She crossed the floor with the other to the long, low, bookcase. Elizabeth drew out a couple of volumes. "These are good to begin with--and this." She stood a moment in thought, her back to the case, her elbow resting on its polished top and her head upon her hand. On a shelf behind her stood a small bronze Psyche, a photograph of Botticelli's Judith, a drawing of Florence Nightingale. "Hagar," said Elizabeth, "if I give you two or three books upon the position of woman in the past and to-day, will you read them?" "I will read anything you give me, Elizabeth." She took her parcel of books and went back to the Maines'. She read with great rapidity. Her memory was not a verbal one, but her very tissues seemed to absorb the sense of what she read. Much in these books simply formulated for her with clearness what was already in solution in her mind. Here and there she was conscious of lines of difference, of inward criticism, but in the main they but enlarged a content already there, but brought above the threshold, named and fed what she was already thinking. Her mind went back to Eglantine and Roger Michael's talk. "No. It did not begin even here. It was in me. It had been in me a long time, only I didn't know it, or called it other names." Before these books were finished she got her fifty dollars from the magazine, and the magazine itself was sent her with her story in it. She sat and read the story, and it seemed strange and new in its robe of print. The magazine had provided an illustration--and how strange it was to see her figures (or rather _not_ her figures) moving and laughing there! Again and again, after the first time, she opened the magazine and in part or whole read the story and gazed upon the illustration--half a dozen or more times during the first twenty-four hours, then with dwindling frequency day after day, for a week or so. After that her appetite for her own completed work flagged. She laid the magazine away, and it was years before she read that story again. The fifty dollars--She put thirty-five away to go toward her summer clothes and wrote to her grandmother that she had done so. The remaining fifteen she expended on books, taking starred titles from Elizabeth's list. In January she wrote "The Lame Duck." She sent it to one of the great monthlies. It was accepted, she was paid a fair price, and the monthly gave her to understand that it should like to see _Hagar Ashendyne's_ next story.