She has neither the worldly knowledge, nor the personal presence, nor the money." Jane gave but one answer to all inquiries--and there were many.
"Yes, I know the move is a sudden one," she would say, "but it is for Lucy's good, and there is no one to go with her but me." No one saw beneath the mask that hid her breaking heart.

To them the drawn face and the weary look in her eyes only showed her grief at leaving home and those who loved her: to Mrs.Cavendish it seemed part of Jane's peculiar temperament.
Nor could they watch her in the silence of the night tossing on her bed, or closeted with Martha in her search for the initial steps that had led to this horror.

Had the Philadelphia school undermined her own sisterly teachings or had her companions been at fault?
Perhaps it was due to the blood of some long-forgotten ancestor, which in the cycle of years had cropped out in this generation, poisoning the fountain of her youth.

Bart, she realized, had played the villain and the ingrate, but yet it was also true that Bart, and all his class, would have been powerless before a woman of a different temperament.

Who, then, had undermined this citadel and given it over to plunder and disgrace?
Then with merciless exactness she searched her own heart.