utocrat Gabriella was being
instructed in this way and in that way by the powerful, strong-minded,
efficient grandmother as a tender old lioness might train a cub for the
mastering of its dangerous world. She recalled these twilight drives
when the fields along the turnpikes were turning green with the young
grain; the homeward return through the lamp-lit town to the big iron
entrance-gate, the parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the great
house, the noiseless movements, the perfect manners of the many
servants; later in the evening the music, the dancing, the wild
joy--fairyland once more. But how far, far away now! And how the forces
of life had tossed things since then like straws on the eddies of a
tempest: her grandmother killed, thousands of miles away, with sorrow;
her uncles with their oldest sons, mere boys, fighting and falling
together; tears, poverty, ruin everywhere: and she, after years of
struggle, cast completely out of the only world she had ever known into
another that she had never imagined.

Gabriella felt this evening what often came to her at times: a deep
yearning for her own people of the past, for their voices, their ways
of looking at life; for the gentleness and courtesy, and the thousand
unconscious moods and acts that rendered them distinguished and
delightful. She would have liked to slip back into the old elegance, to
have been surrounded by the old rich and beautiful things. The
child-princess who was once her sole self was destined to live within
Gabriella always.

But she knew that the society in which she had moved was lost to her
finally. Not alone through the vicissitudes of the war; for after the
war, despite the overthrow, the almost complete disappearance, of many
families, it had come together, it had reconstituted itself, it
flourished still. It was lost to her because she had become penniless
and because she had gone to work. When it transpired that she had
declined all aid, thrown off all disguises, and taken her future into
her own hands, to work and to receive wages for her work, in the social
world where she was known and where the generations of her family had
been leaders, there were kind offers of aid, secret condolences,
whispered regrets, visible distress: her resolve was a new thing for a
girl in those years. She could, indeed, in a way, have kept her place;
but she could not have endured the sympathy, the change, with which she
would have been welcomed--and disc