n actor's face, a bright eye, and a slippery hand. Daphne
had a vivid, and, on the whole, affectionate, remembrance of her father,
of whom, however, she seldom spoke. The thought of her mother, on the
other hand, was always unwelcome. It brought back recollections of storm
and tempest; of wild laughter, and still wilder tears; of gorgeous
dresses, small feet, and jewelled fingers.

No; her parents had but small place in that dramatic autobiography that
Daphne was now constructing for herself. She was not their daughter in
any but the physical sense; she was the daughter of her own works and
efforts.

She leant forward to the fire, her face propped in her hands, going back
in thought to her father's death, when she was fifteen; to her three
years of cloying convent life, and her escape from it, as well as from
the intriguing relations who would have kept her there; to the clever
lawyer who had helped to put her in possession of her fortune, and the
huge sums she had paid him for his services; to her search for
education, her hungry determination to rise in the world, the friends
she had made at college, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington. She had
been influenced by one _milieu_ after another; she had worked hard, now
at music, now at philosophy; had dabbled in girls' clubs, and gone to
Socialist meetings, and had been all through driven on by the gadfly of
an ever-increasing ambition.

Ambition for what! She looked back on this early life with a bitter
contempt. What had it all come to? Marriage with Roger Barnes!--a hasty
passion of which she was already ashamed, for a man who was already
false to her.

What had made her marry him? She did not mince matters with herself in
her reply. She had married him, influenced by a sudden, gust of physical
inclination--by that glamour, too, under which she had seen him in
Washington, a glamour of youth and novelty. If she had seen him first in
his natural environment she would have been on her guard; she would have
realized what it meant to marry a man who could help her own ideals and
ambitions so little. And what, really, had their married life brought
her? Had she ever been _sure_ of Roger?--had she ever been able to feel
proud of him, in the company of really distinguished men?--had she not
been conscious, again and again, when in London, or Paris, or Berlin,
that he was her inferior, that he spoiled her social and intellectual
chances? And his tone toward women had alwa