she is known to have said to a friend after her return from Serbia: "It
was a great day in my life when I discovered that I did not know what
fear was."

Benjamin Kidd in _The Science of Power_ gives (unintentionally) an
indication where to look for the secret of the childless woman's feeling
of loneliness--_she has no link with the future_. He affirms that woman
because of her very nature has her roots in the future. "To women," he
says, "the race is always more than the individual; the future greater
than the present."

As we follow Hildeguard through the pages of the novel, she is shown to
us as faced with the problem of becoming "a lonely woman," the problem
that meets the unmarried and the childless woman. And the claims and the
meaning of religion are confronting her too. The story traces the
workings of Hildeguard's mind and the events of her life for a year.

Christmas Day in the novel finds Hildeguard a lonely and dissatisfied
woman with no "sure anchor." She has had a happy childhood, with many
relations and friends around her. One by one these are taken from
her--some are dead, others are married--and she sees herself, at the age
of thirty-seven, a forlorn figure with no great interest in the future,
and her thoughts dwelling mostly on the joyous past. Two or three of
Hildeguard's friends are conversing together in her rooms. None of them
has had a happy day. Each in her own way is feeling the depression of
the lonely woman. Frances, a little Quaker lady, enters the room, as
someone remarks on the sadness of Christmas-time.


"'Yes,' at last said the Quaker lady; 'I heard what you said as I