e sombre
drawing-room curtains and pitch the stiff-backed, haircloth chairs out
of the window; but her father, though a millionaire, would brook no
change. Still she struggled on, demanding an alteration in the dinner
hour, wine at table and the discarding of the family carry-all. "Do you
want me to open the house to Satan?" her mother asked in horrified
tones. "I want you to be civilized beings and not anchorites," she
replied. Her mother's friends were practically limited to the
communicants of the Knox Presbyterian Church, but such a society only
served to exasperate her more. To her the men were stupid slaves of
business and the women narrow-minded prudes. There was a progressive set
whose companionship she desired, but in her mother's mind they were the
Devil's chosen, and were consequently forbidden the house. In
desperation Marion sought relief and it came in the shape of a husband.
Roswell Sanderson was vice-president of her father's bank, rich,
prominent, and,--what was more to her,--liberal-minded. He asked her to
be his wife, and, without analyzing her feelings further than the sense
of gratefulness which she felt, she accepted him. After a brief
engagement they were married and her new life began.

Marion's husband was a country boy who had been sent to an Eastern
college; and possessing American energy and perception in a marked
degree, he rapidly won a place in the first rank of Chicago business
men. He was a man of broad ideas and sympathies, but lacked the delicate
veneer of manners which distinguishes the cosmopolite from the
provincial. In Marion's eyes this fault soon became greatly magnified.
His flat pronunciation and Western inflection, his cordial, unstudied
manner and hearty laughter so mortified her that in the presence of
those who were capable of recognizing his shortcomings, her manner
became apologetic. His open-hearted frankness, which made him a friend
of high and low, so rasped her ideas of convention that all sense of
sympathy was destroyed, and her married life was no more congenial than
that at home had been. Roswell never criticised her actions, so she was
enabled to seek relief in society. She saw the gradual enlargement and
improvement of Chicago but she was able to pick flaws in the struggles
of society to break the shackles of provincialism, and she longed to
hasten the _metropolizing_ process. Unlike Florence Moreland she could
not admire the vigor and freshness of Western life,