-spread fan all the summer glories of the place.

In Mrs. Leath's hand was the letter which had opened her eyes to these
things, and a smile rose to her lips at the mere feeling of the paper
between her fingers. The thrill it sent through her gave a keener edge
to every sense. She felt, saw, breathed the shining world as though a
thin impenetrable veil had suddenly been removed from it.

Just such a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between herself and
life. It had been like the stage gauze which gives an illusive air of
reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be
no more than a painted scene.

She had been hardly aware, in her girlhood, of differing from others in
this respect. In the well-regulated well-fed Summers world the unusual
was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions
were not visited. Sometimes, with a sense of groping in a topsy-turvy
universe, Anna had wondered why everybody about her seemed to ignore all
the passions and sensations which formed the stuff of great poetry and
memorable action. In a community composed entirely of people like her
parents and her parents' friends she did not see how the magnificent
things one read about could ever have happened. She was sure that if
anything of the kind had occurred in her immediate circle her mother
would have consulted the family clergyman, and her father perhaps even
have rung up the police; and her sense of humour compelled her to own
that, in the given conditions, these precautions might not have been
unjustified.

Little by little the conditions conquered her, and she learned to regard
the substance of life as a mere canvas for the embroideries of poet
and painter, and its little swept and fenced and tended surface as its
actual substance. It was in the visioned region of action and emotion
that her fullest hours were spent; but it hardly occurred to her that
they might be translated into experience, or connected with anything
likely to happen to a young lady living in West Fifty-fifth Street.

She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly the same life
as herself, and seemingly unaware of her world of hidden beauty, were
yet possessed of some vital secret which escaped her. There seemed to be
a kind of freemasonry between them; they were wider awake than she, more
alert, and surer of their wants if not of their opinions. She supposed
they were "cleverer", and accepted her inferi