ghost of the Somers’ family tradition.  They became bohemian.  Instead of the lugubrious Sunday feast of thick joints and heavy puddings, they began to make the acquaintance of the can opener.  And from can opener to corkscrew it was only a brief step...  It was at this point that Helen met Fred Starratt.  Quite naturally the inevitable happened.  Moonlight rowing in the cove at Belvedere, set to the tune of mandolins, was always providing a job for the parson, and, if the truth were told, for the divorce courts as well.  It all had been pleasant enough, and normal enough, and the expected thing.  That’s what young people always did if the proper setting were provided, especially when the moon kept on the job.

Helen Starratt had read about the thrills that the heroines of novels received from the mating fever, but she had to confess that she had not experienced anything as exciting as a thrill during the entire period of her husband’s wooing.  She had felt satisfaction, a mild triumph, a gratified vanity, if you will, but that was as far as her emotional experience had gone.  After all, her career had been marriage, and she had taken the most likely situation that had been offered.  She presumed it was the same when one graduated from business college.  You were expected to land a job and you did.  Sometimes it was a good one, and then again it wasn’t.  Looking back, she conceded that her choice had been fair.  Fred Starratt didn’t drink to excess, he didn’t beat or swear at her, he didn’t make sarcastic remarks about her relations, or do any of the things which anyone who reads the daily papers discovers so many men do under provocation or otherwise.  But, on the other hand, he hadn’t made a fortune or bought a car or given her any reason for feeling compensated for the lack of marital excitement.  His friends called him a nice fellow—­in some ways as damning a thing as one could say about anybody—­and let it go at that.  However, Helen Starratt’s vocabulary was just as limited when it came to characterizing her conventional aims and ambitions.  If, occasionally, her speculations stirred the muddy reaches of certain furtive desires, she took care that they did not become articulate.  This term “nice” included every desirable virtue.  One married nice men, and one lived in a nice neighborhood, and one made nice acquaintances.  In her mother’s day she had heard people say: 

“I believe in having the young folks identified with church work—­they meet such nice people.”

And years later a friend, attempting to interest her in the activities of a local orphan asylum, had clinched every other argument by stating, blandly: 

“You really ought to go in for it, Helen—­you’ve no idea what nice people you meet.”

When America’s entry into the war brought up the question of Red Cross endeavor, her first thought had been: 

“I really ought to do something, I suppose.  And, besides, I’ll meet lots of nice people.”