At the close of a day late in November Emily Garwood came down the walk from the old house that had been her home so long, and at the gate paused for a backward glance of farewell. The oaks under which for so many years she had watched the coming and going of all she loved, were barren, save for the few bronzed leaves that clung with the tenacity of their species to the gnarled boughs. Other leaves, withered and yellow, that had succumbed to the common fate of things, strewed the ground everywhere. Here and there they had been pressed into wet mats by the cold autumnal rains; otherwise they rustled with the wind that ranged through the wide yard. The night was falling swiftly, the darkness increasing by visible degrees as if with the gradual closing of some automatic shutter that was ultimately to exclude the light. Black shadows rose unexpectedly from the ground and silently enfolded objects Emily had known so long that they had become a part of her very life, so intimately associated with all its experiences that she realized her own affection for them but now, when she was leaving them. The old home, to her sensitive imagination, seemed to regard her out of its vacant, lifeless windows with a cold and distant stare, as if already it had begun to forget her. And so she closed the gate softly, as if the clash of its latch might arouse memories that were making ready to pursue her out of the old homestead, drew more snugly into the hollow of her arm the bundle of odds and ends she had gathered up in her final inspection of its dismantled rooms, and hurried away along Sangamon Avenue. The atmosphere held in suspension many more autumnal rains, with such a chill besides that her little figure seemed to shrink with the cold, as it dissolved in the shadows and disappeared. The day of the primaries had marked the fall of the last of Emily's ideals, and she felt, with her old habit of fixing a formal duty for every occasion that she must recognize the change by some definite, decisive act. But as she gradually revolved the problem life had set for her, and one after another weighed all the common solutions that men and women consider at such times--perhaps because of sheer inability to grapple with such monstrous spiritual difficulties--she shrank from them, finding them all so sordid, so squalid, so inadequate to a nature like hers. And so she lived on from day to day, trying to reason it out, and failing in that, awaiting the next scene in her domestic tragedy.