y the chisel of destiny
deep into the sard of their generations; every line and curve and
faintest tracing pregnant with interest, suggestion, and emotion. Men
who are loved and hated, feared, adored and loathed with an intensity
that their commonplace fellows are incapable of evoking. They are
loadstones which attract events; whirlpools which draw to themselves
excitement, emotion, and vast store of sympathy.

Some years previous to the opening of this story, Nesbit Thorne, then a
brilliant recent graduate of Harvard, a leader in society, and a man of
whom great things were predicted, whose name was in many mouths as that
of a man likely to achieve distinction in any path of life he should
select, made a hasty, ill-advised marriage with a Miss Ethel Ross, a
New York belle of surpassing beauty and acumen. A woman whose sole
thought was pleasure, whose highest conception of the good of life was
a constantly varied menu of social excitement, and whose noblest
reading of the word duty was compassed in having a well ordered house,
sumptuous entertainments, and irreproachable toilets. A wife to
satisfy any man who was unemotional, unexacting, and prepared to give
way to her in all things.

Nesbit Thorne, unfortunately, was none of these things, and so his
married life had come to grief. The first few months were smoothed and
gilded by his passionate enjoyment of her mere physical perfection, his
pleasure in the admiration she excited, and in the envy of other men.
Life's river glided smoothly, gayly in the sunshine; then ugly snags
began to appear, and reefs, fretting the surface of the water, and
hinting of sterner difficulties below; then a long stretch of tossing,
troubled water, growing more and more turbulent as it proceeded,
boiling and bubbling into angry whirlpools and sullen eddies. The boat
of married happiness was hard among the breakers, tossed from side to
side, the sport of every wind of passion; contesting hands were on the
tiller ropes. The craft yawed and jerked in its course, a spectacle
for men to weep over, and devils to rejoice in; ran aground on
quicksands, tore and tangled its cordage, rent the planking, and at the
end of a cruise of as many months as it should have lasted years, it
lay a hopeless wreck on the grim bar of separation.

The affair was managed gracefully, and with due deference to the
amenities. There was gossip, of course--there always is gossip--and
public opinion was many si