The whole point about George Sand was that she would have got nowhere if she had been content to be a home girl. The fact that she was a descendant of kings and that a grisette gave birth to her in an alcove adjoining a ballroom wouldn’t have availed her much had she not answered when Paris called. She could have stayed down in the country, being a dutiful wife to Casimir Dudevant until kingdom come and that would have been all there was to it--no Latin Quarter to be free in, no salons to dominate, no editors to cajole, no poet to be adored by--and what woman doesn’t dream of being adored by one of the shallow ethereal creatures? Then, too, George Sand had a sense of values. It would be more interesting to coddle Chopin on an island than to keep Maurice and Solange tidy at Nohant; so she up and had the courage of her romantic convictions. Just as the dawn was turning the blurred square of her window to rose Matilda decided what she would do. She would go to a city, Chicago, perhaps; change her name to Mathilde Lantier, and open a salon. She might even write when she had lived long enough to have a viewpoint about her lovers. In the meantime she would make a collection of bon mots. To hear her one would think that opening a salon in Chicago was as simple as setting up a millinery shop on Main Street at home. The next day Matilda went about the detested store in a daze of intrepid graciousness, and so hypnotized was she by her borrowed boldness that she verily believed she was bringing something to pass. When the school children trooped in at noon she tossed lemon drops across the counter as if they were largesse. She sold farmhand overalls with the charming condescension of a princess. A notoriously stingy old fellow who “batched it” in a tumbledown cottage across the tracks came in and bought china recklessly because Matilda’s way among the chipped dusty cups was that of a hostess tendering a senator tea. At six o’clock that evening it was her father who swung open the door she dreamed of. The four of them were at supper. The fat, hairy mother headed the board like a pink general whose idea of relaxation is being as plump as possible in a flowered wrapper. Her handsome son Fred sat there glorying sullenly in a prowess which enabled him to juggle night into day and make sibyls, sheriffs, virgins, and hoboes stand in awe of him or succumb, as the case might be. There was Matilda herself, hollow-eyed, brooding, with a heritage in her breast clamouring to be aired and a book upstairs which was making her poignantly sure that at last she had found a way up the hill. At the foot of everything sat Franz, the grocer, who clung to the tangled faded ends of dreams with the same kind of shamefaced pride that he clung to the last faint fringe of his hair. He was gumptionless and meant too well for his own good, but it was he who spoke. “I’m thinkin’ of puttin’ in a line of fancy glassware and some electrical stuff. We gotta be more modern.”