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