The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of inheritance of every American--she is at times of the old American stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,--she is apt to wrap in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life, formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has not the instinct of attention to her mother tongue which marks women of fine breeding. The best thing made by man--good books--she has little love for. The newspaper and to-day’s flimsy novel of adventure stand in their stead. There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm of Milton’s “Penseroso” and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare’s comedies. But that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on the mountain-top of school-girl idealism and looked not at things near by, but afar--a period not long when compared to the jaded vacuity of later years. To this shapely woman a writer is presented as “the highest paid lady-writer in the world.” The highest paid! Where, then, is literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for “Paradise Lost,” and eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal writer of the simplicities of Wakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns! “Learning,” says Thomas Fuller, in his “Holy States,” “learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.” This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the mother of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she moves--a result of her freedom and a sign of her strength--and she is mistress of the occasion always. In this domination (the right of the domina) she has, even when unmarried and as early as in her teens, the poise and solidity of the matron. She scorns your supposition that she is not informed in every worldly line, and that the wavering hesitancy of the one who does not know could be hers. She rarely blushes, and is therefore a negative witness to Swift’s hard-cut apophthegm-- “A virtue but at second-hand; They blush because they understand.”