She came back to the fire, pushed a footstool upon the hearth, and sat down, crouching close to the flame. "I'm not yet twenty-six. I was married to Julian Bolt when I was eighteen. I'd known him--or I thought I'd known him--for years. His mother and sisters went in summer to the place in the mountains where we always went. They had money, though less than people supposed. Julian spent two weeks with them each summer. He was older than I, of course,--years older. But he used to row us girls upon the lake, and to play tennis with us, and we thought him wonderful. We called him 'The Prince.' As I got older, he rowed me sometimes alone on the lake, and now and then we went for a walk together. He was good-looking, and he dressed and talked well, and he spent money. I had heard somebody call him 'a man-about-town'--but I didn't know what 'a man-about-town' meant. There were two or three families in the place with daughters out or about to come out, and they made Julian Bolt very welcome. I never heard a father or mother there say a word against him. Mine didn't. "Well, I came out very early, and the summer after, when I went to Virginia, to the White with my aunt, and that winter when I stayed with some army people at Old Point, he came to both places, and I knew that he came to see me. He told me so.... Of course, though I would have died rather than say it, even to myself, of course, I was expecting men to fall in love with me and ask me to marry them--and expecting to choose one, having first, of course, fallen in love with him, and be married in white satin and old lace, and be romantically happy and provided for ever after! Isn't that the thinking rôle for every properly brought-up girl? The funny thing is that I'd rather die than see Betty come upon that treadmill they've built for a girl's mind!... Well, I was on it all right....