As children, in winter in New York, in summer on Long Island, Jimmie
Blagwin and Jeanne Thayer had grown up together. They had the same
tastes in sports, the same friends, the same worldly advantages.
Neither of them had many ideas. It was after they married that Jeanne
began to borrow ideas and doubt the advantages.

For the first three years after the wedding, in the old farmhouse which
Jimmie had made over into a sort of idealized country club, Jeanne lived
a happy, healthy, out-of-door existence. To occupy her there were
Jimmie's hunters and a pack of joyous beagles; for tennis, at week-ends
Jimmie filled the house with men, and during the week they both played
polo, he with the Meadow Brooks and she with the Meadow Larks, and the
golf links of Piping Rock ran almost to their lodge-gate. Until Proctor
Maddox took a cottage at Glen Cove and joined the golf-club, than Jeanne
and Jimmie on all Long Island no couple were so content.

At that time Proctor Maddox was the young and brilliant editor of the
_Wilderness_ magazine, the wilderness being the world we live in, and
the Voice crying in it the voice of Proctor Maddox. He was a Socialist
and Feminist, he flirted with syndicalism, and he had a good word even
for the I.W.W. He was darkly handsome, his eyeglasses were fastened to a
black ribbon, and he addressed his hostess as "dear lady." He was that
sort. Women described him as "dangerous," and liked him because he
talked of things they did not understand, and because he told each of
them it was easy to see it would be useless to flatter _her_. The men
did not like him. The oldest and wealthiest members of the club
protested that the things Maddox said in his magazine should exclude him
from the society of law-abiding, money-making millionaires. But Freddy
Bayliss, the leader of the younger crowd, said that, to him, it did not
matter what Maddox said in the _Wilderness_, so long as he stayed there.