everything in life moves in sequences, and that poor Syrian child
upstairs, in her dire extremity, was furnishing a sequence in the
young man's life, before she went out of it. Her stimulation of his
sympathy and imagination was to change the whole course of his
existence.

Meanwhile, Doctor Sturtevant was having a rather strenuous argument
with his wife, who for once stood against him. She had her
not-to-be-silenced personal note. She had a horror of the alien and
unusual. All her life she had walked her chalk-line, and anything
outside savoured of the mysterious, and terrible. She was
Anglo-Saxon. She was what her ancestresses had been for generations.
The strain was unchanged, and had become so tense and narrow that it
was almost fathomless. Mrs. Sturtevant, good and benevolent on her
chalk-line, was involuntarily a bigot. She looked at Chinese laundry
men, poor little yellow figures, shuffling about with bags of soiled
linen, with thrills of recoil. She would not have acknowledged it to
herself, for she came of a race which favoured abolition, but nothing
could have induced her to have a coloured girl in her kitchen. Her
imaginations and prejudices were stained as white as her skin. There
was a lone man living on the outskirts of Fairbridge, in a little
shack built by himself in the woods, who was said to have Indian
blood in his veins, and Mrs. Sturtevant never saw him without that
awful thrill of recoil. When the little Orientals, men or women,
swayed sidewise and bent with their cheap suitcases filled with
Eastern handiwork, came to the door, she did not draw a long breath
until she had watched them out of sight down the street. It made no
difference to her that they might be Christians, that they might have
suffered persecution in their own land and sought our doorless
entrances of hospitality; she still realised her own aloofness from