h. Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole
from twenty-four and matrimony. Stella subscribed to that. She took for
her guiding-star--theoretically--the twin concepts of morality and duty
as she had been taught to construe them. So she saw no loophole, and
seeing none, felt cheated of something infinitely precious. Marriage and
motherhood had not come to her as the fruits of love, as the
passionately eager fulfilling of her destiny. It had been thrust upon
her. She had accepted it as a last resort at a time when her powers of
resistance to misfortune were at the ebb.

She knew that this sort of self-communing was a bad thing, that it was
bound to sour the whole taste of life in her mouth. As much as possible
she thrust aside those vague, repressed longings. Materially she had
everything. If she had foregone that bargain with Jack Fyfe, God only
knew what long-drawn agony of mind and body circumstances and Charlie
Benton's subordination of her to his own ends might have inflicted upon
her. That was the reverse of her shield, but one that grew dimmer as
time passed. Mostly, she took life as she found it, concentrating upon
Jack Junior, a sturdy boy with blue eyes like his father, and who grew
steadily more adorable.

Nevertheless she had recurring periods when moodiness and ill-stifled
discontent got hold of her. Sometimes she stole out along the cliffs to
sit on a mossy boulder, staring with absent eyes at the distant hills.
And sometimes she would slip out in a canoe, to lie rocking in the lake
swell,--just dreaming, filled with a passive sort of regret. She could
not change things now, but she could not help wishing she could.

Fyfe warned her once about getting offshore in the canoe. Roaring Lake,
pent in the shape of a boomerang between two mountain ranges, was
subject to squalls. Sudden bursts of wind would shoot down its length
like blasts from some monster funnel. Stella knew that; she had seen the
glassy surface torn into whitecaps in ten minutes, but she was not
afraid of the lake nor the lake winds. She was hard and strong. The
open, the clean mountain air, and a measure of activity, had built her
up physically. She swam like a seal. Out in that sixteen-foot Peterboro
she could detach herself from her world of reality, lie back on a
cushion, and lose herself staring at the sky. She paid little heed to
Fyfe's warning beyond a smiling assurance that she had no intention of
courting a watery end.

So on