It's a great loss to me, Mrs.Carr.

I'd got used to him and his ways, and when you've once got used to a man, it ain't easy to give him up." She sobbed audibly as she finished; and it seemed to Gabriella that a lifetime of experience passed in the instant while she stood there, with her pulses drumming in her ears, her throat contracting until she struggled for breath, and the lights of the city swimming in a nebulous blur before her eyes.

Yet in that instant, as in every crisis of her life, she turned instinctively to action, to movement, to exertion, however futile.

While she walked across the pavement to the waiting cab, for the crowning and ultimate choice of her life, she abandoned forever the authority and guide of tradition.

Tradition, she knew, bade her sit and wait on destiny until she withered, like Arthur, to the vital core of her nature; but something mightier than tradition, something which she shared with the swarming multitude of children in the streets--the will to live, to strive, and to conquer--this had risen superior to the empty rules of the past.