A Woman of Genius BY MARY AUSTIN _Author of "The Land of Little Rain," "The Arrowmaker," "Isidro," "Christ in Italy," etc., etc._ GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1912 _Copyright, 1912, by_ DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. _All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian_ TO LOU HENRY HOOVER AND SOME PLEASANT MEMORIES OF THE RED HOUSE IN HORNTON STREET BOOK I CHAPTER I It is strange that I can never think of writing any account of my life without thinking of Pauline Mills and wondering what she will say of it. Pauline is rather given to reading the autobiographies of distinguished people--unless she has left off since I disappointed her--and finding in them new persuasions of the fundamental lightness of her scheme of things. I recall very well, how, when I was having the bad time of my life there in Chicago, she would abound in consoling instances from one then appearing in the monthly magazines; skidding over the obvious derivation of the biographist's son from the Lord Knows Who, except that it wasn't from the man to whom she was legally married, to fix on the foolish detail of the child's tempers and woolly lambs as the advertisement of that true womanliness which Pauline loves to pluck from every feminine bush. There was also a great deal in that story about a certain other celebrity, for her relations to whom the writer was blackballed in a club of which I afterward became a member, and I think it was the things Pauline said about one of the rewards of genius being the privilege of association with such transcendent personalities on a footing which permitted one to call them by their first names in one's reminiscences, that gave me the notion of writing this book. It has struck me as humorous to a degree, that, in this sort of writing, the really important things are usually left out.