and's over-shadowing presence. He was not a man to be
ignored, as she had seen wives ignore and put aside their meek partners.
Marshall Haney even yet was a dominating personality, even though his
family affairs were so insistent and so difficult to manage or explain.
If the father came her joy in her home would be gone, and yet she had no
right to refuse him shelter.

At the same time she was less sure of her place in the world, now that
she was alone. She had the feeling that if anything were to happen--if
the motorman should demand his pay at the door, or the hotel-keeper
refuse to go her bond, she would be helpless. The Captain, for all his
shortcomings and physical disability, was master of every situation. He
had been schooled by stern powers, and his capabilities of defence were
still equal to almost any need.

On the ferry-boat she found herself surrounded by the swarms of people
who are forever calculating expenditures, who never desert a garment,
and who finger a nickel lovingly; and she caught them looking at her as
upon one of those who enjoy without earning it the product of their
toil. They made way for her, as she got down and walked to the railing,
as they would have done for a millionaire's daughter, a little surlily,
and she divined without understanding this enmity, but was too exalted
by the glittering bay, with its romance of ship and sea and shore and
town, to very much mind what her threadbare fellow-passengers thought of
her. These dark-hulled, ocean-going vessels, these alien flags, widened
her horizon--deepened her sense of the earth's wonder and the wide-flung
nerves of national interest. From this sea-level she looked up in fancy
to her brother's ranch near Sibley as at a cabin on a mountain-side. How
still and faint and far it seemed at the moment!

At the word of the chauffeur she climbed back into her car, returning to
the isolation which money now provided for her. And so, girt about with
velvet and costly wood and gilding, she rode up through the tearing
throngs of the wharf, whirling past cars and trucks, outspeeding cabs
and carriages, protected by a gambler's name, royally isolated and
defensible by his money. As she spun through Fifth Avenue, so smooth of
pave, so crowded, so sparkling, so far-reaching in its suggestions of
security and power, the girl's soul entered upon a new and fierce phase
of its struggle.

It was a larger and more absorbing fairy story than any in the _Arabi