ed her twenty-two years wholly shielded from the human maelstrom,
fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools. Her head
was full of university lore, things she had read, a smattering of the
arts and philosophy, liberal portions of academic knowledge, all tagged
and sorted like parcels on a shelf to be reached when called for. Buried
under these externalities the ego of her lay unaroused, an incalculable
quantity.

All of which is merely by way of stating that Miss Estella Benton was a
young woman who had grown up quite complacently in that station of life
in which--to quote the Philistines--it had pleased God to place her, and
that Chance had somehow, to her astonished dismay, contrived to thrust a
spoke in the smooth-rolling wheels of destiny. Or was it Destiny? She
had begun to think about that, to wonder if a lot that she had taken for
granted as an ordered state of things was not, after all, wholly
dependent upon Chance. She had danced and sung and played
lightheartedly accepting a certain standard of living, a certain
position in a certain set, a pleasantly ordered home life, as her
birthright, a natural heritage. She had dwelt upon her ultimate destiny
in her secret thoughts as foreshadowed by that of other girls she knew.
The Prince would come, to put it in a nutshell. He would woo gracefully.
They would wed. They would be delightfully happy. Except for the matter
of being married, things would move along the same pleasant channels.

Just so. But a broken steering knuckle on a heavy touring car set things
in a different light--many things. She learned then that death is no
respecter of persons, that a big income may be lived to its limit with
nothing left when the brain force which commanded it ceases to function.
Her father produced perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year in
his brokerage business, and he had saved nothing. Thus at one stroke she
was put on an equal footing with the stenographer in her father's
office. Scarcely equal either, for the stenographer earned her bread and
was technically equipped for the task, whereas Estella Benton had no
training whatsoever, except in social usage. She did not yet fully
realize just what had overtaken her. Things had happened so swiftly, to
ruthlessly, that she still verged upon the incredulous. Habit clung
fast. But she had begun to think, to try and establish some working
relation between herself and things as she found them. She had
di