"Thank you," said Florence coldly. "I shall take my own time; fortunately there is no one behind me."
"Humph!" said Leah, playing with her diamond rings. "It don't do to be too particular. Why don't you come round and see me sometimes?"
"There are so many of you now," murmured Florence. She was not attracted by the solicitors and traders in whose society and carriages her mother lolled luxuriously, and she resented the matronly airs of her sisters. With Leah, however, she was conscious of a different and more paradoxical provocation. Leah had an incredible air of juvenility. All those unthinkable, innumerable years little Schnapsie had conceived of her eldest sister as an old maid, hopeless, senescent, despite the wonderful belt that had kept her figure dashing; but now that she was married she had become the girlish bride, kittenish, irresistible, while little Schnapsie was the old maid, the sister in peril of being passed by. And indeed she felt herself appallingly ancient, prematurely aged by her long stay at seventeen.
"Yes, you are right, Leah," she said pensively, with a touch of malice. "To-morrow I shall be twenty-four."
"What?" shrieked Leah.
"Yes," Florence said obstinately. "And oh, how glad I shall be!" She raised her arms exultingly and stretched herself, as if shooting up seven years as soon as the pressure of her sisters was removed.
"Do you hear, mother?" whispered Leah. "That fool of a Florence is going to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Not the slightest consideration for us!"
"I didn't say I would celebrate it publicly," said Florence. "Besides," she suggested, smiling, "very soon people will forget that I am not the eldest."
"Then your folly will recoil on your own head," said Leah.
Little Schnapsie gave a devil-may-care shrug—a Ghetto trait that still clung to all the sisters.