He would have married Vergie Winters, they said (the old ones who remembered the beginnings of Vergie’s story and passed it on to their children and grandchildren) but there was already a girl to whom John Shadwell was betrothed, and in the background a powerful father, and John Shadwell’s career--which Vergie Winters, being only the daughter of a Swiss immigrant farmer, could do nothing to aid. Long afterward, the Town said, “Look at her! You can see what a drag she would have been on him, with her queer, silent ways. A pity, too, for she was a beautiful girl. A pity she was always bad!” But they never thought, of course, that if things had been different, Vergie Winters might not have been queer and silent; and now, looking back, one can see that they were quite wrong. It was not Vergie Winters who was a drag on his career. It was the other woman, John Shadwell’s wife, who turned into a strange, whining, melancholy invalid before they had been married two years. And what could John Shadwell do? Desert her? It was not possible. And in the way of such invalids she lived for more than forty years, forty dreary years, complaining, hypochondriac, nagging. She outlived even her husband, a great, vigorous, handsome man, who treated her patiently and with gentlemanly respect. “It was a pity about John Shadwell’s wife,” people said. “And she was such a lady, too.” And Vergie Winters? She did not break her heart. She did not marry some stupid lout and give up her life to a dull unhappiness. She did not wither away into spinsterhood. She loved John Shadwell, who knows how passionately, how deeply, in the profound depths of that curious, remote soul of hers? She left her parents (“to set herself up in dressmaking and millinery,” so she said), and took a narrow wooden house on Main Street, where she put up a card in the window and sold hats to the women of the Town. And before two years had passed it was to this narrow house that John Shadwell came, secretly--it must have been with an amazing secrecy, for no one even suspected the visits for more than three years. She made no effort to be more friendly with people about her than was required by the simple routine of her trade. She lived placidly, with a strange, rich contentment, inside the walls of the narrow little house. One met her sometimes, usually after darkness had fallen, walking with her slow, dignified step along the streets of the Town. But she was alone ... always alone.