My heroine, Diana May, wondered. She was always wondering. She spent weeks, and months, and years, in a chronic state of wonder. She wondered about herself and several other people, because she thought both herself and those several other people so absurd. She found no use for herself in the general scheme of things, and tried, with much patient humility, to account for herself. But though she read books on science, books on psychology, books on natural and spiritual law, and studied complex problems of evolution and selection of species till her poor dim eyes grew dimmer, and the “lines from nose to chin” became ever longer and deeper, she could discover no way through the thick bog of her difficulties. She was an awkward numeral in a sum; she did not know why she came in or how she was to be got out. Her father and mother were what are called “very well-to-do-people,” with a pleasantly suburban reputation for respectability and regular church attendance. Mr. James Polydore May,--this was his name in full, as engraved on his visiting card--was a small man in stature, but in self-complacency the biggest one alive. He had made a considerable fortune in a certain manufacturing business which need not here be specified, and he had speculated with it in a shrewd and careful manner which was not without a touch of genius, the happy result being that he had always gained and never lost. Now at the age of sixty, he was free from all financial care, and could rattle gold and silver in his trousers-pockets with a sense of pleasure in their clinking sound,--they had the sweetness of church-bells which proclaim the sure nearness of a prosperous town. He was not a bad-looking little veteran,--he had, as he was fond of saying of himself, “a good chest measurement,” and though his legs were short, they were not bandy. Inclined to corpulence, the two lower buttons of his waistcoat were generally left undone, that he might the more easily stretch himself after a full meal. His physiognomy was not so much intelligent as pugnacious--his bushy eyebrows, hair and moustache gave him at certain moments the look of an irascible old terrier. He had keen small eyes, coming close to the bridge of a rather pronounced Israelitish nose, and to these characteristics was added a generally assertive air,--an air which went before him like an advancing atmosphere, heralding his approach as a “somebody”--that sort of atmosphere which invariably accompanies nobodies. His admiration of the fair sex was open and not always discreet, and from his youth up he had believed himself capable of subjugating any and every woman. He had an agreeable “first manner” of his own on introduction,--a manner which was absolutely deceptive, giving no clue to the uglier side of his nature. His wife could have told whole stories about this “first manner” of his, had she not long ago given up the attempt to retain any hold on her own individuality.