

E-text prepared by Al Haines



ARMS AND THE WOMAN

A Romance

by

HAROLD MacGRATH







New York
Doubleday Page & Company
1905
Copyright, 1899, by
S. S. Mcclure Co.
Copyright, 1899, by
Doubleday and Mcclure Co.





To her, that is to say, to the hand that rocked the cradle.




ARMS AND THE WOMAN

CHAPTER I

The first time I met her I was a reporter in the embryonic state and
she was a girl in short dresses.  It was in a garden, surrounded by
high red brick walls which were half hidden by clusters of green vines,
and at the base of which nestled earth-beds, radiant with roses and
poppies and peonies and bushes of lavender lilacs, all spilling their
delicate ambrosia on the mild air of passing May.  I stood, straw hat
in hand, wondering if I had not stumbled into some sweet prison of
flowers which, having run disobedient ways in the past, had been placed
here by Flora, and forever denied their native meadows and
wildernesses.  And this vision of fresh youth in my path, perhaps she
