for people. Besides, the responsibility of bringing up the Seagrave
twins had been sufficient to subdue anybody's spirits. She was only
nineteen and a widow of a month when her distant relative, Magnelius
Grandcourt, found her the position as personal guardian of the twins,
then aged nine. Now they were twenty-one and she thirty-one; twelve
years of service, twelve years of steady fidelity, which long ago had
become a changeless and passionate devotion, made up of all she might
have given to the dead, and of the unborn happiness she had never known.
What other sort of love, if there was any, lay within her undeveloped,
nobody knew because nobody had ever aroused it.

Sunshine transformed into great golden transparencies the lowered shades
in the living room where Geraldine stood, pensive, distraite, idly
twirling her crop by the loop. Presently it flew off her gloved
forefinger and fell clattering across the carpetless floor. She bathed
and dressed leisurely; later, when luncheon was brought to her, she
dropped into a low, wide chair and, ignoring everything except the
strawberries, turned her face to the breeze which was softly rattling
the southern curtains.

Errant thoughts, light as summer fleece, drifted across her mind. Often,
in such moments, she strove to realise that she was now mistress of
herself; but never could completely.

"For example: if I want to buy Roya-Neh," she mused, biting into an
enormous strawberry, "I can do it.... All I have to do is to say that
I'll buy it.... And I can live there if I choose--as long as I
choose.... It's a very agreeable sensation.... I can have anything I
fancy, without asking Mr. Tappan.... It's rather odd that I don't want
anything."