became what sentimentalists fondly suppose the relationship between
mother and daughter must always be--what, alas, it so rarely, but then
so beautifully, is.

I date from that hour Miss Goucher's abandonment of her predilection for
the lethal chamber; at least, she never spoke of it again. And Sonia
stayed with us. Her boy was born in my house, and there for three happy
years was nourished and shamelessly spoiled; at the end of which time
Sonia found a husband in the person of young Jack Palumbo,
unquestionably the pick of all our Hillhouse Avenue chauffeurs. Their
marriage caused a brief scandal in the neighborhood, but was soon
accepted as an authentic and successful fact.

Chance and change are not always villains, you observe; the
temperamental Sonia has grown stout and placid, and has increased the
world's legitimate population by three. Nevertheless, it is the
consensus of opinion that little Ivan, her first-born, is the golden
arrow in her quiver--an opinion in which Jack Palumbo delightedly, if
rather surprisingly, concurs.

And so much for Sonia.... Let the curtain quietly descend. When it rises
again, six years will have passed; good years--and therefore unrecorded.
Your scribe, Susan, is now nearing forty; and you---- Great heavens, is
it possible! Can you be "going on"--twenty?

Yes, dear---- You are.

THE THIRD CHAPTER

I

IT was October; the year, 1913. Susan, Miss Goucher and I had just
returned from Liverpool on the good ship "Lusitania"--there was a good
ship "Lusitania" in those days--after a delightful summer spent in Italy
and France. Susan and I entirely agree that the season for Italy is
midsummer. Italy is not Italy until she has drunk deep of the sun; until
a haze of whitest dust floats up from the slow hoofs of her white oxen
along Umbrian or Tuscan roads. You will never get from her churches all
they can give unless they have been to you as shadows of great rocks in
a weary land. To step from reverberating glare to vast cool dimness--ah,
that is to know at last the meaning of sanctuary!

But to step from a North River pier into a cynical taxi, solely
energized by our great American principle of "Take a chance!"--to be
bumped and slithered by that energizing principle across the main
traffic streams of impatient New York--that is to reawaken to all the
doubt and distraction, the implacable multiplicity of a scientifically
disordered world!

New Haven was better; Hillhouse A