“Only a bird in a gilded cage,” sang Spike again.  An encore had been urged.

At noon the following day Winona Penniman, a copy of the Advance before her, sat at the Penniman luncheon table staring dully into a dish of cold rice pudding.  She had read again and again the unbelievable item.  At length she snapped her head, as Spike Brennon would when now and again a clean blow reached his jaw, pushed the untouched dessert from her with a gesture of repugnance, and went aloft to her own little room.  Here she sat at her neat desk of bird’s eye maple, opened her journal, and across a blank page wrote in her fine, firm hand, “What Life Means to Me.”

It had seemed to her that it meant much.  She would fill many pages.  The name of Lyman Teaford would not there appear, yet his influence would be continuously present.  She was not stricken as had been another reader of that fateful bit of news.  But she was startled, feeling herself perilously cast afloat from old moorings.  She began bravely and easily, with a choice literary flavour.

“My sensations may be more readily imagined than described.”

This she found true.  She could imagine them readily, but could not, in truth, describe them.  She was shocked to discern that for the first time in her correct life there were distinctly imagined sensations which she could not bring herself to word, even in a volume forever sacred to her own eyes.  A long time she sat imagining.  At last she wrote, but the words seemed so petty.

All apparently that life meant to her was “How did she do it?”

She stared long at this.  Then followed, as if the fruit of her further meditation:  “There is a horrid bit of slang I hear from time to time—­can it be that I need more pepper?”

After this she took from the bottom drawer of her bureau that long-forgotten gift from the facetious Dave Cowan.  She held the stockings of tan silk before her, testing their fineness, their sheerness.  She was still meditating.  She snapped her dark head, perked it as might a puzzled wren.

“Certainly, more pepper!” she murmured.

CHAPTER XIV

A world once considered of enduring stability had crashed fearsomely about the ears of Winona Penniman and Wilbur Cowan.  After this no support was to be trusted, however seemingly stout.  Old foundations had crumbled, old institutions perished, the walls of Time itself lay wrecked.  They stared across the appalling desolation with frightened eyes.  What next?  In a world to be ruined at a touch, like a house of cards, what vaster ruin would ensue?