She felt that if ever
she let go her hold on them she would lose faith in human happiness,
and thus in life itself. For between Lois Travers the woman and Lois
Travers the light-hearted, high-spirited girl there stretched a year's
gulf. Marriage had been to her what it is more or less to all women--a
Rubicon, a Book of Revelations in which girlish ideals are rarely
realized, sometimes modified, more often destroyed.
Clever and pliable women, women with the "art of living" do not allow
their hearts to be broken in the latter event, supposing them to have
relaxed their cleverness so far as to have had ideals at all; but
Lois was not clever or pliable, and her ideals had been destroyed. She
had loved John Stafford, and in some inexplicable way he had failed
her. She had given her life into Travers' hands in the belief that he
needed her for his progress, and that in helping him her idle powers
of love and devotion would not be wasted. Too late she realized--what
no woman ever realizes until it _is_ too late--that the man who needs
a woman for his salvation is already far beyond her help.
Beneath Lois' light-heartedness and love of gaiety there lurked a
spirit of Puritanism which had drawn her to Stafford, and now brought
her into violent conflict with Travers' fundamental frivolity. In the
first month of their marriage she had had to admit that she had
reached the bottom of his character, and found nothing there--not so
much as a deeply planted vice.
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