She has taken a unique episode in our early history, -- the short-lived colony of the Vine and Olive, founded in Alabama by French idealists and refugees. Their leader has been recently married to a girl thrust upon him by her aunt, and accepted as part of his ideal picture, rather than as a flesh and blood woman. She struggles for her own place against the thin dreams of Condorcet, thinks she has failed, and leaves him to suffer again for his dream. A new type of pioneer and frontier story, with the background more interesting than the story played out against it.