“At the end of four years, the Iveses and their babies returned to Rosemont. They bought an old farmhouse with some seven or eight acres about a mile from the club, remodelled it, landscaped it, put in a tennis court, and became the most sought-after young couple in Rosemont. On the surface, they seemed ideally happy. Two charming children, a charming home, plenty of money, congenial enough tastes—such things should go far to create a paradise, shouldn’t they? Well, down this smooth, easy, flower-strewn, and garlanded path Patrick and Susan Ives were hurrying straight toward hell. In order to understand why this was true, you must know something of two other people and their lives.
“About a mile and a half from the Ives house was another farmhouse, on the outskirts of the village, but this one had not been remodelled. It was small, shabby, in poor repair—no tennis court, no gardens, a cheap portable garage, a meagre half acre of land inadequately surrounded by a rickety fence. Everything is comparative in this world. To the dwellers in tenements and slums, that house would have been a little palace. To the dweller in the stone palaces that line the Hudson, it would be a slum. To Madeleine Bellamy, whose home it was, it was undoubtedly a constant humiliation and irritation.
“Mimi Bellamy—in all likelihood no one in Rosemont had heard her called Madeleine since the day that she was christened—Mimi Bellamy was an amazingly beautiful creature. ‘Beauty’ is a much cheapened and battered word; in murder trials it is loosely applied to either the victim or the murderess if either of them happened to be under fifty and not actually deformed. I am not referring to that type of beauty. Mimi Bellamy’s beauty was of the type that in Trojan days launched a thousand ships and in these days launches a musical comedy. Hers was beauty that is a disastrous gift—not the common-place prettiness of a small-town belle, though such, it seems, was the rôle in which fate had cast her.
“I am showing you her picture, cut from the local paper—crudely taken, crudely printed, many times enlarged, yet even all these factors cannot dim her radiance. It was taken shortly before she died—not two months before, as a matter of fact. It cannot give the flowerlike beauty of her colouring, the red-gold hair, the sea-blue eyes, the exquisite flush of exultant youth that played about her like an enchantment; but perhaps even this cold, black-and-white shadow of a laughing girl in a flowered frock will give you enough of a suggestion of her warm enchantment to make the incredible disaster that resulted from that enchantment more credible. It is for that purpose that I am showing it to you now, and to remind you, if you feel pity for another woman, that never more again in all this world will that girl’s laughter be heard, young and careless and joyous. I ask you most solemnly to remember that.
“Mimi Dawson Bellamy was the daughter of the village dressmaker, who had married Frederick Dawson, a man considerably above her socially, as he was a moderately successful real-estate broker in the village of Rosemont. He was by no manner of means a member of the local smart set, however, and was not even a member of the country club. They lived in a comfortable, unpretentious house a little off the main street, and in the boarding house next to them lived Mrs. Daniel Ives and her son Patrick.
“Mrs. Ives, a widow, was very highly regarded in the village, to which she had come many years previously, and was extremely industrious in her efforts to supplement their meagre income. She gave music lessons, did mending, looked after small children whose mothers were at the movies, and did everything in her power to assist her son, whose principal contribution to their welfare up to the time that he was twenty-one seemed to be a genuine devotion to his mother. At that age Mr. Dawson took him in to work with him in the real-estate business, hoping that his charm and engaging manners would make up for his lack of experience and industry. To a certain extent they did, but they created considerably more havoc with Mr. Dawson’s beautiful daughter than they did with his clients. A boy-and-girl affair immediately sprang up between these two—the exquisite, precocious child of seventeen and the handsome boy of twenty-two were seen everywhere together, and it was a thoroughly understood thing that Mimi Dawson and Pat Ives were going together, and that one of these days they would go as far as the altar.
“A year later war was declared. Patrick Ives enlisted at once, and was among the first to reach France. The whole village believed that if he came back alive he would marry Mimi. But they were counting without Mimi.
“War, gentlemen, changed more things than the map of Europe. It changed the entire social map in many an American community; it changed, drastically and surprisingly, the social map of the community of Rosemont in the county of Bellechester. For the first time since the country club was built and many of the residents of New York discovered that it was possible to live in the country and work in the city, the barrier between the villagers and the country club members was lowered, and over this lowered barrier stepped Mimi Dawson, straight into the charmed sewing circles, knitting circles, Red Cross circles, bandage-making circles that had sprung up over-night—straight, moreover, into the charmed circle of society, about whose edges she had wistfully hovered—and straight, moreover, into the life of Elliot Farwell.
“Elliot Farwell was the younger brother of Mrs. George Dallas, at whose house met the Red Cross Circle of which Mrs. Dallas was president. Many of the village girls were asked to join her class in bandage making—after all, we were fighting this war to make the world safe for democracy, so why not be democratic? A pair of hands from the village was just as good as a pair of hands from the club—possibly better. So little Mimi Dawson found herself sitting next to the great Miss Thorne, wrapping wisps of cotton about bits of wood and going home to the village with rapidly increasing regularity in Mr. Elliot Farwell’s new automobile, quite without the knowledge or sanction of Mr. Farwell’s sister, whose democracy might not have stood the strain.
“Elliot Farwell was one of the two or three young men left in Rosemont. His eyes made it impossible for him to get into any branch of the service, so he remained peaceably at home, attending to a somewhat perfunctory business in the city as a promoter. He would have had to be blind enough to require the services of a dog and a tin cup not to have noted Mimi Dawson’s beauty, however; as a matter of fact, he noted it so intently that three months after peace was declared and three weeks before Patrick Ives returned from the war, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Dawson announced the engagement of their daughter Madeleine to Mr. Elliot Farwell—and a startled world. Not the least startled member of this world, possibly, was Susan Thorne, to whom young Farwell had been moderately attentive for several years.