eir hands clasped.

Then they both shut their eyes with a little shudder, as though what
they saw was terrible to look upon. Emily's hand, the tiny hand that
was so unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on his, and his crushed
the absurd fingers until she winced with pain.

That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.

Emily wasn't the kind of girl who would be left to pine. There are too
many Jos in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and then thump at
the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in their grip.
One year later Emily was married to a young man whose father owned a
large, pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of Michigan.

That being safely accomplished, there was something grimly humorous in
the trend taken by affairs in the old house on Calumet. For Eva
married. Married well, too, though he was a great deal older than she.
She went off in a hat she had copied from a French model at Field's,
and a suit she had contrived with a home dressmaker, aided by pressing
on the part of the little tailor in the basement over on Thirty-first
Street. It was the last of that, though. The next time they saw her,
she had on a hat that even she would have despaired of copying, and a
suit that sort of melted into your gaze. She moved to the North Side
(trust Eva for that), and Babe assumed the management of the household
on Calumet Avenue. It was rather a pinched little household now, for
the harness business shrank and shrank.

"I don't see how you can expect me to keep house decently on this!"
Babe would say contemptuously. Babe's nose, always a little inclined
to sharpness, had whittled down to a point of late. "If you knew what
Ben gives Eva."

"It's the best I can do, Sis. Business is something rotten."

"Ben says if you had the least bit of----" Ben was Eva's husband, and
quotable, as are all successful men.

"I don't care what Ben says," shouted Jo, goaded into rage. "I'm sick
of your everlasting Ben. Go and get a Ben of your own, why don't you,
if you're so stuck on the way he does things."

And Babe did. She made a last desperate drive, aided by Eva, and she
captured a rather surprised young man in the brokerage way, who had
made up his mind not to marry for years and years. Eva wanted to give
her her wedding things, but at that Jo broke into sudden rebellion.

"No, sir! No Ben is going to buy my sister's wedding clothes,
understand? I guess I'm not broke--yet.