She was near the finish of her journey.  Pensively she considered the end of the road.  How would it be there?  What manner of folk and country?  Between her past mode of life and the new that she was hurrying toward lay the vast gulf of distance, of custom, of class even.  It was bound to be crude, to be full of inconveniences and uncouthness.  Her brother’s letters had partly prepared her for that.  Involuntarily she shrank from it, had been shrinking from it by fits and starts all the way, as flowers that thrive best in shady nooks shrink from hot sun and rude winds.  Not that Estella Benton was particularly flower-like.  On the contrary she was a healthy, vigorous-bodied young woman, scarcely to be described as beautiful, yet undeniably attractive.  Obviously a daughter of the well-to-do, one of that American type which flourishes in families to which American politicians unctuously refer as the backbone of the nation.  Outwardly, gazing riverward through the dusty pane, she bore herself with utmost serenity.  Inwardly she was full of misgivings.

Four days of lonely travel across a continent, hearing the drumming clack of car wheels and rail joint ninety-six hours on end, acutely conscious that every hour of the ninety-six put its due quota of miles between the known and the unknown, may be either an adventure, a bore, or a calamity, depending altogether upon the individual point of view, upon conditioning circumstances and previous experience.

Estella Benton’s experience along such lines was chiefly a blank and the conditioning circumstances of her present journey were somber enough to breed thought that verged upon the melancholy.  Save for a natural buoyancy of spirit she might have wept her way across North America.  She had no tried standard by which to measure life’s values for she had lived her twenty-two years wholly shielded from the human maelstrom, fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools.  Her head was full of university lore, things she had read, a smattering of the arts and philosophy, liberal portions of academic knowledge, all tagged and sorted like parcels on a shelf to be reached when called for.  Buried under these externalities the ego of her lay unaroused, an incalculable quantity.

All of which is merely by way of stating that Miss Estella Benton was a young woman who had grown up quite complacently in that station of life in which—­to quote the Philistines—­it had pleased God to place her, and that Chance had somehow, to her astonished dismay, contrived to thrust a spoke in the smooth-rolling wheels of destiny.  Or was it Destiny?  She had begun to think about that, to wonder if a lot that she had taken for granted as an ordered state of things was not, after all, wholly dependent upon Chance.  She had danced and sung and played lightheartedly accepting a certain standard of living, a certain position in a certain set, a pleasantly ordered home life, as her birthright, a natural heritage.  She had dwelt upon her ultimate destiny in her secret thoughts as foreshadowed by that of other girls she knew.  The Prince would come, to put it in a nutshell.  He would woo gracefully.  They would wed.  They would be delightfully happy.  Except for the matter of being married, things would move along the same pleasant channels.