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.