until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable
is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made
wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of
stalking about grewsome and accidental, becomes a prearranged
pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault,
where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is
swept continually away.

Such was the environment of Edith Whittlesey. Nothing happened.
It could scarcely be called a happening, when, at the age of
twenty-five, she accompanied her mistress on a bit of travel to the
United States. The groove merely changed its direction. It was
still the same groove and well oiled. It was a groove that bridged
the Atlantic with uneventfulness, so that the ship was not a ship
in the midst of the sea, but a capacious, many-corridored hotel
that moved swiftly and placidly, crushing the waves into submission
with its colossal bulk until the sea was a mill-pond, monotonous
with quietude. And at the other side the groove continued on over
the land - a well-disposed, respectable groove that supplied hotels
at every stopping-place, and hotels on wheels between the stopping-
places.

In Chicago, while her mistress saw one side of social life, Edith
Whittlesey saw another side; and when she left her lady's service
and became Edith Nelson, she betrayed, perhaps faintly, her ability
to grapple with the unexpected and to master it. Hans Nelson,
immigrant, Swede by birth and carpenter by occupation, had in him
that Teutonic unrest that drives the race ever westward on its
great adventure. He was a large-muscled, stolid sort of a man, in
whom little imagination was coupled with immense initiative, and