LIFE AND GABRIELLA THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE BY ELLEN GLASGOW FRONTISPIECE BY C. ALLAN GILBERT GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1916 CONTENTS BOOK FIRST--THE AGE OF FAITH CHAPTER PAGE I. Presents a Shameless Heroine 3 II. Poor Jane 30 III. A Start in Life 61 IV. Mirage 90 V. The New World 122 VI. The Old Serpent 148 VII. Motherhood 176 BOOK SECOND--THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE I. Disenchantment. 211 II. A Second Start in Life 241 III. Work 274 IV. The Dream and the Years 300 V. Success 331 VI. Discoveries 368 VII. Readjustments 406 VIII. The Test 444 IX. The Past 476 X. Dream and the Reality 501 BOOK FIRST THE AGE OF FAITH CHAPTER I PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room, the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella was patiently pulling basting threads out of the hem of a skirt. For a minute her capable hands stopped at their work, and raising her smooth dark head she looked compassionately at her sister Jane, who was sitting, like a frozen image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long horsehair sofa. Three times within the last twelve months Jane had fled from her husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a sparrow had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs. Carr had wept over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen saint, to the arms of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day, while the four older children were bribed to good behaviour with bread and damson preserves in the pantry, and the baby was contentedly playing with his rubber ring in his mother's arms, Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane must never, never go back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever happened before, for the repentant Charley had been discovered making love to his wife's dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had engaged for her spring sewing because she had more "style" than had fallen to the austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress, Miss Folly Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good," moaned Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window, wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was hemming.