it. For a while an active outdoor life--golf, tennis,
yachting--kept this realization from becoming morbid introspection.
There came a time when even these lost charm for her, and then she
believed she was indeed ill in mind. Travel did not help her.

There had been months of unrest, of curiously painful wonderment
that her position, her wealth, her popularity no longer sufficed. She
believed she had lived through the dreams and fancies of a girl to
become a woman of the world. And she had gone on as before, a part of
the glittering show, but no longer blind to the truth--that there was
nothing in her luxurious life to make it significant.

Sometimes from the depths of her there flashed up at odd moments
intimations of a future revolt. She remembered one evening at the opera
when the curtain had risen upon a particularly well-done piece of stage
scenery--a broad space of deep desolateness, reaching away under an
infinitude of night sky, illumined by stars. The suggestion it brought
of vast wastes of lonely, rugged earth, of a great, blue-arched vault of
starry sky, pervaded her soul with a strange, sweet peace.

When the scene was changed she lost this vague new sense of peace, and
she turned away from the stage in irritation. She looked at the long,
curved tier of glittering boxes that represented her world. It was a
distinguished and splendid world--the wealth, fashion, culture, beauty,
and blood of a nation. She, Madeline Hammond, was a part of it. She
smiled, she listened, she talked to the men who from time to time
strolled into the Hammond box, and she felt that there was not a moment
when she was natural, true to herself. She wondered why these people
could not somehow, some way be different; but she could not tell what
she wanted them to be. If they had been different they would not have
fitted the place; indeed, they would not have been there at all. Yet she
thought wistfully that they lacked something for her.

And suddenly realizing she would marry one of these men if she did not
revolt, she had been assailed by a great weariness, an icy-sickening
sense that life had palled upon her. She was tired of fashionable
society. She was tired of polished, imperturbable men who sought only to
please her. She was tired of being feted, admired, loved, followed,
and importuned; tired of people; tired of houses, noise, ostentation,
luxury. She was so tired of herself!

In the lonely distances and the passionless star