There is, in the human soul, as in the depths of the ocean, a state of
eternal calm. Around it the waves of unrest may surge and roar but there
peace reigns. In that sanctuary the tides are born and, in their
appointed time, swelling and rising, they carry the poor jetsam and
flotsam of life before them.

The tide was rising in the soul of Meredith Thornton; she was awake at
last. Awake as people are who have lived with their faculties drugged.
The condition was partly due to the education and training of the woman,
and largely to her own ability in the past to close her senses to any
conception of life that differed from her desires. She had always been
like that. She loved beauty and music; she loved goodness and happiness;
she loved them whom she loved so well that she shut all others out.
Consequently, when Life tore her defences away she had no guidance upon
which to depend but that which had lain hidden in the secret place of
her soul.

As a little child Meredith and her older sister, Doris, lived in New
York. Their house had been in the Fletcher family for three generations
and stood at the end of a dignified row, opposite a park whose iron
gates opened only to those considered worthy of owning a key--the
Fletchers had a key!

In the park the little Fletcher girls played--if one could call it
play--under the eye of a carefully selected maid whose glance was
expected to rest constantly upon them. The anxious father tried to do
his double duty conscientiously, for the mother had died at Meredith's
birth.