while it lasted.
I tell you, my dear, those were strenuous times but they had a zest of
their own."

I saw more of the picture she was revealing than she thought I did.
I could guess that the one who most often sold anything was the woman
who was so calmly telling me the story of those early hardships. I
knew that the dominant member of that little group of stragglers, the
one who heartened them all, the one who would unhesitatingly go hungry
herself if she thought a comrade needed it, was Lillian Underwood.

"And then I spoiled my life. I married."

"Don't misunderstand me," she hastened to say. "I do not mean that I
believe all marriages are failures. I believe tremendously in
married happiness, but I think I must be one of the women who are
temperamentally unfitted to make any man happy."

Her tone was bitter, self-accusing.

"You cannot make me believe that," I said stoutly. "I would rather
believe that you were very unwise in your choice of husbands."

She laughed ironically.

"Well, we will let it go at that! At any rate there is only one word
that describes my first marriage. It was hell from start to finish."

The look on her face told me she was not exaggerating. It was a look,
only graven by intense suffering.

"When the baby came my feeling for Will changed. He had worn me out.
The love I had given him I lavished upon the child. Will's mother came
to live with us--she had been drifting around miserably before--and
while she failed me at the time of the divorce, yet she was a tower of
strength to me during the baby's infancy. I was very fond of her and
I think she sincerely liked me. But Will, her only son, could always
make her believe black was white, as I later found out to my sorrow.

"With the vanishing of the hectic love I had felt for Will, things
went more smoothly with me. I worked like a slave to keep up the
expenses of the home and to lay by something for the baby's future. My
husband was away so much that the boys and girls gradually came back
to something like their old term of intimacy. I never gave the matter
of propriety a thought. My mother-in-law, a baby and a maid, were
certainly chaperons enough.

"Afterward I found out that my husband, equipped with his legal
knowledge, had set all manner of traps for me, had bribed my maid, and
diabolically managed to twist the most innocent visits of the boys of
the old crowd to our home to his own evil meanings.

"Then came the crash. Dic