And moving, always moving. As Gita grew older she learned that her father and his guests not only drank and caroused but gambled, sometimes all day as all night . . . that his friends persecuted her mother, whom they called the Blonde Madonna. She received little protection from her husband, with whom, nevertheless, she was at that time infatuated; she hated him later. Gita begged her mother to leave him and return to San Francisco, but this seemed a poor alternative to the tormented Millicent. Her parents were dead, her only relative was an aunt, whom she disliked. She had no desire to return to a city, where, in her first season, and to the envy of the other girls, she had captured the handsome and dashing Easterner, visiting polo friends in Burlingame. Now they thought of her as living brilliantly in Europe, although it must have struck them as odd sometimes that they never were able to communicate with her in their many trips abroad. Moreover, a wife’s duty was to her husband, no matter what he might be. Even at the age of ten Gita sniffed. But her lovely mother was the one perfect being in a too imperfect world, and if she said it was right to live with a man who was intoxicated most of the time, hit her, subjected her to every form of insult, then right it must be. But she conceived a strong distaste for husbands and abominated her father, informing him more than once she wished he were dead. He would scowl or grin down at the small child, straight and defiant, and smack her or toss her to the ceiling, according to his mood. Carteret was an unlucky gambler, on the whole, and lived “on the interest of his debts,” after his own and his wife’s inheritances had expired. When his creditors became too pressing he bundled his family out in the night and set up in another capital. When fortune ran with him he was charming and generous; when luck jibed he struck his wife, his child, his servants, whoever got in his raging way, raved like a madman, then collapsed in drunken tears at his Madonna’s feet and implored her forgiveness. . . . Gita hated him increasingly, hated the other men, with their well-bred dissipated faces, who persecuted her mother . . . in time herself. . . . Herself! These were the ugliest and most indelible memories of all. . . . This life, in which the war made no appreciable difference, ended abruptly when Gita was sixteen. Gerald Carteret died of typhoid fever in a French provincial town where he was hiding from his creditors. Gita sold her grandmother Sears’ engagement-ring, the only remaining jewel, and buried him thankfully; then sat for three months at her mother’s bedside in the charity ward of a hospital, exercising her will frantically to keep life in her mother’s exhausted body; a poor family in the neighborhood keeping life in her own.