needed help, and no one appeared to notice it, not even his wife, who began planning a dinner party in the futile effort to come to George’s assistance.  It was by coming to George’s assistance in every difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made George what he was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line of subterfuges, of pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all hidden in the tortuous labyrinthine windings of the maternal instinct.  She saw, with the relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet, the inevitable ruin of the love that does not submit to wisdom as its law.

More than seven months afterwards, when she lay in her room with her child in the crook of her arm, she prayed passionately that some supreme Power would grant her the strength not of emotion, but of reason.  All her life she had suffered from an unrestrained indulgence of the virtues—­from love running to waste through excess, from the self-sacrifice that is capable of everything but self-discipline, from the intemperate devotion to duty that is as morbid as sin.  Balance, moderation, restraint—­these seemed to her, lying there with her child on her arm, to be the things most worth striving for.  She saw her mother, worn to a shadow by the unnecessary deaths she had died, by the useless crucifixions she had endured; she saw Jane, haggard, wan, with her sweetness turning to bitterness because it was wasted; and again she found herself asking for balance, moderation, restraint.  The child, a little girl, with George’s eyes and hair like gauze, had liberated Gabriella from the last illusions of her girlhood.

And yet, though Gabriella prayed for moderation, she found after a few months that motherhood was absorbing the full strength of her nature.  George hardly existed for her; he came and went like the passing of a shadow, and she began gradually to sink her life into the life of her child.  Not until the winter was she brought back to a sharp realization of her neglected duty to her mother; and this came with a letter from Mrs. Carr during the last week in January.  Mrs. Carr was still living with Jane, and though she had accepted mildly Gabriella’s reasons for postponing her coming to New York, she was beginning somewhat plaintively to question.  She had made little effort to hide her disappointment at not being with her daughter when her grandchild was born, for, in spite of the fact that she had tragically assisted at the entrance of Jane’s six children into the world, she still possessed an insatiable appetite for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and death.  Then only did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified by universal phenomena.

And now on this morning in January, when Frances Evelyn, the baby, lay good and quiet in her crib, Gabriella read over again the disturbing letter she had just received from her mother.

     My dear daughter: