obscurity to prominence and influence

A dormant mother-instinct, too, such as must exist, however obscurely, in every frame of woman, even in that of a Jennie Leitzel, found an outlet in coddling Sadie's health and in ministering to and encouraging a certain plaintiveness in the younger woman's disposition. So, these two sisters, depending upon and complementing each other, of congenial temperaments, and with but one common paramount interest in life, the welfare of their incomparable younger brother whom they had brought up and of whom they were inordinately proud, lived together in the supreme enjoyment of the high estate to which their ambitions and their unflagging efforts had uplifted the Leitzel family—from rural in their county town of New Munich.

To be sure, the sisters realized that they held what they called their "social position" only as appendages to Danny—Danny who had been to college, who was the head of a great corporation law firm, who was enormously rich and a highly eligible young man; that is, he used to be young; and though New Munich regarded him as a confirmed old bachelor, his sisters still looked upon him as a dashing youth and a great matrimonial prize. They were not ashamed, but proud, of the fact that people tolerated them because they were Danny's sisters.


Sadie's love of clothes was second only to her devotion to Danny. She was dressed this evening in a girlish Empire gown made of red cheesecloth.

"What will folks say to this news, anyhow?" scolded Jennie. "I'll have a shamed face to go on the street, us not knowing anything about it, not even who she is yet! If folks ast us, Sadie, we must leave on we did know—we'll just say, 'Oh, it ain't news to us!'"

"But how could we know much when Danny himself has knew her only a little over a month, Jennie?"

"Yes, don't it, now, beat all?"

"Yes, don't it!"

"That shows what she is—marrying a man she knew only a month or so!"

"Well, to be sure, it wouldn't take her even a month, Jennie, to see what a catch our Danny is."

"If she does turn out to be a common person," said Jennie with her most purse-proud look and tone, "she's anyhow got to act genteel before folks and not give Danny and us a shamed face here in New Munich—high up as we've raised our Danny and hard as we worked to do it yet!"

"Yes, the idea!" mourned Sadie.

"Yes, the very idea!" nodded Jennie vindictively. "I shouldn't wonder," she added anxiously, always concerned for her sister's health which was really quite remarkably perfect, "if this shock give you the headache, Sadie!"

"I shouldn't wonder!" Sadie shook her head sadly.

"Read me off the piece in the paper and see what it says all," Jennie ordered. "But sit so the light don't give you the headache."

Sadie, adjusting her spectacles and turning on the electric table lamp at her elbow, read the glaring article which had that evening appeared on the first page of their daily paper and which every household in New Munich was, they knew, now reading with feelings of astonishment, curiosity, disappointment or chagrin, as the case might be, for the sisters were sure that many heartaches among the marriageable maidens of the town would be caused by the news that Danny was no longer within their possible reach. These twenty-five years past he and his gold had been dangling before them—and now to have him appropriated, without warning, by a non-resident!