Chapter I

A Pawn of Fate


Mrs. Lora Delane Porter dismissed the hireling who had brought her
automobile around from the garage and seated herself at the wheel. It
was her habit to refresh her mind and improve her health by a daily
drive between the hours of two and four in the afternoon.

The world knows little of its greatest women, and it is possible that
Mrs. Porter's name is not familiar to you. If this is the case, I am
pained, but not surprised. It happens only too often that the uplifter
of the public mind is baulked by a disinclination on the part of the
public mind to meet him or her half-way. The uplifter does his share.
He produces the uplifting book. But the public, instead of standing
still to be uplifted, wanders off to browse on coloured supplements and
magazine stories.

If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair.
Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave
you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put
it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put
most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the
modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on
long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined
that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers
and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason
Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in
Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond