Even now, if I smell it from some strange garden, or wafting from some old fragment of lace long kept in a trunk or bureau drawer, I feel faint and sick. And then, for a moment, time and space will whirl around in my head, and I will be back to the nightmare of those days at Quarry House, when I walked like a painted doll through another girl's life, shrouded in a cloud of her perfume.

Judith had loved lavender. And so in those days I must always walk with the faint sweet scent of lavender drifting from my hair and my petticoats. When I came down in the afternoons for tea in the long library, I am sure that the scent must have drifted to Philip's nostrils before he ever heard my step, for he would always turn and rise, the candlelight glinting on his white hair. His face would light into a smile; he would say "Judith, my dear" and come to take my hand and lead me down the steps into the library, to the little bay window we used for the tea table in those days.

Tannery would wait on us there--none of the women servants ever came into the library except in the early morning, to dust and lay the fire. Tannery would bring the English tea that Philip liked, and the muffins and sandwiches and cake. The Sargent portrait would watch us from the wall, delicate and inscrutable, and after tea I would go to Judith's rosewood piano and play there, in the falling dusk, while Philip dreamed before the fire. The house would be quiet, though sometimes I could hear the distant chiming of the clock on the stairs, or the soft clink of silver and china where the maids were laying the great formal table in the dining room for later that night.

How peaceful it all seemed, in the early days, and how elegant. And later, it became such a nightmare--and yet I used to sit there like the painted portrait on the wall, or like a mechanical doll, with only my fingers moving on the ivory keys, and only the firelight and the music seeming alive in the room.

Well, those days are gone. I ask myself sometimes if it could have happened today. No, surely not. Any one of these modern young girls would know better. For all their bobbed hair, and the short skirts that make them look as if they should be in the nursery, they are wiser than girls of my generation. Sheltered and preciously protected against the ruthless facts of the world, the flesh, and the devil, girls of my day were young and innocent in a way no girl can ever be innocent now.

And so I married Philip Maynard, and came to Quarry House before I had finished my eighteenth year.

Philip must have seen me first at the hotel in Newport, trailing meekly after Aunt Mabel, in my white muslins and frilled shirtwaists and carrying my new parasol. Breakfast in the small dining room, a morning promenade on the beach, lunch in a fashionable restaurant, an afternoon drive where matrons and widows and marriageable maidens bowed to us with exactly the right degree of correctness, lawn tennis, and dinner beneath the glittering chandeliers of the enormous hotel dining room.

I would have preferred to wear short skirts and strap-sandal shoes and sit on the beach all the day long, looking at the waves and pretending to be a child again, in the vanished days when I had made sandcastles and Mamma and Papa watched me benevolently from sun chairs. I now know I was still suffering from shock after the terrible and sudden, though mercifully brief, bout of food poisoning that had carried them both off within an hour of one another. A lifelong dislike for mayonnaise had saved me all but a few hours of agonizing cramps and sickness--but when I realized that they were both gone, and that I was alone, I wished in hours of exhausted weeping that I had died, too.

I had welcomed Aunt Mabel's offer of a summer at the seaside. I needed the long slow summer to heal the wounds in my heart. But that was not Aunt's purpose. I was there to be seen, and I made an appearance every few hours, carefully dressed and rehearsed for her approval.

"I want you married and off my hands," she told me bluntly, without mincing words. "The little money your father left wouldn't keep you long enough to send you to school to earn a living, and I know my duty. I've got two girls of my own old enough to be married, and three more growing up. If I can get you married to some decent man this summer, I won't be worrying about you."

I could only venture a feeble "But I don't want to get married, Aunt."

"Nonsense!" To do her justice, she did not say it unkindly, but with a brisk cheerfulness. She was a large, brisk woman, red-faced from her tight corsets, and inclined to be stout. She had borne nine children and reared five, while maintaining a "suitable place in society," and it never would have occurred to her that there was anything about young girls which could be a mystery to her. "You must get married, and so you shall! Why, silly girl, what else would you do with your life?"

I did not know. I could only make feeble sounds of protest.

"It's a great pity you haven't had your debut yet," she sighed, "and I can't give you one this winter, with Belle in her first season and Sara coming out at Christmas. Well, there's no help for it, I'll simply have to leave the girls in town this summer, and take you to Newport. Every one who is anyone is there, and you'll meet all sorts of eligible men, and it won't matter that you aren't really "out" yet. You must have suitable clothes--don't worry, they will all be suitable for your trousseau too--and if you do as I say, I'll manage a good match for you before the summer is over."