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.
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