All three were alike in the small, broad faces that brooded, half
sullen and half sad; in the wide eyes that watched vaguely; in the
little tender noses, and in the mouths, tender and sullen, too; in the
arch and sweep of the upper lips, the delicate fulness of the lower;
in the way of the thick hair, parted and turned back over the brows in
two wide and shallow waves.
Mary, the eldest, sat in a low chair by the fireside. Her hands were
clasped loosely on the black woolen socks she had ceased to darn.
She was staring into the fire with her gray eyes, the thick gray eyes
that never let you know what she was thinking. The firelight woke the
flame in her reddish-tawny hair. The red of her lips was turned back
and crushed against the white. Mary was shorter than her sisters, but
she was the one that had the color. And with it she had a stillness
that was not theirs. Mary's face brooded more deeply than their faces,
but it was untroubled in its brooding.
She had learned to darn socks for her own amusement on her eleventh
birthday, and she was twenty-seven now.
Alice, the youngest girl (she was twenty-three) lay stretched out on
the sofa.
She departed in no way from her sister's type but that her body was
slender and small boned, that her face was lightly finished, that her
gray eyes were clear and her lips pale against the honey-white of her
face, and that her hair was colorless as dust except where the edge of
the wave showed a dull gold.
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