And not till I saw this did I realize that Vio herself was up against the first big struggle of her life. She had never hitherto faced what might be called a moral situation. Her history had been that of any other well-off girl in a city like Boston, where money and position entitled her to whatever was best in the small realm. American civilization, like that of the Italy of the Middle Ages, being civic and not national, the boundaries of Boston, with its suburbs and seaside resorts, had formed the limits of Vio’s horizon. True, she had spent a good deal of time in Europe—but always as a Bostonian. She had made periodical visits to Newport, Bar Harbor, Palm Beach, and White Sulphur Springs—but always as a Bostonian. Once she had traveled as far on the American continent as California—but still as a Bostonian. Boston sufficed for Vio, seeing that it was big enough to give her variety, and swell enough to permit her to shine with little competition. Competition irked her, for the reason that she despised taking trouble. With the exception of a toilet exact to the last detail of refinement, her life was always at loose ends. She rarely answered letters; she rarely returned calls; she never kept accounts; if she began a book she didn’t finish it. Adoring little Bobby during the months of his brief life, she found the necessities of motherhood unbearable. That she was as a rule picturesquely unhappy was due to the fact of having nothing on which to whet her spiritual mettle. Like a motor working while the motor-car stands still, she churned herself into action that got nowhere as a result. But now for the first time in her life she was face to face with a great, big personal problem. How big and great the problem was I didn’t at the time understand. All I could see was that she was meeting her baptism of fire, and that I was the means of the ministration. Pushing open the door between her room and mine I received again the impression of almost awesome privilege I had got on our return from our honeymoon. I had never been at my ease in this room; it was Vio’s sanctuary, her fastness. It was a Soames and Torrance sanctuary and fastness, and to it I had only been admitted, not given its freedom as a right. Possibly the feeling that always came to me on crossing its threshold, that I stepped out of my own domain, betokened the missing strand in the tie that had bound Vio and me together.