Neither of them has ever been heard to utter the words “I’m sorry” after hurting anyone’s feelings. Claire noted this long ago--but she has never realized that it is simply because they are not sorry that they omit the use of the time-honored formula. They are both of them clever and both of them good-looking. But I often find it strange that they should be Mary Ambrey’s children. She, too, is clever and good-looking, but in thinking of her one substitutes other adjectives. Mary is gifted, sensitive, intelligent, gracious, and beautiful, and pre-eminently well bred. The description reminds me of the game we called “Sallie’s game” that she invented last summer. It was that afternoon, incidentally, on which I first heard Mrs. Harter’s name. The Ambreys had come up to the Manor House on the first day of the long vacation. There was the slight constraint that is always perceptible when Claire is present, unless she is being made the center of the conversation. One felt the involuntary chafing of her spirit. After tea, she suddenly suggested that we should play paper games. “I’ve invented a new paper game,” Sallie said, joyously, her eyes dancing. “It’s called Portraits, and there are two ways of playing it. Either we each write down five adjectives applicable to some person we all know, and then guess whom it’s meant for, or else we all agree on the same person and then write the portraits and compare them.” (“This,” thought I, “is the sort of game that ends in at least one member of the party getting up and leaving the room, permanently offended.”) “Let’s try it,” said Claire, eagerly. Personalities always appeal to her, until they are directed against herself. But it is a part of her curious pathos that she never really expects them to be directed against herself. I looked at Mary Ambrey, and she looked back at me with the faintest hint of resigned amusement in her hazel eyes. Just as Martyn had finished distributing pencils and strips of paper the Misses Kendal were announced. It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen. They wear their hats on the backs of their heads, and their skirts a little longer behind than in front, as do all the Kendals, but they are nice-looking girls in a bovine way. It is hard on them to compare them with Sallie, who is ten years their junior, as slim and as straight as a wand, and whose clothes invariably produce a peculiarly dashing effect. No Kendals are ever dashing. “You’re just in time to learn a new game,” said Martyn, proceeding to explain. “We’re no good at this sort of thing,” said the Kendals, with cheerful contempt for those who were. “We shall be thoroughly out of it all, but we’ll try and struggle along somehow.” The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thorough-going, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”