Business gets a hunch, or somebody’s business goes into bankruptcy. The domestic sphere spins around, loses its ancient balance and the girl gives a really fashionable tea party, after removing the precious potted plants from the front porch and placing her tables there, if it is a pleasant day. These things happen and you cannot help it. Give them an inch of education abroad and they will take an ell of license with your manners, convictions, and prejudices when they come home. Nothing like this had yet happened in Shannon. Only drummers and salesmen really knew and saw what was going on in the world, and no drummers or salesmen lived there. The town was passing tranquilly through its religious and golden-oak periods. Most people went to church, and everybody who was anybody had golden-oak furniture, including an upright piano, as distinguished from the antiquated square piano. If the latter was for the present beyond their means, they had an elaborately carved and bracketed organ of the same durable wood, through which the Sabbath-afternoon air passed in hymnal strains at about the same hour it bore the aroma of boiling coffee on week days. This is a mere flash of what Shannon was in those days; such an impression as you might have received from the window of your car if you had been passing through on one of those fast trains that did not stop at Shannon, but roared by as if this little town did not exist. And if you knew all that was to happen there within the next twenty years to only two people, not to mention the remaining six thousand of her inhabitants, to whom a great deal more must have happened, you would agree that I am justified in detaining you a moment before beginning this tale. Otherwise, how could you understand that Helen belonged by tradition, by environment, by the very petunias that bordered her mother’s flower beds, to the Agnes tribe of meek and enduring women. I am not claiming that this is a wiser, abler tribe than the numerous modern tribes of insurgent women, many of whom have faced the same emergencies. I leave each one of you to decide that question according to your lights, leaving out the traditions and the petunias, because doubtless you have long since made way with them. My task is simply to set down here exactly what happened, with no more regard for the moral than the facts themselves carry. And so I give you my word that this is a true story, and that the events I have recorded did happen and that the “House of Helen” does stand to this day in Shannon. You may see it from the window of your car, as you pass through, halfway down Wiggs Street, on the right-hand side, and facing you. It is not so large, so pretentious as the other residences which have taken the place of the cottages that stood along this street during the golden-oak period, but it looks different, that house, serene, as a house should that has weathered the storm and has fair weather forever within. CHAPTER II