She started once more around the circle, but one can not keep at that
sort of thing forever. About sunrise she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DUMB PRINCESS

None of his own family knew quite what to make of Anthony March. All of
them but his mother disapproved of him, on more or less mutually
contradictory grounds. Disapproved of him more than they did of one
another, though he occupied a sort of middle ground between them. It is a
possible explanation to the paradox that each of them regarded him as a
potential ally and so spent more time trying to change his ways, scolding
at him, pointing out his derelictions and lost opportunities, than it was
worth while spending on the others who were hopeless.

I shall be a little more intelligible, perhaps, if I tell you briefly
who they were. The father, David March, and Eveline, his wife, were New
Englanders. They both came, as a matter of fact, from within ten miles
of Glastonbury, Connecticut, though they didn't discover this fact until
after they'd met a number of times in the social and religious
activities of the Moody Institute. The lives of both had been woven in
the somber colors of Evangelical religion. With him this ran close to
fanaticism and served as an outlet for a very intense emotional life.
She was not highly energized enough to go to extremes in anything, but
she acquiesced in all his beliefs and practises, made him in short, a
perfectly dutiful wife according to the Miltonian precept, "He for God
only, she for God in him."

Back in New England she probably would not have married him for she was a
cut or more above him socially, the played-out end of a very fine line,
as her beautiful speech would have made evident to any sensitive ear. But
in Chicago, the disheveled, terrifying Chicago of the roaring eighties,
to all intents and purposes alone, clinging precariously to a
school-teacher's job which she had no special equipment for, she put up
only the weakest resistance to David March's determination that she
should be his wife.

He was a skilled artisan, a stringer and chipper in a piano factory
(chipping, if you care to be told, is the tuning a piano gets before its
action is put in). One would hardly have predicted then, considering the
man's energy and intelligence, that he would remain just that, go on
working at the same bench for thirty-five years. But, as I have said, his
energy found its main outlet in emotional religion.

Their