She had tried to take a nap that afternoon but sleep would not come though she obeyed all the rules for capturing it.  Her father’s blood was in her veins and even her training had failed to obliterate all of the hard sense which had helped him pass his neighbors in the race for money which should win the coveted title “A Success.”

She did not like the dances, she knew she was not equal to the round of varied functions that lay before her.  But she was a worshiper—­she blindly followed Fashion—­she bowed in the presence of Pleasure—­and at last sighing wearily, murmured softly, “Well, there is no way out.  Mother has set her heart on it and one might as well die as to be out of everything”—­she laid her sacrifice upon the altar, took up a book and stopped thinking.

It is easy to think that she is but one, and perhaps the great exception, that because she is not physically strong she shrinks from the long gay season.  But she is only one of many, some very young and strong, and some in the twenties who have hearts and find them unsatisfied, who long to be free but held in the grip of the twin idols at last bow down and worship.

In the home of a shoemaker where food was coarse but plentiful and where the loose casements and cracks in walls and doors defied all efforts to keep out the air, grew up a little rosy-cheeked, black-haired girl.  When she was fourteen she was tall for her age, her black hair was abundant and beautiful, her large, dark eyes snapped and sparkled in laughter or in anger.  She went to work.  As yet she had thought little about the twin idols.  Before the year had passed, she knelt before them.  At the end of the second year she had offered in their name, truth and honesty in exchange for furs, a silver purse and a beautiful necklace.  Her parents unable to speak English, ready to believe that anything was possible in the new land suspected nothing.  Before the close of the third year, when she was but seventeen, in mad devotion to Fashion and Pleasure, she had laid herself, a living sacrifice upon the altar.

In the same city where she had followed so madly in pursuit of pleasure and dress, in a comfortable home upon one of the new avenues where young shade trees, modern houses, neatly trimmed lawns, all spoke of the young people just starting out for themselves, there lived a family trying in vain to find happiness.  Both were young, she only twenty, he twenty-two.  She worshiped the idols.  He worshiped her.  She had social ambitions.  She needed money to carry them out.  He got it as fast as he could and he was doing pretty well.  But it was not enough.  That night they had said bitter words to each other, then had repented and he had begged her to be careful, to try for a while to do without unnecessary things for his sake and said that she was more beautiful than any of the more richly dressed women he knew and that she ought to be content.  She promised to try.  But it was of no use.