“I like to sit there in that dim quiet and think of things I can’t think of elsewhere.  Do you think I am queer?  Philip, all women are queer.  They haven’t yet been explained.  That is the reason why the novelists find it next to impossible, with all the materials at hand, to make a good woman—­that is a woman.  Do you know what it is to want what you don’t want?  Longing is one thing and reason another.

“Perhaps I have depended too much on my reason.  If you long to go to a place where you will have peace, why should you let what you call your reason stand in the way?  Perhaps your reason is foolishness.  You will laugh a little at this, and say that I am tired.  No.  Only I am not so sure of things as I used to be.  Do you remember when we children used to sit under that tree by the Deerfield, how confident I was that I understood all about life, and my airs of superiority?

“Well, I don’t know as much now.  But there is one thing that has survived and grown with the years, and that, Philip, is your dear friendship.”

What was it in this unassuming, but no doubt sufficiently conceited and ambitious, young fellow that he should have the affection, the love, of three such women?

Is affection as whimsically, as blindly distributed as wealth?  It is the experience of life that it is rare to keep either to the end, but as a man is judged not so much by his ability to make money as to keep it, so it is fair to estimate his qualities by his power to retain friendship.  New York is full of failures, bankrupts in fortune and bankrupts in affection, but this melancholy aspect of the town is on the surface, and is not to be considered in comparison with the great body of moderately contented, moderately successful, and on the whole happy households.  In this it is a microcosm of the world.

To Evelyn and Philip, judging the world a good deal by each other, in those months before their marriage, when surprising perfection and new tenderness were daily developed, the gay and busy city seemed a sort of paradise.

Mysterious things were going on in the weeks immediately preceding the wedding.  There was a conspiracy between Miss McDonald and Philip in the furnishing and setting in order a tiny apartment on the Heights, overlooking the city, the lordly Hudson, and its romantic hills.  And when, after the ceremony, on a radiant afternoon in early June, the wedded lovers went to their new home, it was the housekeeper, the old governess, who opened the door and took into her arms the child she had loved and lost awhile.

This fragment of history leaves Philip Burnett on the threshold of his career.  Those who know him only by his books may have been interested in his experiences, in the merciful interposition of disaster, before he came into the great fortune of the love of Evelyn Mavick.