Now when Fortune is too kind to us Fate sometimes plays a grim joke, in order to level us with the vast mass of toiling, yearning, disappointed, suffering fellow-humans. This is what Fate did with Clara Thayer.

She was young, rich, beautiful, able to marry whom she pleased and live as she liked without let or hindrance. Fate had given her good coin with which to purchase anything her vagrant fancy might light upon. She might have chosen whom she would. Therefore she chose an extremely good-looking scoundrel whose Irish mother and Italian father had bequeathed to him, together with the light-hearted fascinations of their kindred natures, the sum total of every vice of which both lands are capable. The sweet kindness of heart and warm devotion to cause and kindred which characterize the Italian and Irish races lay in the softness of his dark eyes, the velvet smoothness of his voice, but were quite absent from his nature. This Clara Thayer did not know; and, had she known, it is more than probable that she would not have cared. For the first time in her life she was in the grip of a perfectly irrational fascination, an infatuation which drove her as a whirlwind might drive wheat. The infatuation ended, moreover, only when her life did.

This was, perhaps, a natural ending to Clara Thayer's career. It was natural, too, that people should refer to her as that poor girl who made "such a sensible first match" and "such an idiotic second one." As a matter of fact it would be difficult to determine which of Clara's two marriages was the more idiotic. Her first was for money, her second, for love. Her first supplied her with good food, pretty clothes and unlimited boredom. Her second gave her sharp rapture and equally poignant pain. Possibly, if she had remained unmarried she might have encountered worse things than any of these. Of the three wishes which the bad fairy, Life, gives the average woman it is difficult to say which is the least fraught with unhappiness.

"Woman in a bitter world must do the best she can." Clara Brooks did the best she could and bad was the best.

However she died at forty-five, and many women live to be old.

CHAPTER V

"BLIND FOOLS OF FATE"

"Blind fools of fate and slaves of circumstance,

Life is a fiddler and we all must dance."

—Robert Service.

When Clara Thayer gave birth to a daughter she was, as has been before stated, disappointed. When that daughter developed the appearance and characteristics of its father Clara began to dislike it. In vain she reasoned with herself, in vain upbraided herself, secretly and severely, in vain called herself "an unnatural mother." The sad fact remained that she did not care for the child. It had no pretty ways, no graceful tricks; its eyes were dull, its skin was pale, its hair ordinary. If it had resembled her she would have loved it; if it had resembled her mother, her father, anyone for whom she cared, she would have idolized it. It resembled no one, however, but her husband, and, although when Clara had married Lowden Thayer she had been supremely indifferent to him, that indifference had, unfortunately, deepened into a positively appalling dislike. Not dislike for his character which she respected; not dislike for his attitude toward her which left nothing to be desired; no, dislike for the man, himself, dislike for his personality, his manners, his way of entering a room, his way of brushing his hair, his way of walking, talking, breathing.

It is easy here for the reader to throw down this veracious account of a real woman with the single comment that she was unreasonable and ungrateful. It is true that she was unreasonable but not that she was ungrateful. She knew all that she owed to her husband, she sometimes hated herself for her lack of feeling, and she strove earnestly to hide her dislike and to do her duty in a way befitting a wife and mother. It was a bitter addition to what seemed to her an already difficult life when the child, to whose advent she had looked with so much hope and longing, turned out the counterpart of her husband. Instead of a distraction it was a perpetual reminder of the galling chain; instead of a delight it represented merely another disagreeable duty.