SONIA MARRIED STEPHEN McKENNA "As a clownish Fellow was driving his cart along a deep miry lane, the wheel stuck so fast in the clay, that his horse could not draw it out. Upon this he fell a bawling and praying to Hercules to come and help him. Hercules, looking down from a cloud, bid him not to lie there like an idle, dastardly booby as he was, but get up and whip his horse, and clap his shoulder stoutly to the wheel, adding that this was the only way for him to obtain assistance." The Fables of Æsop: "Hercules and the Carter." SONIA MARRIED BY STEPHEN McKENNA AUTHOR OF "SONIA," "MIDAS AND SON," "NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE," ETC. [Illustration: Logo] NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE METROPOLITAN PUBLICATIONS, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA EPISTLE DEDICATORY To WALTER FRANCIS ROCH My dear Roch, Ever since you read "SONIA" in manuscript, you have been the book's most generous critic. May I mark my gratitude for this and for a friendship older than "SONIA" by dedicating its successor to you? Perhaps you remember openly doubting whether in fact the spiritual shock of war could so change and steady Sonia as to make her a fitting wife for any man, O'Rane most of all; you may recollect my confessing that such a marriage of hysterical impulse contained the seeds of instant disaster. Sequels are admittedly failures, but I look on this book less as a sequel than as an epilogue or footnote. Sonia was not to know happiness until she had suffered, and the sacrifice in the early days of war was to many a new and heady self-indulgence. It is the length of the war, the sickening repetition of one well-placed blow after another on the same bruised flesh that has tested the survivors. After a year of war O'Rane could have mustered many followers, when he murmured to himself, "I--all of us who were out there--have seen it. We can't forget. The courage, the cold, heart-breaking courage ... and the smile on a dying man's face.... We must never let it be forgotten, we've earned the right. As long as a drunkard kicks his wife, or a child goes hungry, or a woman is driven through shame to disease and death.... Is it a great thing to ask? To demand of England to remember that the criminals and loafers and prostitutes are somebody's children, mothers and sisters? And that we've all been saved by a miracle of suffering? Is that too great a strain on our chivalry? I'll go out if need be, but--but _must_ we stand at street corners to tell what we've seen? To ask the bystanders--and ourselves--whether we went to war to preserve the right of inflicting pain?"