The longer I live the more remarkable it seems to me, how limited is the field in which any of us does original thinking. One of my friends is an exceedingly able physician. Within his specialty he has been startlingly radical. His cures, however, are so amazing that his colleagues are accepting his methods. But in all other departments of thought he is hopelessly conservative. Another acquaintance, a painter, is a daring innovator in his use of colors, but has unquestioningly accepted all those beliefs which Max Nordau has called "The Conventional Lies of our Civilization." To one subject we seem to give all our mental energy, all our powers of original thinking, in other matters we believe what we are taught. It was so with Ann. Her specialty was bacteriology, her ideas on marriage she had inherited. Her mother, whom I afterwards came to know and respect, was a remarkable woman. Mr. Barton, after a fairly upright younger life, had deserted her at thirty-five. Although neither Ann nor Mrs. Barton, ever spoke much of him, I learned that he had died, a hopeless drunkard. At first the mother had supported the children by nursing and sewing among the families of her Vermont neighbors. And everywhere, once she had entered the privacy of a household, she found the same repellent pretense, a carefully preserved outward show of harmony and affection, an inside reality of petty quarrels and discord. Often she found situations of more abhorrent tragedy, jealousy, hatred and strange passions, women heartbroken for lack of love, bodily broken from an excess of child-bearing. From considering her own misfortunes a horrible exception, she came to believe such sorrows were pitifully common. And everywhere women seemed to be the victims. However unhappy a man’s married life might be, he found release in his work. To the woman, home was everything, if it went wrong, all life was awry. By chance apparently, but I suppose inevitably, she had come in contact with some of the leaders of the early "Woman’s Rights Movement." She corresponded with them ardently and at length came west to Cincinnati, having decided that she needed education. She supported herself and her children by needle-work and spent half the nights, after they were abed, over schoolbooks. She had to begin at the beginning. By herself, in her garret, she followed the grammar school course, crowding the work which takes a child two or three years, into the half nights of one. Gradually she worked her way up to the position of forewoman in a large embroidery establishment and so was able to send her children through high school, the older ones to college. But her health had given out before Ann’s turn came.