, all the
possibilities of a Western American girl's existence lay before her.
A piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the
limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of
the unpainted "meeting-house" were already the promise of those
possibilities. Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was
limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors. There were
small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted
floors of outlying log-cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright,
clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed
upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the
county judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and
unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter. Eventually she had married
the male of her species, a young stranger, who, as schoolmaster in
the nearest town, had utilized to some local extent a scant capital
of education. In obedience to the unwritten law of the West, after
the marriage was celebrated the doors of the ancestral home cheerfully
opened, and bride and bridegroom issued forth, without regret and
without sentiment, to seek the further possibilities of a life beyond
these already too familiar voices. With their departure for California
as Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tucker, the parental nest in the Blue Grass
meadows knew them no more.

They submitted with equal cheerfulness to the privations and excesses of
their new conditions. Within three years the schoolmaster developed into
a lawyer and capitalist, the Blue Grass bride supplying a grace and ease
to these transitions that were all her own. She softened the abruptness
of sudden wealth, mitigated the austerities of newly acquired power, and
made the most glaring incongruity picturesque. Only one thing seemed
to limit their progress in the region of these possibilities. They
were childless. It was as if they had exhausted the future in their own
youth, leaving little or nothing for another generation to do.

A southwesterly storm was beating against the dressing-room windows
of their new house in one of the hilly suburbs of San Francisco, and
threatening the unseasonable frivolity of the stucco ornamentation of
cornice and balcony. Mrs. Tucker had been called from the contemplation
of the dreary prospect without by the arrival of a visitor. On
entering the drawing-room she found him engaged in a half-admiring,
half-resen