woman Goliath of society and challenge her? What! expect that woman, with all her native grace and beauty, her fabulous wealth, and her years of training to give way before her? A crimson spot came out on either cheek, but she swallowed hard with her hot dry throat and set her lips in firm resolve. She could but fail. She would do it.
But how? And with what? It would take money. She could not use her husband’s, at least not much of it, not to win him back. There was a little, a few hundreds, a small legacy her grandmother had left to her. How pitifully small it seemed now! She cast a glance at a fashion magazine that lay upon her table. She had bought it the day before because of a valuable article on how to make over dress skirts to suit the coming season’s style. How satisfied with the sweet monotony of her life had she been then! It came to her with another sharp thrust now! But that magazine said that gowns from five to seven hundred dollars were no longer remarkable things. How she had smiled but the evening before as she read it and curled her lip at the unfortunates whose lives were run into the grooves of folly that could require such extravagance. Now she wished fiercely that she might possess several that cost not merely seven hundred but seven thousand dollars, if only she might outstrip them all and stand at the head for her husband to see.
But this was folly. She had only a little and that little must do! It had been put aside for a rainy day, or to send the children to college in case father failed. Alas! And now father had failed, but not in the way thought possible, and the money must be used to save him and them all from destruction, if indeed it would hold out. How long would it take, and how, how should she go about it?
With sudden energy she caught up the magazine and read. She had gone over it all the day before in her ride from the city where she had been shopping, and had recognized from its tone that it was familiar with a different world from hers. Now with sudden hope she read feverishly, if perchance there might be some help there for her.
Yes, there were suggestions of how to do this and that, how to plan and dress and act in the different functions of society; but of what use were they to her? How was she to begin? She was not in society and how was she to get there? She could not ask her husband. That would spoil it all. She must get there without his help.
If she only had that editor, that woman or whoever it was who answered those questions, for just a few minutes, she could find out if there was any way in which she could creep into that mystic circle where alone her battle could be fought. She had always despised people who wrote to newspapers for advice in their household troubles and now she felt a sudden sympathy for them. Actually it was now her only source of help, at least the only one of which she knew. Her cheeks burned as the suggestion of writing persistently put itself before her. She could hear her husband’s scornful laugh ringing out as he ridiculed the poor fools who wrote to papers for advice, and the presumption that attempted to administer medicine—mental, moral, and physical—to all the troubles of the earth.
But the wife’s heart suddenly overflowed with gratitude toward the paper. It was trying to do good in the world, it was ready to help the helpless. Why should she be ashamed to write? No one would ever know who it was. And she need not consider herself from last night’s view-point. She had come to a terrible strait. Trouble and shame had entered her life. She no longer stood upon the high pinnacle of joy in happy wifehood! Her heart was broken and her idol clay. What should she care for her former ideas of nicety? It was not for her to question the ways or the means. It was for her to snatch at the first straw that presented itself, as any sensible drowning person would do.
With firm determination she laid down the magazine and walked deliberately to her desk. Her fingers did not tremble nor the resolute look pass from her chin as she selected plain paper and envelope and wrote. The words seemed to come without need of thought. She stated the case clearly in a few words, and signed her grandmother’s initials. She folded, addressed the letter, and sent her sleepy little maid to post it before the set look relaxed.
Then having done all that was in her power to do that night she went up to her room in the dark and smothering her head in the pillow so that the baby should not be disturbed she let the wild sobs have their way.
Chapter 2: A Trip Abroad
“It is just barely possible I may have to take a flying trip to Paris,” Claude Winthrop announced casually, looking up from the newspaper which had been engrossing his attention.
It was the next morning and his wife unrefreshed from her night’s vigil was sitting quietly in her place at the breakfast table. She looked now and then at the top of her husband’s head, thinking of his face as she had seen it in the park, and trying to realize that all around her was just the same outwardly as it had been yesterday and all the days that had gone before, only she knew that it was all so different.
She made some slight reply. He had said so many times that he hoped his business would take him abroad soon, that she ceased to reproach him for desiring to go without her and the children as she had done at first. She began to feel that he would not really go after all. It had been a source of uneasiness to her many times, for she had a morbid horror of having the wide ocean separate her from the one she loved better than all on earth besides. But this morning, in the light of recent discoveries, she realized that even this trouble of the past was as nothing beside what was laid upon her now to bear.
How often it is that when we mock at a trouble, or detract from its magnitude, it comes upon us suddenly as if to taunt us and reveal its true heaviness. Miriam Winthrop felt this with a sudden sharp pang a little later that day when she received and read a brief note from her husband brought by a messenger boy. For the moment all her more recent grief was forgotten and she was tormented by her former fears and dread.
“Dear Miriam,” he had scrawled on the back of a business envelope, “I’ve got to go at once. The firm thinks I’m the only one who can represent them in Paris just now, and if I don’t go there’ll be trouble. I’m sorry it comes with such a rush but it’s a fine thing for me. Pack my grip with what you think I need for a month. I don’t want to be bothered with much. I may not get home till late and fear I shall have to take the midnight train. Haste. Claude.”
She did not stop now to study the phraseology of the hastily worded note, nor let the coldness and baldness of the announcement enter her soul like a keen blade as it would be sure to do later when the trial began in dead earnest. She did not even give a thought to the difference between this note and those he used to write her when they were first married. It was enough to realize that he was going across that terrible ocean without her and talking about it as calmly as if he were but going downtown. Other people let their husbands go off without a murmur. There was Mrs. Forsythe, who smilingly said she intended to send her husband on a tour for six months so that she could be free from household cares and do as she pleased for a little while. But then she was Mr. Forsythe’s wife, and Claude was—and then there came that sudden sharp remembrance of yesterday and its revelation, and her sorrow entered full into her being with a realization of what it was going to mean. Yes, perhaps she ought to be glad he was going away. But she was not—oh, she was not! It was worse a hundred-fold than it would have been if it had come two days ago. Now she was plunged into the awfulness of the black abyss that had yawned before her feet, and Claude was going from her and would not be there to help her out by any possible explanation, nor even to know of the horror in her path, for she knew in her heart that she could not and would not tell him her discovery now before he went. There would not be time, even if it were wise. No, she must bear it alone until he returned, if he ever did. Oh, that deep awful sea that must roll over her troubled heart for weeks before she could hope to begin to change things. Could she stand it? Would she live to brave it through?
A ringing baby laugh from the nursery,
