hen she slept.

The story she had imparted to him in the wheezing shaking cabin, and at
the Calais buffet--where he had insisted on offering her the dinner
she had missed at Mrs. Murrett's--had given a distincter outline to
her figure. From the moment of entering the New York boarding-school to
which a preoccupied guardian had hastily consigned her after the death
of her parents, she had found herself alone in a busy and indifferent
world. Her youthful history might, in fact, have been summed up in
the statement that everybody had been too busy to look after her. Her
guardian, a drudge in a big banking house, was absorbed by "the office";
the guardian's wife, by her health and her religion; and an elder
sister, Laura, married, unmarried, remarried, and pursuing, through all
these alternating phases, some vaguely "artistic" ideal on which the
guardian and his wife looked askance, had (as Darrow conjectured) taken
their disapproval as a pretext for not troubling herself about
poor Sophy, to whom--perhaps for this reason--she had remained the
incarnation of remote romantic possibilities.

In the course of time a sudden "stroke" of the guardian's had thrown his
personal affairs into a state of confusion from which--after his widely
lamented death--it became evident that it would not be possible to
extricate his ward's inheritance. No one deplored this more sincerely
than his widow, who saw in it one more proof of her husband's life
having been sacrificed to the innumerable duties imposed on him, and who
could hardly--but for the counsels of religion--have brought herself to
pardon the young girl for her indirect share in hastening his end. Sophy
did not resent this point of view. She was really much sorrier for her
guardian's death than for the loss of her insignificant fortune. The
latter had represented only the means of holding her in bondage, and
its disappearance was the occasion of her immediate plunge into the
wide bright sea of life surrounding the island-of her captivity. She had
first landed--thanks to the intervention of the ladies who had directed
her education--in a Fifth Avenue school-room where, for a few months,
she acted as a buffer between three autocratic infants and their
bodyguard of nurses and teachers. The too-pressing attentions of their
father's valet had caused her to fly this sheltered spot, against the
express advice of her educational superiors, who implied that, in their
own case, refinement a