As the troubled bride passed the hallway mirror, she stopped momentarily to look at herself. At nineteen, she was an exceptionally attractive young woman with light brown hair that flowed softly around her shoulders in a page-boy style and framed the delicately molded features of her face. She had hazel eyes that sparkled like diamonds, a pert nose that turned up slightly and full, sensual lips tinged a bright pink. Her facial complexion was as clear as white Carrara marble, and her cheeks glowed with a natural rosy bloom.

She was dressed that day in a light summer frock of bright yellow that clung snugly to her full upthrust breasts, tapered down to her tiny narrow waist, then flared out in a wide circle around the slender shapeliness of her legs. Although the garment was of modest design, it in no way concealed the fact that she was a very well proportioned young female, with a petite but spectacularly curvaceous figure that never failed to win attentive male glances when she walked down the street. Yet, strangely, she eyed herself with contempt as she gazed at her reflection in the mirror. The young wife didn't like getting so much attention from men. It made her uncomfortable and tense when they whistled at her, as if she were some kind of freak. Her ample breasts seemed to jut forward in almost obscene swells, no matter how demurely she dressed herself. And yet the troubled young girl knew that she should be proud of her figure, pleased at the admiring glances it elicited, but she was possessed by a terrible paradox, a paradox born of her childhood training.

"The Lakeside Orphanage for Young Girls," she murmured aloud as she stood before the mirror. Her mind flashed suddenly back to the childhood days when she had been sent to the huge institution outside Chicago after her parents were killed in an automobile crash. She was only five years old then, and she had hated the cold gray building from the moment she had first seen it.