And there the young widow sat at the open window, conscious of no impression beyond that which she had frequently acquired from reading a novel at the same window. She felt that she had been reading an account of a wreck in a novel, in which the hero lost his life in a forlorn hope to rescue his fellow creatures, and the hero had been a black sheep; the object of the writer being to show that even the worst man may have in his nature the elements of the heroic. The man Blaydon seemed as legendary to her as Jim Bludso in Hay’s ballad. He seemed quite as remote from her life. She took no more than a novel-reader’s interest in the story. She was harder than the newspaper men, for she could not bring herself up to a point of sympathizing with the young widow. “Good heavens!” she cried, getting to her feet so quickly that the papers fluttered down to the carpet. “Good heavens! have I allowed myself to be made miserable for so long by a person who was no more than a character out of a novel--one of the black sheep hero novels? Oh, what a fool I was--as foolish as the girls who cry copiously when their fustian hero gets into trouble.” Then she leant up against the side of the window and was lost in a maze of thought. Several minutes had passed before she found herself, so to speak; and she found herself with a smile on her face. “Good heavens!” she said again. “Good heavens! After all I was not miserable, but glad. I allowed myself to be driven into marrying him when all the time I did not even like him. I had a sense of committing suicide--of annihilating myself--when I married him, and I now know that it was a relief to me when we were separated. And now the final relief has come--relief and release; and my life is once more in my own hands. Thank God for that! Thank God for that!” And then, strange though it was, she began to recall, apparently without any connection with her previous reflections, something that she had said to Rosa when on their way to the primrose park in the forenoon--something about immorality--it was certainly a very foolish thing--some hint that if she were to set her mind--no, her heart--upon some object, she would not allow any considerations that were generally called moral considerations to interfere with her achievement of that object. That was in substance what she had said in her foolishness, and now, thinking upon it, she felt that it was not merely a very foolish thing to say, but a very shocking thing as well. The very idea at which she had hinted was revolting to her now, so that she could not understand what was the origin of the impulse in the force of which she had talked so wildly. This was what she now felt, illustrating with some amount of emphasis how a slight change in the conditions which govern a young woman’s life may cause her to lose a sense of the right perspective in a fancy picture that she is drawing, as she believes, direct from Nature.