It looked anything this May after
noon except a starting-place for drama. But, then, the great dramas of
life often avoid the splendid estates and trappings with which
conventional romance would equip them, and have their beginnings in
unlikeliest environment; and thence sweep on to a noble, consuming
tragedy, or to a glorious unfolding of souls. Life is a composite of
contradictions--a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its
graceful purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead
lion putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a
storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to the ordinary and
the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter
travail, grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.
Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their
beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop
from them or what their stories were to be.
The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a
uniform, dingy, scaling redness. The house of the Duchess, on the left
side as you came down the street toward the little Square which
squatted beside the East River, differed from the others only in that
three balls of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed pledges
emanated a weakly lure from behind its dirt-streaked windows, and also
in that the personality of the Duchess gave the house something of a
character of its own.
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