Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/360

 and vivid. If at thirty the vividness was emphasized by artificial means the fault lay in Amy's sacrifice to her social ideals, She needed the butter which she denied herself. She needed cream, and eggs, and her doctor had told her so. And Amy had kept the knowledge to herself.

Ethel, eating as little as Amy—or even less—had escaped, miraculously, attenuation. At twenty she had been a plump little beauty. She was still plump. Her neck in her low-cut gown was lovely. Her figure was not fashionable, and she lacked Amy's look of race.

"They are all charming," Molly Winchell said. "Why don't you marry one of them, Murray?"

"Marriage," said Murray, "would spoil it."

"Spoil what?"

Murray turned on her his fine dark eyes. "They are such darlings—the three of them."

"You Turk!" Molly surveyed him over the top of her sapphire feather fan. "So that's it, is it? You want them all."

Murray thought vaguely it was something like that. For ten years he had had Amy and Ethel—Amy at twenty, fire and flame, Ethel at fifteen, with bronze locks and lovely color. In those years Anne had promised little in the way of beauty or charm. She had read voraciously, curled up in chairs or on 354