Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl until she became boy-struck--as our vernacular puts it. Her mother thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers about the boys who came to see Nora--before she was twelve. In those days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody's honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the Sinclairs'. Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn't "one of those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream. The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other little girls of Nora's age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes: "You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and never objected when he stayed after eleven o'clock; for she thought he was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to her having two or three other eleven o'clock fellows. She said he was "selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew more about matters that were none of her business than most women know on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills, and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don't