for sympathy, companionship and the natural desire for something
that would feed vanity, which, if it is permitted to die, is
replaced by bitterness and a very warped point of view.

Christopher Ludlow, a wild, harum-scarum fellow who had risked his
life many times during his hunting trips, came to his death in a
prosaic street accident. For fifteen years his widow, then twenty-
five, lived in the country with his parents and his little daughter.
She was at their mercy, because Christopher had left no money. He
had been dependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived
with them and bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing
crotchetiness and impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a
purposely small income in a second-rate hotel or a six by six
apartment barely on the edge of the map. A timid woman, all for
peace, without the grit and courage that goes with self-direction,
she pursued the easy policy of least resistance, sacrificed her
youth on the altar of Comfort and dwindled with only a few secret
pangs into middle age. From time to time, with Joan, she left the
safe waters of Lethe and put an almost frightened foot into the
swift main stream. As time went on and Spring went out of her and
Summer ripened to maturity, she was more and more glad to return
from these brief excursions to the quiet country and the safe
monotonous round. Then the day came when her no longer little girl
came finally out of school, urgent and rebellious, kicking against
the pricks, electrically alive and eager, autocrat and individualist
rolled into one. Catching something of this youthfulness and shocked
to wake to a realization of her lost years, she made a frantic and
despairing effort to grasp at the tail-end of Summer and with a
daughter far more wordly than herself escaped as frequently as
possible into town to taste the pleasures that she had almost