The thought of her mother, on the other hand, was always unwelcome.

It brought back recollections of storm and tempest; of wild laughter, and still wilder tears; of gorgeous dresses, small feet, and jewelled fingers.
No; her parents had but small place in that dramatic autobiography that Daphne was now constructing for herself.

She was not their daughter in any but the physical sense; she was the daughter of her own works and efforts.
She leant forward to the fire, her face propped in her hands, going back in thought to her father's death, when she was fifteen; to her three years of cloying convent life, and her escape from it, as well as from the intriguing relations who would have kept her there; to the clever lawyer who had helped to put her in possession of her fortune, and the huge sums she had paid him for his services; to her search for education, her hungry determination to rise in the world, the friends she had made at college, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington.

She had been influenced by one _milieu_ after another; she had worked hard, now at music, now at philosophy; had dabbled in girls' clubs, and gone to Socialist meetings, and had been all through driven on by the gadfly of an ever-increasing ambition.
Ambition for what! She looked back on this early life with a bitter contempt.

What had it all come to?
Marriage with Roger Barnes!--a hasty passion of which she was already ashamed, for a man who was already false to her.
What had made her marry him?
She did not mince matters with herself in her reply.