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younger brothers if her grandparents were not alive and willing and able to rescue them. George Gates and his wife rushed back to Independence by the fastest available trains to comfort their shattered daughter and her children. Nana’s tall, bearded presence not only guaranteed economic security; he was a crucial, steadying influence. His gentle wife Elizabeth played an equally vital role in offering their shattered daughter and grandchildren a loving refuge. Elizabeth Gates knew from firsthand experience the blows that fate could deliver. When she was a child of eight in England, her entire family had died of some epidemic disease and she had been sent to America to live with her sister.
    The four young Wallaces and their mother were welcomed into the big house on North Delaware Street. But Madge Wallace’s grief and shame could not be assuaged by this retreat. Her parents decided it might be better if they all retreated from Independence for a while. They had left their ailing son, Frank, in Colorado Springs, probably with the same Gates relative whom Madge and the children had visited during the previous summer. Telegraphs whizzed to this sympathetic man. In twenty-four hours, the grief-stricken refugees were aboard the Missouri Pacific’s crack flyer, The Santa Fe, which deposited them in Colorado Springs the following day.
    They stayed a full year. A year that is a blank in young Bess Wallace’s life - a year from which not a single letter survives. But it is not an unimportant year. In those twelve months in Colorado Springs’ clear air, with Pike’s Peak and the other majestic crags of the Rockies towering above her, Bess struggled to understand her father’s suicide. A terrible wound had been inflicted on her spirit. Never again could she regard the world with the serene self-confidence, the blithe optimism, of her girlhood. In sleepless nights and on lonely walks, she had to cope with agonizing questions of guilt and responsibility.
    When a woman loves someone as intensely as Bess had loved her father, and he turns his back on her and that love in such an absolute, devastating way, inevitably she questions her own ability to love. As an intelligent, observant young woman, she also had to question the nature of her mother’s love. Something fundamental had failed. She could not bring herself to place all the blame on her father, on ideas such as moral weakness. He had been a loving man, a generous one. Why had his wife’s love failed to sustain him? Was it the cruelty, the callousness of politics that had destroyed him?
    No one, above all not an eighteen-year-old girl, could answer these tormenting questions. They settled into Bess Wallace’s mind and soul as doubts, voices that whispered to her in the night. But in this year in Colorado, Bess was able to reach certain conclusions. She saw that her mother’s way of loving her father, the passive, tender but more or less mindless love of the genteel lady, was a mistake. It failed to share the bruises, the fears, the defeats a man experienced in his world. It left him exposed to spiritual loneliness. If she ever found a man she could trust - and that must have seemed a dubious proposition during that first sorrowful year - Bess Wallace vowed she would share his whole life, no matter how much pain it cost her. She rejected absolutely and totally the idea of a woman’s sphere and a man’s sphere.
    Bess did not blame her mother for her father’s death. She loved Madge Wallace, also too. To love was added the pity she felt when she saw how shattered her mother was by the catastrophe. Blame was not a word Bess could ever use. But a kind of judgment, an emotional separation took place between mother and daughter during that year in Colorado or soon after their return to Independence in 1904.
    Bess saw that she had to become a different woman from her mother. Her success as an athlete and her role as an older sister probably prepared her for this change. But the