's plumpness was not the plumpness of inelegance. Nothing
about Aunt Maude was inelegant. She was of ancient Knickerbocker stock.
She had been petrified by years of social exclusiveness into something
less amiable than her curves and dimples promised. Her hair was gray, and
not much of it was her own. Her curled bang and high coronet braid were
held flatly against her head by a hair net. She wore always certain
chains and bracelets which proclaimed the family's past prosperity. Her
present prosperity was evidenced by the somewhat severe richness of her
attire. Her complexion was delicately yellow and her wrinkles were deep.
Her eyes were light blue and coldly staring. In manner she seemed to set
herself against any world but her own.

The money on which the two women lived was Aunt Maude's. She expected to
make Eve her heir. In the meantime she gave her a generous allowance and
indulged most of her whims.

The latest whim was the new breakfast room in which they now sat, with
the winter sun streaming through the small panes of a wide south window.

For sixty odd years Aunt Maude had eaten her breakfast promptly at eight
from a tray in her own room. It had been a hearty breakfast of hot breads
and chops. At one she had lunched decently in the long dim dining-room in
a mid-Victorian atmosphere of Moquet and marble mantels, carved walnut
and plush curtains.

And now back of this sacred dining-room Eve had built out a structure of
glass and of stone, looking over a scrap of enclosed city garden, and
furnished in black and white, relieved by splashes of brilliant color.
Aunt Maude hated the green parrot and the flame-colored fishes in the
teakwood aquarium. She thought that Eve looked like an actress in the
little jacket with the apple-green ribbons which she wore when she came
down at twelve.

"Aren't we ever going to eat any more luncheons?" had been Aunt Maude's
plaintive question when she realized that she was in the midst of a
gastronomic revolution.