People who know life only on its surfaces were apt to pronounce Joan Blair a rather hard young person. She would herself have admitted to a certain hardness, secretly aware, however, that it was a trait she had deliberately cultivated for protective purposes. Hers was one of the unfortunate natures that are more attuned to the minor than the major chords of life. Once in her childhood she had confessed to her mother, with a burst of sobbing, that she never expected to be entirely happy because of all the stray dogs running about the world, hungry and lonesome. As she grew older she discovered that it is not only the stray dogs who go hungry and lonesome. She often wondered impatiently why it was that every one with whom she came into close contact seemed soon or late to develop a marked quality of pathos: her futile father, the struggling Misses Darcy, gruff old devoted Ellen, Effie May, Archie--and now more than all Stefan Nikolai. Despite his renown, his wide experience, his phenomenal rise in life from so handicapped a beginning, her friend seemed nevertheless to her a rather tragic figure, belonging to nobody, product of two countries and native of neither, without even a race to which he could claim complete allegiance. For his mother had been a Christian girl of high birth, outcast by her family because of her marriage with a Jew; who had been in turn rejected by his own people because of her. Both had been killed in a _pogrom_, one of those appalling man-hunts that still take place in the Russian pale in the name of Christianity; and his father's sister, escaping to a land where there are no _pogroms_, had brought the child Stefan with her. It must have been a forlorn boyhood for a sensitive, gifted, half-alien lad, none too welcome in a poor and growing Jewish family of the slums; working his brilliant way through school and university, only to meet a crushing rebuff in this land of the free and equal at the hands of a girl who was afraid to marry him. Joan understood why her mother had taken the hurt and lonely youth into her rare friendship. Aside from Nikolai's charm of companionship and her gratitude to him, she felt it an inherited duty to "make it up" to him for the sadness of his past. And where Joan gave, she gave unstintingly.... She did not pursue her headstrong course without receiving faint inklings now and then as to its effect upon the community. The warnings began with Ellen. "I ain't sayin' he's not a quiet, pleasant-spoken enough gentleman, as free with his money as if he was a Christian--Most _too_ free, if you ast me! What's he want out of it all? After all, a Jew's a Jew." "Even if he happens to be a Unitarian?" (Nikolai, during his college life, had chanced to adopt that creed.)