CHAPTER I.

Gertrude Warrener was twenty-five years old on the day she went into the back library and, seated in a rocking chair, a newspaper and a box of candy-kitchen chocolates in her lap--began to live.

Hitherto the boundaries of her lifeline had been limited by a wooden fence circling a few feet of coarse grass and two frame houses like her own. To the rear, in the yard, four poles formed a square with peculiar precision, and on washdays the level lines of a cord, stretching cat’s-cradle-wise, supported the household laundry.

She had taken for eight years the front rooms of the house for her point of vantage, and when she had mentally stated “Mrs. Felter’s just gone into the Perches’,” or “Pearl Exeter does her marketing in the afternoons instead of the mornings,” she had nothing further to say. One day she caught herself in the middle of some such banal reflection, and, going to the back of the house, took her place in the window of a microscopic library.

Gertrude Warrener did not remotely dream that she on this day passed the Rubicon lying between existence and life.

When the mind is sensible of inertia--the eyes catch sight of living forms, and the soul yearns toward something which it has not--it may be taken for granted that a life-breath has blown over the valley of dead bones.

In the case of Gertrude Warrener, it was indeed a tomb in which she awakened, and she did not know that she had been immured.

In her seventeenth year, George Warrener, just received into a subordinate position in a New York banking and broking firm, began to pay her his bashful attentions. With no spoken words on his part that she could remember--nor could he for the life of him have recalled the formula--there was an engagement. She married him before her eighteenth birthday.

As she sat in the library, all image of the youthful lover was completely effaced from her mind. He was now like hundreds and dozens of other middle-rank business men. Of medium height, stocky, his hair and short, stubby mustache nondescript, his eyes blue, wide apart and rather small, he was a successful type and entirely sacrificed as an individual. He often said:

“I look like a prosperous Wall Street man, and that is as near as I shall ever come to it--to look like it.”

But in spite of his dapper appearance, Warrener was an overworked drudge. He worked so hard and so long, his daily trips on unhealthy ferries and hot cars sapped his vitality to such an extent, that all his life had been spent and lived by the time he crossed at night the threshold of his home.

Gertrude in the little library opened the pages of the _Slocum Daily_ slowly. She read the town gossip, a local weather prediction, an account of the hospital fair; and as she rocked and ate one after the other the chocolate marshmallows she had a feeling of freedom, whose cause was due simply to the fact that she had changed her point of view--due to the humble novelty of her transposition.

George’s library smelled of stale tobacco. She had sensitive nostrils, and was beginning to find the dead odor unpleasant, when at this point she fell upon an item in the _Slocum Daily_ which held her attention:

We are glad to learn that the McAllister homestead has been opened. After the long absence in Europe of the family, Mr. and Mrs. Bellamy have returned, and Slocum welcomes them back with much pleasure.

“Slocum!” She spoke aloud, and there was scorn in her tone. “Well, I guess they’ll laugh at that. I don’t believe _they_ care for the _Daily_!”

Old Mrs. McAllister at once took form for her. She had come to their wedding, and Gertrude remembered her as tall, and that her dress and hat became her. The young, light-minded bride had remarked the difference between this guest and other Slocumites.

Kept in state on the buffet downstairs was a silver pitcher, the sole real silver in the house. Mrs. McAllister had sent it to the Warreners as a wedding present.

Gertrude got up and went out in the hall. “Eliza!”

“Yes, ma’am.” The maid of all work appeared at the foot of the back stairs.

“Say--just go and get that silver pitcher off the dining-room buffet and clean it. I guess it hasn’t been cleaned for three years.”

The maid looked at her in astonishment. “Why, we haven’t got a mite of cleaning powder in the house, Mrs. Warrener!”

Mrs. Warrener came slowly down the stairs herself, and, going to the dining-room buffet, looked at her wedding gift--or what she could see of it through a thick layer of dirt and discoloration. Then she carried it to the bathroom, and, with nail brush and tooth powder, shone it up as well as she could. It was a tribute of welcome to the return of the Bellamys.