“When she put the ring on my finger, saying, ‘It fits you as it once fitted me--but you are worthy of it as I never was,’ I cried a little and begged her to tell me what it all meant. Then she broke down and, clasping me in her arms, told me that she was my own mother. I won’t tell you all the details of our weeping time, for they are too sacred even for you to hear. Let me simply copy here, as accurately as I can, my mother’s account of herself. “‘I was born,’ she said, ‘the daughter of a Virginian of good family--as good as any. My father lived as many Virginians do, far beyond his means. Perhaps he did wrong things--I do not know, and after all it is no matter. At any rate when he died people seemed to care very little for us--my mother and me--when everything we had was sold and we went out into the world to hunt for bread. I was seventeen then, I had what they call a genius for music. We went to New York and lived wretchedly there for a time. But I earned something with my violin and my ’cello, and now and then by singing, for I had a voice that was deemed good. We lived in that wretched, ill-mannered, loose-moraled, dissolute and financially reckless set which calls itself Bohemia, and excuses itself from all social and moral obligation on the ground that its members are persons of genius, though in fact most of them are anything else. My mother never liked these people. She simply tolerated them, and she did that only because she had no choice. She did her best to shield me against harm to my soul in contact with them, but she could not prevent the contact itself. Our bread and butter and the roof over our heads depended upon that. Finally there came into our set a manager who was looking out for opportunities. He heard me play, and he heard me sing. He proposed that I should go to Europe for instruction at his expense, and that he should bring me out as a genius in the autumn. I went, and I received some brief instruction of great value to me--not that it made me a better musician but that it taught me how to captivate an audience with such gifts as I had. Well the manager brought me out, and I succeeded even beyond his expectations. I don’t think it was my musical ability altogether, though that was thought to be remarkable, I believe. I was beautiful then, as you are now, Dorothy; I had all the charm of a willowy grace, which, added to my beauty, made men and women go mad over me. I made money in abundance for my manager, and that was all that he cared for. I made money for myself too, and my mother and I were eagerly sought after by the leaders of fashion. We ceased to know the old Bohemia and came to be members of a new and perhaps not a better set--except in its conformity to those rules of life which are supposed to hedge respectability about, without really improving its morals. For I tell you child I saw more of real wickedness in my contact with those who call themselves the socially elect than I ever dreamed of among my