Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As the weeks fled, as the bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man who might have offered himself--no matter how repellent he might have been. She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes with the mass of middle-class people for comfort. She wanted what she had--the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used. In the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many indications of depravity. In Mildred Gower's brain they were the natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her training, nothing as to her character. So, when she, thinking only of a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice. But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered. Indeed, no man of any kind offered. Instead, it was her mother who married. A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally thought, proposed, and was accepted. And two years and a month after Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury--and ceased to veil from her new husband the truth as to her affairs. Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend. She was now to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders into a poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth. Not so the elderly man or woman. As we grow older, no matter how timidly conventional we are by nature, we become, through selfishness or through indifference to the opinion of others or through impatience of petty restraint, more and more outspoken. Old Presbury discovered how he had tricked himself four days after the wedding. He and his bride were at the Waldorf in New York, a-honeymooning.