He was younger than Joan by a year. Born to the name of Edgar, he had been dubbed Butch in the public schools, and the name had stuck; even his mother and father employed it. And yet it could not be said to suit him; rather, the boy suggested a jocky. He was short, slender, and wiry; with a strong, emaciated nose flanked by small eyes sunk deep in sallow cheeks--his mouth set in a perpetually sardonic curve. He dressed neatly, whatever the straits and necessities of the family (to the mitigation of which he contributed nothing whatever) and had a failing for narrow red neckties and flashy waistcoats. His hard, thin lips were generally tight upon a cigarette; they were forever tight upon his personal affairs: if he opened them at home it was to "kid" the girls, which he did with a slangy, mordant wit, or to drop some casually affectionate word to his mother. His conversation with his father, whom he seemed always to be watching with a narrow, grim suspicion, was ordinarily confined to monosyllables of affirmation or negation. He went his secret ways, self-sufficient, wary, reserved; a perpetual subject of covert speculation to the women of his family. Joan had heard it whispered that he was a member of the "Car-barn Gang." But she never dared question Butch, though she trembled every time she came upon newspaper headlines advertising some fresh hooliganism on the part of the gang--a policeman "beaten up," a sober citizen "held up and frisked" in the small hours, or a member of some rival organization found stabbed and weltering on the sawdust floor of a grisly dive. Between this girl and her brother there existed a strange harmony of understanding, quite tacit and almost unrecognized by either. Joan's nearest approach to acknowledgment of it resided in infrequent admissions to friends that she could "get on with Butch," whereas "the rest of the bunch made her weary." Almost all the vigour and vitality of the mother seemed to have been surrendered to Butch and Joan; there had been little left for Edna. The girl was frail, anæmic, flat-chested, pretty in an appealing way: fit only for one of two things, tuberculosis or reconstruction in the country. As it was, in the busy seasons she found underpaid employment in the workrooms of Sixth Avenue dressmaking establishments; between whiles she drudged at housework to the limits of her small strength.