racter, soaring
beyond the limits of fact and real life and often of probability, but
the result of loneliness and middle age, and of two hearts starving for
love and the expression of love, for sympathy, companionship and the
natural desire for something that would feed vanity, which, if it is
permitted to die, is replaced by bitterness and a very warped point of
view.

Christopher Ludlow, a wild, harum-scarum fellow who had risked his life
many times during his hunting trips, came to his death in a prosaic
street accident. For fifteen years his widow, then twenty-five, lived
in the country with his parents and his little daughter. She was at
their mercy, because Christopher had left no money. He had been
dependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived with them
and bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing crotchetiness
and impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a purposely small
income in a second-rate hotel or a six by six apartment barely on the
edge of the map. A timid woman, all for peace, without the grit and
courage that goes with self-direction, she pursued the easy policy of
least resistance, sacrificed her youth on the altar of Comfort and
dwindled with only a few secret pangs into middle age. From time to
time, with Joan, she left the safe waters of Lethe and put an almost
frightened foot into the swift main stream. As time went on and Spring
went out of her and Summer ripened to maturity, she was more and more
glad to return from these brief excursions to the quiet country and the
safe monotonous round. Then the day came when her no longer little girl
came finally out of school, urgent and rebellious, kicking against the
pricks, electrically alive and eager, autocrat and individualist rolled
into one. Catching something of this youthfulness and shocked to wake
to a realization of her lost years, she made a frantic and despairing
effort to grasp at the tail-end of Summer and with a daughter far more
worldly than herself escaped as frequently as possible into town to
taste the pleasures that she had almost forgotten, and revive under the
influence of the theater and the roar of life. It was during one of
these excursions, while Joan was lunching with Alice Palgrave, that she
caught an arrow shot at random by that mischievous little devil Cupid,
which landed plum in the middle of a heart that had been placid so
long. In getting out of a taxicab she had slipped and fallen, was
ra