Her book, too, was a shock to Frances. It was the story of a woman living on the prairies--the Lonely Woman--alone with a stolid husband; then a young clergyman stopped there on his way somewhere, and chapter after chapter recounted the wiles, the lures of the lonely woman to rouse his passion, to destroy his honour. In the end she got him, triumphed for a few lurid days, and then tried to run away with him. But they were overtaken by a blizzard and died, frozen to death. The pursuing husband saw them, sitting clasped in each other’s arms, and shot them, not knowing that they were already dead, and then gave himself up to the police and was hanged. It was what her publishers called “palpitating”--very. Nothing was left to the imagination. Frances thought it awful; she hadn’t been trained to see the poetry in lust. All she could say in praise was that the prairie scenes seemed very true to life, and Miss Eppendorfer assured her that they were. “I’ve lived out there,” she said. She often told scraps of her past life, but they wouldn’t piece together; sometimes one story directly contradicted another. She had been married, sometimes she said once, sometimes twice, and her husband--or first husband--had been “unspeakable.” She had divorced him, or he her. Sometimes she described her childhood as ideally happy, her parents as wealthy and indulgent; then, once, she told Frances she was the daughter of a wretched woman who had lived with a worker in the Chicago stockyards. Yet all this didn’t impress Frances as lying; it was too vague, too aimless; she couldn’t help a stupid feeling that Miss Eppendorfer didn’t _know_ exactly what had happened to her. Which was of course absurd.... And she was sure that the stories which told of want, pain, and struggle were the true ones, that the poor woman had suffered. Talent she undoubtedly possessed. Although Frances detested the persistent fleshliness of her stories, she had a generous admiration for the gift itself. She would watch her writing, almost with awe, wondering where the ideas came from, from what unfathomable reservoir she drew so easily. She had no style, little art, couldn’t even use the language properly; simply she put on paper the visions of her curious mind. She sometimes used to cry as she wrote. And, although her books were oversensual, her talk wasn’t. She avoided those topics which distressed the austere Frances. IV It was not for six months that Frances got her first clue to this baffling creature. She tried to study her, to understand her, why she had no friends, no “circle” such as she had imagined literary people always had, why she was sometimes so slovenly, sometimes so extravagantly dressed, why sometimes she couldn’t bear to go out, and sometimes couldn’t endure staying at home.