The Green Bough

Cover
THE GREEN BOUGH
BY E. TEMPLE THURSTON
AUTHOR OF THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE, THE WORLD OF WONDERFUL REALITY, ETC.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK MCMXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO E. F. COWLIN
PHASE I
The life of Mary Throgmorton, viewed as one would scan the chronicles of history, impersonally, without regard to the conventions, is the life of a woman no more than fulfilled in the elements of her being.
All women would be as Mary Throgmorton if they dared. All women would love as Mary Throgmorton loved--suffer as she suffered. Perhaps not all might yield, as she yielded towards the end; not all might make her sacrifices. But, in the latitudinous perspective of Time where everything vanishes to the point of due proportion, she must range with that vast army of women who have hungered, loved, been fed and paid the reckoning with the tears out of their eyes and the very blood out of their hearts.
It is only when she comes to be observed in the immediate and narrow surroundings of her circumstance that her life stands out tragically apart. She becomes then as a monument, set up on a high and lonely hill amongst the many of those hills in drowsy Devon, a monument, silently claiming the birthright of all women which the laws men make by force have so ungenerously circumscribed.