Though Judith Arden was only just out of her teens, she was older in mind and ways; she ranked herself, and was accepted, as contemporary with women in the middle and later twenties, like Bernadette and Esther Norton Ward. She had had to face the world practically by herself. An epidemic of fever in an Italian town had carried off father and mother when she was fifteen. She had got them buried, herself quarantined and back to England, unaided, as she best could. That was a developing experience. At home she came under the guardianship of her uncle, Godfrey Lisle, which was much the same thing as coming under her own. Godfrey was not practical; the care of a growing girl was hopelessly beyond him. Judith put herself to school at Paris; that finished with, she tried Cambridge for a term, and found it too like going back to school. She kept house for a while with an old school-comrade, an art-student, in Paris. The friend married, and she was by herself again. A visit to Hilsey led to the sort of semi-attachment to the Godfrey Lisle household which she described to Esther; from the position of a "poor relation" she was saved by her four hundred pounds a year--her mother's portion; the late Mr. Arden, author of books on art, and travel in the interests of art, had left nothing but some personal debts behind. To the maturity of her world-experience there was one exception; she had never been in love; the transitory flirtations of ball-rooms and studios had left her amused but heart-whole.