gift, the unrest of dreams stifled, thwarted, but never destroyed.

She had made a compact with God, and she continued to keep it; but more
and more hunger stared out of her eyes and a nervous restlessness
betrayed itself in her manner. She was happy, but she was not
satisfied. Something clamored in her unappeased.

If she had lived in a large city, there would at least have been food,
if not activity, for that clamoring, aching thing within her. There
would have been pictures and music and plays to lift her, at times,
into the world of poetic beauty for which she longed. But Shadyville
could offer nothing to one of her mental quality; as a girl she had
found diversion in its social gaiety, but as a matron, the mother of a
nine-year-old son, even the social life of the town was restricted for
her to card-parties and the doubtful amusement of chaperonage.

For in Shadyville, the young married people early abdicated in favor of
those still younger, those still seeking mates. Society was, in fact,
merely a means of finding one's mate, so primitive had the little town
remained; companionship between men and women, save as an opportunity
for the eternal quest, was unknown. Wives and mothers sat placidly, or
wearily, against the walls at dances, watching the game of man and
maid, and slaked their thirst for entertainment, for stimulating
comradeship, at the afternoon teas and bridge parties of their own sex.
Now and then a reading club or a study class was organized, a naive
effort toward an understanding of things which Shadyville vaguely
perceived to be of importance beyond its boundaries; and always the
class or club died of insufficient nourishment. Within thirty miles of
a large town, the life of Shadyville remained uncorrupted--and
unimproved; a healthy, simple, joyous affair of the love-quest in
youth; a healthy, simple, and usually contented, matter of home-making
and child-rearing later. Sheila, having stepped over into the second
stage with her marriage, was not supposed to feel any longings which
her domestic existence could not satisfy; and feeling them, in defiance
of Shadyville's standards and traditions, she could but suppress and
starve them.

"Let me go down to the office every day and help you," she suggested to
Ted finally, "I used to help you--before we were married."

But Ted, whose limited ambitions had realized themselves and whose work
had now settled into a comfortable routine for which he