She was barely twenty-three years old.

It is probable that up to that age, and the beginning of this episode, her life had been uneventful.
Born to the easy mediocrity of such compensating extremes as a small farmhouse and large lands, a good position and no society, in that vast grazing district of Kentucky known as the "Blue Grass" region, all the possibilities of a Western American girl's existence lay before her.
A piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of the unpainted "meeting-house" were already the promise of those possibilities.

Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors.

There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying log-cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the county judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter.

Eventually she had married the male of her species, a young stranger, who, as schoolmaster in the nearest town, had utilized to some local extent a scant capital of education.