But Annabel’s vanity was aggressive and competitive, must be indulged, must prevail. She reasoned that Adam was getting the University of Virginia and that James had his acre of land. She, therefore, must have at the very least her portrait to console her, and not one, if you please, shared by her sister. They must be painted separately, Annabel insisted, so that those who admired only one of them would not be obliged to swallow the other too.

Seeing how things stood, Bruce gave in to Annabel, but he promised Doreen a young horse for her next Christmas present. She might even, he said, go about the county with him and help him choose. Thus rewarded, she would sit peaceably enough for her picture when the time came. Casey Troy was used to young girls who preferred horses to their own painted likenesses and even rather liked them, although he knew well enough it was the Annabels who lined his purse with more than dust.

It was the occasion of a funeral that enabled Annabel to inform her friends Ann-Elizabeth and Margaret-Ella Clay, and indeed everyone else, that she was to be limned on canvas. Old Dr. Chester Porterfield, who had with the help of quantities of biscuit and cheese and brandy seen Deborah Kendrick out of this world and Rachel Kendrick into it, had died four years ago. Today it was his good wife Mamie’s turn to be stared at for the last, and perhaps only time, and prayed over before being deposited in the ground.

As the mourners drifted out of the church door onto church porch, Annabel poked out her rounding bosom and further invited attention by fluttering her shawl in the air like a butterfly exercising his wings.

“It seems to me,” Annabel confided with a sigh to Leon whom she had managed to exit beside, “I go nowhere but to funerals and weddings.”

Leon smiled sympathetically, his eyes on her young bosom.

Edna, who had not been able to shake off a particularly tenacious chest cold that had racked her for a month, stepped to the edge of the church porch, and hawked and spat into the yard.

Annabel smiled with mortification. “Granny dear, must you?”

“I-be-dogged if I’ll swallow pus and corruption when there’s a yard to spit in,” Edna replied, and hawked and spat again to make her determination clear.

For Annabel’s sake, Leon pretended not to have seen or heard, and Annabel fussed up to Sarah. “Aunt Sarah,” she said, “you’re looking mighty pretty today!”

“Why, thank you, Annabel,” Sarah answered, amused and irritated about equally.

“That magnificent ball you gave us last month has perked you up just enormously,” Annabel continued.

“I must have allowed myself to droop terribly for the difference now to be so marked.”

“Well, I do declare you look perfectly fine these days, really very well!”