We opened in May, not the best time of year for such an adventure; but I suppose Polatkin was afraid to trust me to the distractions of another vacation. It occurs to me now, though at the time I didn't suspect him, that we couldn't have opened even then if he had not been much more forward with the plan than at any time he had permitted me to guess. At the last I came near, in his estimation, to jeopardizing the whole business by opening with "The Winter's Tale" with Sarah in the part of _Hermione_ and myself as _Perdita_. Jerry was writing me a new play, but in the process of breaking off a marriage that ought never to have been begun, he had found no time to complete it; but why, urged Polatkin, if we must fall back on Shakespeare, choose a part that did not introduce me to the audience until the play was half done? He stood out at least for _Juliet_ or _Cleopatra_. "Why, indeed," I retorted, "have a theatre of my own if it is not to do as I please in it?" I knew however that what I could put into _Perdita_ of Willesden Lake and the woods aflame, would have sustained even a more inconsiderable part. Effie and her husband came on to my opening night. I want to say here, if I have not explicitly said it, that my sister is a wonderful, an indispensable woman. When I think of her, the mystery of how she came out of Taylorville, full-fledged to her time, is greater than the mystery of how I came to be at all. For Effie is absolutely contemporaneous. She lives squarely not only in her century, but in the particular quarter of it now going. No clutch of tradition topples her toward the generation of women past. Most women of my acquaintance are either sodden with left-over conventions, or blowsy with racing after the to-be, but Effie is compacted, tucked in, detached from but distinctly related to her background of Montecito. She was president of the Woman's Club, chairman of the book committee of the circulating library, and though she had a letter every morning and a telegram every night from the woman with whom she had left her two babies, it didn't prevent her in the week she spent with me, from getting into touch with more Forward Movements than I was aware were in operation in New York. "But, good heavens, Effie, how can you find time for them? It's as much as I can do to attend to my own job." "Oh, you! You're a forward movement yourself. All I am doing is herding the others up to keep step with you. You know, Olivia, I've wondered if you didn't feel lonely at times, so far ahead that you don't find anybody to line up _with_. Every time I see a woman step out of the ranks in some achievement of her own, I think, 'Now, Olivia will have company.'" "But, heavens!" I said again. "I'm not thinking of the others at all. I don't even know that there are others, or at least who they are. I'm a squirrel in a cage. I go round because I must. I don't know what comes of it."