Just so.  But a broken steering knuckle on a heavy touring car set things in a different light—­many things.  She learned then that death is no respecter of persons, that a big income may be lived to its limit with nothing left when the brain force which commanded it ceases to function.  Her father produced perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year in his brokerage business, and he had saved nothing.  Thus at one stroke she was put on an equal footing with the stenographer in her father’s office.  Scarcely equal either, for the stenographer earned her bread and was technically equipped for the task, whereas Estella Benton had no training whatsoever, except in social usage.  She did not yet fully realize just what had overtaken her.  Things had happened so swiftly, to ruthlessly, that she still verged upon the incredulous.  Habit clung fast.  But she had begun to think, to try and establish some working relation between herself and things as she found them.  She had discovered already that certain theories of human relations are not soundly established in fact.

She turned at last in her seat.  The Limited’s whistle had shrilled for a stop.  At the next stop—­she wondered what lay in store for her just beyond the next stop.  While she dwelt mentally upon this, her hands were gathering up some few odds and ends of her belongings on the berth.

Across the aisle a large, smooth-faced young man watched her with covert admiration.  When she had settled back with bag and suitcase locked and strapped on the opposite seat and was hatted and gloved, he leaned over and addressed her genially.

“Getting off at Hopyard?  Happen to be going out to Roaring Springs?”

Miss Benton’s gray eyes rested impersonally on the top of his head, traveled slowly down over the trim front of his blue serge to the polished tan Oxfords on his feet, and there was not in eyes or on countenance the slightest sign that she saw or heard him.  The large young man flushed a vivid red.

Miss Benton was partly amused, partly provoked.  The large young man had been her vis-a-vis at dinner the day before and at breakfast that morning.  He had evinced a yearning for conversation each time, but it had been diplomatically confined to salt and other condiments, the weather and the scenery.  Miss Benton had no objection to young men in general, quite the contrary.  But she did not consider it quite the thing to countenance every amiable stranger.

Within a few minutes the porter came for her things, and the blast of the Limited’s whistle warned her that it was time to leave the train.  Ten minutes later the Limited was a vanishing object down an aisle slashed through a forest of great trees, and Miss Estella Benton stood on the plank platform of Hopyard station.  Northward stretched a flat, unlovely vista of fire-blackened stumps.  Southward, along track and siding, ranged a single row of buildings, a grocery store, a shanty with a huge sign proclaiming that it was a bank, dwelling, hotel and blacksmith shop whence arose the clang of hammered iron.  A dirt road ran between town and station, with hitching posts at which farmers’ nags stood dispiritedly in harness.