As she sat down to wait she reviewed the causes which accounted for the remarkable situation in which she found herself.  That Madeline Hammond should be alone, at a late hour, in a dingy little Western railroad station, was indeed extraordinary.

The close of her debutante year had been marred by the only unhappy experience of her life—­the disgrace of her brother and his leaving home.  She dated the beginning of a certain thoughtful habit of mind from that time, and a dissatisfaction with the brilliant life society offered her.  The change had been so gradual that it was permanent before she realized it.  For a while an active outdoor life—­golf, tennis, yachting—­kept this realization from becoming morbid introspection.  There came a time when even these lost charm for her, and then she believed she was indeed ill in mind.  Travel did not help her.

There had been months of unrest, of curiously painful wonderment that her position, her wealth, her popularity no longer sufficed.  She believed she had lived through the dreams and fancies of a girl to become a woman of the world.  And she had gone on as before, a part of the glittering show, but no longer blind to the truth—­that there was nothing in her luxurious life to make it significant.

Sometimes from the depths of her there flashed up at odd moments intimations of a future revolt.  She remembered one evening at the opera when the curtain had risen upon a particularly well-done piece of stage scenery—­a broad space of deep desolateness, reaching away under an infinitude of night sky, illumined by stars.  The suggestion it brought of vast wastes of lonely, rugged earth, of a great, blue-arched vault of starry sky, pervaded her soul with a strange, sweet peace.

When the scene was changed she lost this vague new sense of peace, and she turned away from the stage in irritation.  She looked at the long, curved tier of glittering boxes that represented her world.  It was a distinguished and splendid world—­the wealth, fashion, culture, beauty, and blood of a nation.  She, Madeline Hammond, was a part of it.  She smiled, she listened, she talked to the men who from time to time strolled into the Hammond box, and she felt that there was not a moment when she was natural, true to herself.  She wondered why these people could not somehow, some way be different; but she could not tell what she wanted them to be.  If they had been different they would not have fitted the place; indeed, they would not have been there at all.  Yet she thought wistfully that they lacked something for her.

And suddenly realizing she would marry one of these men if she did not revolt, she had been assailed by a great weariness, an icy-sickening sense that life had palled upon her.  She was tired of fashionable society.  She was tired of polished, imperturbable men who sought only to please her.  She was tired of being feted, admired, loved, followed, and importuned; tired of people; tired of houses, noise, ostentation, luxury.  She was so tired of herself!