320 THE GARDEN OF A 



comes from the fact that she has stood, as it were, 

 in her own shadow, and tried to manage nature. 



I think that poor Dora must have been born to 

 or inherited a certain vein of ill luck that she has 

 either had too much self-complacency to recognize 

 or else lacked the force to forestall. According to 

 her own fragmentary account, which I have pieced 

 together by intuition, from her girlhood, when her 

 parents died leaving her rich as money is reckoned 

 in the country, mischance continually fell upon her in 

 ways for which she denied all responsibility. She is, 

 in fact, the sort of woman who is always overtaken 

 by a shower when she goes out in her best clothes. 



She went to college, and seems to have obtained 

 a feeling of superiority over her less ambitious sis- 

 ters, instead of breadth of vision and culture. Next, 

 she travelled abroad awhile with some college 

 friends, and, on her return, opened her old home, 

 which she improved, having one gift, the rare skill 

 that knows how to renew without making the new- 

 ness apparent. 



For several years she led a self-satisfactory life, 

 being a leader of a small social procession, ready 

 in charity and much flattered and consulted. Then 

 fate stepped in and began to meddle with the even 

 fabric of her life, and as she thinks, tangle the skein 



