old-time Bohemian associates. The only advantage these dissolutes had over the others was, that having bank accounts they drew checks for their debts where the others shirked and shuffled to escape from theirs. “‘I was glad, therefore, when your father came into my life. He was a man of a higher type than any that I had known since early childhood--a man of integrity, of honor, of high purposes. His courtesy was exquisite, and it was sincere. It is often said of a man that he would not tell a lie to save his life. Your father went further than that, my child. He would not tell a lie even to please a woman, and with such a man as he was, pleasing a woman was a stronger temptation than saving his life. He was in New York taking a supplementary medical course--what they now call a post graduate course,--in order, as he said, that he might the better fulfil his life-saving mission as a physician. He fell madly in love with me, and I--God help me! I loved him as well as one of my shallow nature and irregular bringing up could love any man. After a little I married him. I went with him for a brief trip abroad, and after that I went to be mistress of Pocahontas. I looked forward longingly to the beautiful life of refinement there, as he so often pictured it to me. I was tired of the whirl and excitement. I was weary of the footlights and of having to take my applause and my approval over the heads of the orchestra. I thought I should be perfectly happy, playing grand lady in an old, historic Virginia house. I was only nineteen years old then,--I am well under forty still--and for a time I did enjoy the new life amazingly. But after a little it wearied me. It seemed to me too narrow, too conventional, too uninteresting. When I had company and poured my whole soul into a violin obligato,--rendering the great music in a way which had often brought down the house and called for repeated encores while delighted audiences threatened to bury me under flowers--when I did that sort of thing at Pocahontas, the guests would say coldly how well I played and all the other parrot like things that people say when they mean to be polite but have no real appreciation of music. Little by little I grew utterly weary of the life. The very things in it that had at first delighted and rested me, became like thorns in my flesh. As the rescued children of Israel longed for the flesh pots of Egypt, so at last I came to long again for the delights of the old life on the stage, with its excitements, its ever changing pleasures, its triumphs and even its failures and disappointments. Yet it was not so much a longing for that old life which oppressed me, as an intolerable impatience to get out of the new one from which I had expected so much of happiness. It seemed to me a tread-mill life of self-indulgence. I was surrounded by every luxury that a well-ordered woman could desire. But I was not a well-ordered woman, and the very