What she wanted was unbridled personal
liberty, unlimited financial resources.
Marian, almost numbed with physical fatigue and weeks of mental
strain, came repeatedly against the dead wall of ignorance when
she tried to fathom the change that had taken place between
herself and John Gilman and between herself and Eileen. Daniel
Thorne was an older man than Doctor Strong. He had accumulated
more property. Marian had sufficient means at her command to
make it unnecessary for her to acquire a profession or work for
her living, but she had always been interested in and loved to
plan houses and help her friends with buildings they were
erecting. When the silence and the loneliness of her empty home
enveloped her, she had begun, at first as a distraction, to work
on the drawings for a home that an architect had made for one of
her neighbors. She had been able to suggest so many comforts and
conveniences, and so to revise these plans that, at first in a
desultory way, later in real earnest, she had begun to draw plans
for houses. Then, being of methodical habit and mathematical
mind, she began scaling up the plans and figuring on the cost of
building, and so she had worked until she felt that she was
evolving homes that could be built for the same amount of money
and lived in with more comfort and convenience than the homes
that many of her friends were having planned for them by
architects of the city.
To one spot in the valley she had gone from childhood as a secret
place in which to dream and study.
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