Why did Mildred refuse Stanley Baird and cut herself off from him, even after her hopes of Donald Keith died through lack of food, real or imaginary? It would be gratifying to offer this as a case of pure courage and high principle, untainted of the motives which govern ordinary human actions. But unluckily this is a biography, not a romance, a history and not a eulogy. And Mildred Gower is a human being, even as you and I, not a galvanized embodiment of superhuman virtues such as you and I are pretending to be, perhaps even to ourselves. The explanation of her strange aberration, which will be doubted or secretly condemned by every woman of the sheltered classes who loves her dependence and seeks to disguise it as something sweet and fine and "womanly"--the explanation of her almost insane act of renunciation of all that a lady holds most dear is simple enough, puzzling though she found it. Ignorance, which accounts for so much of the squalid failure in human life, accounts also for much if not all the most splendid audacious achievement. Very often--very, very often--the impossibilities are achieved by those who in their ignorance advance not boldly but unconcernedly where a wiser man or woman would shrink and retreat. Fortunate indeed is he or she who in a crisis is by chance equipped with neither too little nor too much knowledge--who knows enough to enable him to advance, but does not know enough to appreciate how perilous, how foolhardy, how harsh and cruel, advance will be. Mildred was in this instance thus fortunate--unfortunate, she was presently to think it. She knew enough about loveless marriage to shrink from it. She did not know enough about what poverty, moneylessness, and friendlessness mean in the actuality to a woman bred as she had been. She imagined she knew--and sick at heart her notion of poverty made her. But imagination was only faintest foreshadowing of actuality. If she had known, she would have yielded to the temptation that was almost too strong for her. And if she had yielded--what then? Not such a repulsive lot, as our comfortable classes look at it. Plenty to eat and drink and to wear, servants and equipages and fine houses and fine society, the envy of her gaping kind--a comfortable life for the body, a comfortable death for mind and heart, slowly and softly suffocated in luxury. Partly through knowledge that strongly affected her character, which was on the whole aspiring and sensitive beyond the average to the true and the beautiful, partly through ignorance that veiled the future from her none too valorous and hardy heart, she did not yield to the temptation. And thus, instead of dying, she began to live, for what is life but growth in experience, in strength and knowledge and capability?