buggy, coming in on winter nights half-frozen but happy, sitting up long after the others were in bed, to read and to study, finding at last a thrilling climax to her ambitions in an appointment to teach school far up in the hills of Colorado.
So she had left the Missouri farm behind her, and it was in Colorado that she had met Louis Carew, who had come out to look after the mining interests of a client. He had fallen in love with her at first sight, and when he had known her only a month he had married her. He was a Baltimorean of good blood and ample means. He had taken Elizabeth back with him, proud of her youth and beauty.
Yet youth and beauty had not been enough. She had found that when she came among her husband's people. She was not like them. And she had found, too, after the first ecstasy had worn from their love-affair, that Louis wanted to make her over to fit the family pattern. His mother and sisters had soft voices and perfect ease of manner. They knew what to do at a dinner-party and what to say. They spoke French fluently, and were much traveled. Compared with them, young Elizabeth was crude, middle-class. She knew only how to be lovely and how to worship her husband.
To please him, she tried to make herself over. She had a dancing teacher and one who taught French. She was manicured and coiffed and cold-creamed. She spent hours in her room trying to change her round, public-school penmanship into something elegant, unshaded, and fashionable. She eliminated her "r's," and her voice was like a murmuring brook.
