Yet now and then she found herself falling into fits of abstraction in which Roaring Lake and Jack Fyfe, all that meant anything to her now, faded into the background, and she saw herself playing a lone hand against the world, making her individual struggle to be something more than the petted companion of a dominant male and the mother of his children.  She never quite lost sight of the fact that marriage had been the last resort, that in effect she had taken the avenue her personal charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation.  There was still deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of living.  She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big thing in her life.  And it was not.  It was too incidental, too incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life’s highway.  Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was driven to look facts in the eye because she did dream.  Always she encountered the same obstacle, a feeling that she had been defrauded, robbed of something vital; she had forgone that wonderful, passionate drawing together which makes the separate lives of the man and woman who experiences it so fuse that in the truest sense of the word they become one.

Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told herself—­sometimes wistfully—­could never be realized.  She had shut the door on many things, it seemed to her now.  But she had the sense to know that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid, and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable.  She had chosen what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to abide steadfast by her choice.

Charlie Benton came to visit them.  Strangely enough to Stella, who had never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb.  If he had started on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert, bubbling over with good spirits.

“Why, say, you look like a tourist,” Fyfe remarked after an appraising glance.

“I’m making money, pulling ahead of the game, that’s all,” Benton retorted cheerfully.  “I can afford to take a holiday now and then.  I’m putting a million feet a month in the water.  That’s going some for small fry like me.  Say, this house of yours is all to the good, Jack.  It’s got class, outside and in.  Makes a man feel as if he had to live up to it, eh?  Mackinaws and calked boots don’t go with oriental rugs and oak floors.”

“You should get a place like this as soon as possible then,” Stella put in drily, “to keep you up to the mark, on edge aesthetically, one might put it.”