For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game with the odds against them. I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years, and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off, and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness, and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.