She was a great favourite in the office. Again a thaw had succeeded a second glacier period, induced by entire change of environment, and she liked nearly everybody she knew, and became a most genial and expansive young woman. She often laughed at herself, and concluded that she would never strike the proper balance until she fell in love (if she ever did), when the large and restless currents of her nature would unite and find their proper destination. She had no “weird experiences.” Her abounding feminity appealed to the chivalry of the gentlemen among whom she was thrown, and she was clever enough not to flirt with them, to treat them impartially as good comrades. The second-class men detested her, and were not conciliated: the underbred newspaper man touches a lower notch of vulgarity than any person of similar social degree the world over. * * * * * One morning she awoke about four o’clock,—that is, her mind awoke; her body was still too full of sleep to move to the right or left. It was one of her favourite sensations, and she lay for a time meditating upon the various pleasures, great and small, which are part of man’s inheritance. Suddenly she became conscious that it was raining. She had moved into a back room on the second floor. Beside one window was a tin roof upon which the rain poured with heavy reiterance. In the back yard was a large ailanthus tree which lifted itself past her windows to the floor above. A light wind rustled it. The rain pattered monotonously upon its wide leaves, producing a certain sweet volume of sound. It was long since she had listened to rain in the night. It was associated in her mind with the vague sweet dreams of girlhood and with her life in Carmel Valley. She had loved to wander through the pine woods when the winter rains were beating through the uplifted arms, swirling and splashing in the dark fragrant depths. It said something to her then, she hardly knew what, nor when it roared upon the roof of the old farmhouse, or flung itself through the windows of Carmel tower, as she and Solomon huddled close to the wall. But when it had beaten upon the roof of her little room in Miss Tremont’s house it had sung the loneliness of youth into her soul, murmured of the great joy to which every woman looks forward as her birthright. Hard worked and absorbed as she may have been during the day, if the rain awoke her in the night, it was to dreams of love and of nothing else, and of the time when she should no longer be alone. This morning she listened to the rain for a time, then moved suddenly to her side, her eyes opening more widely in the dark. The rain said nothing to her. She listened to it without a thrill, with no longing, with no loneliness of soul, and no vague tremor of passion.