Free Giant by Edna Ferber Page A

that her fingers bit into his muscles. Quietly, as though continuing a conversation, she said, “You see. It’s caught up with you, it’s caught up with us. It always does.”
    But now the boy stirred and groaned and his eyes opened and his face was a mask of hideous pain as he looked up into the two stricken faces bent over him. The physician in him rose valiantly to meet that moment, the distorted lips spoke the truth to reassure them.
    “Morphine…pain…horrible…not serious…morphine…”

5
    Though the three Lynnton girls always were spoken of as the Beautiful Lynnton Sisters of Virginia they weren’t really beautiful. For that matter, they weren’t Virginians, having been born in Ohio. But undeniably there was about these three young women an aura, a glow, a dash of what used to be called diablerie that served as handily as beauty and sometimes handier. These exhilarating qualities wore well, too, for they lasted the girls their lifetime, which beauty frequently fails to do.
    The three Lynntons were always doing things first or better or more outrageously than other girls of their age and station in Virginia and Washington society. Leigh, the eldest—the one who married Sir Alfred Karfrey and went to England to live—scandalized Washington when, as a young woman in that capital’s society circles, she had smoked a cigarette in public long before her friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth shocked the whole United States with a puff or two. Leigh certainly was the least lovely of the three Lynnton Lovelies as they sometimes were fatuously called. She had the long aquiline face of her mother—horse-faced, her feminine detractors said—and she was further handicapped for dalliance by a mordant tongue that should have scared the wits out of the young male Virginians who came courting with Southern sweet talk. People said that with her scarifying wit she actually had whiplashed the timorous Karfrey into marrying her.
    Leslie the second sister was, as the term went, a bluestocking. She was forever reading books, but not the sort of books which otherSouthern young women consumed like bonbons as they lay, indolent and slightly liverish from too many hot breads, in the well-worn hammock under the trees. Leslie Lynnton had opinions of her own, she conversed and even argued with her distinguished father and his friends on matters political, sociological, medical and literary just as if she were a man. Though her eyes were large, dark, and warmly lustrous there undeniably was a slight cast in the left one which gave her, at times, a sort of stricken look. Oddly enough, men found this attractive, perhaps because it imparted a momentarily helpless and appealing aspect.
    The third girl, Lacey, was seven years younger than her second sister and represented Mrs. Lynnton’s last try for a son. Lacey turned out a tomboy and small wonder. As each of the three had been intended by their parents to be males only masculine names had been provided for them before birth. With the advent of the third girl Mrs. Lynnton, admitting final defeat, had hastily attempted to change the name from Lacey to Laura. But Lacey it remained.
    You were always seeing photographs of the three in airy organdies and sashes posed with arms about one another’s waists in front of white-columned porticoes with a well-bred hunting dog or two crouched in the foreground. But Race Lynnton—Doctor Horace Lynnton in all the encyclopedias and Who’s Whos and medical journals—had really brought them up with a free hand and an open mind. Though the girls moved with grace and distinction they were generally considered too thin. Theirs were long clever-looking hands rather than little dimpled ones; theirs a spirited manner; little money and small prospect of more, being daughters of a very dedicated surgeon-physician-scientist.
    In spite of these handicaps the Lynnton ladies somehow emerged feminine and alluring. The life juices were strong in them, they possessed