play with it,
get yourself a fur cloak, have a fire in your bedroom----"

"Oh!" said Jane.

"But, Robert," Anna said, "I don't feel it is sent to us for that."

"Sent!" said Pateley. "Well, that is one way of putting it."

But he did not enlarge upon the point. He accepted his sisters just as
they were, with their limitations, their principles, and everything. He
was not particularly susceptible to beauty and distinction, in the sense
of these qualities being necessary to his belongings, and perhaps it was
as well. Anna and Jane, though they looked undeniably like gentlewomen,
had nothing else about them that was particularly agreeable to look
upon. Nor were they either of them very strikingly ugly, or, indeed,
strikingly anything. Jane was the better looking of the two. It was,
perhaps, a rather heartless freak of destiny that life should have
ordained her to live with somebody who was like a parody of herself,
older, rounder, thicker, plainer. Living apart they might each have
passed muster; living together they somehow made their ugliness, like
their income, go further. But in the composite photograph it was Anna
who predominated. It was a pity, for she was the stumpier of the two.

Long and earnest were the discussions the little sisters had that night
after their splendid brother had departed, until by the time they went
to bed they were prepared, or so it seemed to them, to launch their
existence on a dizzy career of extravagance. They were going, as they
expressed it, to put their establishment on another footing, which meant
that instead of being attended by an inexperienced young person of
eighteen they were to have an arrogant one of twenty-five. Their own
elderly servant had declined to face the temptations of London, and had
remained behind, living close to their old home. And, greatest event of
all, they had at length--it was now summer, but that didn't matter, furs
were cheaper--yielded to the thought which they had been alternately
caressing and dismissing for months, and they were each going to buy a
Fur Cloak. The days in which this all important purchase was being
considered were to the Miss Pateleys days of pure enjoyment. Days of
walks along Oxford Street, no longer so bewildered by the noise of
London traffic, the discovery of some shop in an out of the way place
whose wares were about half the price of the more fashionable quarters.
The days were full of glorious possibilities.

It was two d