She saw her progress as though she were looking down at great revolving spirals, complete in themselves, yet merging in an upward progress. How many men--not by tens, but by scores--she had deliberately used in her upward striving! "Yes; this is my punishment!" she said breathlessly. She had a feeling that they--the others--were now to be revenged. * * * * * She had only a faint impression of her home in a little village town of Ohio. Home it had never been. Her father, brilliant, erratic, emigrant from New England, half politician, half journalist, had suddenly disappeared from her life when she was not yet in her teens. They had told her many things at the time. Afterward she had divined what must have happened--unhappiness, flight with another woman, divorce. Her mother, perhaps the most to blame, had remarried immediately. She had known nothing of her step-father, only that he was some one in power in Cincinnati politics, and well-off. She had been left to the care of an aunt, and very soon she had realized that her duty in life was to make her own way. And this way she had achieved, or rather had made others achieve for her. She had been precocious, feeling herself a little mongrel who must captivate by its tricks. How simple it had all been--this curious spiral mounting from the pillared house at the corner of the village green, through various strata, to this--to New York, and to the heart of New York at the last! She could never remember the time when she had not had the devotion of the opposite sex. No one had ever needed to teach her the art of pleasing, yet she had known how to exercise it everywhere. She remembered curious odd figures, girlhood admirers, whom she blushed now to have cared even to attract. How her ideas had changed! How she had been educated! And how many different types of men she had known! At first it had been the grocery clerk, a ruddy Saxon, who had cut prices and swollen measures, fatuously, for her sake; then a young engineer on the railroad who had appealed to her imagination; little storekeepers, a local reporter, the captain of the village nine--a giant in those days: not singly, but a dozen at once at her feet.