“Write to your Uncle Peter,” I said that evening at supper, “and ask him for enough money for you to go to Denver and get a job on a newspaper. There’s no opportunity for your talent in this town and no chance to meet a man really worthy of you.” I was much too proud to appeal to Pete, myself, after our quarrel, but on several occasions I had permitted Silver to do so. In justice to Pete, I must admit he always responded—and I always felt he was trying to make up for the way he acted at the time of Tabor’s collapse. Silver left for Denver shortly after. For a while, she made good as a reporter on the _Denver Times_, and, later, in Chicago she wrote a novel, “Star of Blood.” But good fortune did not last. When she was out of money and a job, she wrote to me in Leadville. “Mama,” she mused on paper, “I think I will enter a convent. You have always been very religious and I am turning in that direction more and more—perhaps that would be a fine solution for my life.” I had always pictured Silver with a dazzling, high place before the world. But when I realized how the world was changing her from the sweet, pretty little girl she had been to a woman, bruised and at the mercy of men’s lust, I welcomed the thought of the serenity and spiritual safety of a convent. I was giving up my life to the Matchless. It was fitting that my daughter should give up her life to her God. They were both dedications to a love higher than self. “If you don’t hear from me,” she went on, “you will know that I can’t write—that I’ve taken vows.” My breath choked in my throat. I had lost everything—everything in the world that I prized—my dear husband, money, prominence, all my fineries, jewelry and the many little luxuries a woman loves, my brother, my family, my first daughter—and now Silver! It was almost more than one heart could stand. I cried out in terror. “Oh, no, Silver! I can’t lose you.” Little by little, I became reconciled to her suggestion. My darling baby was going away—but she was not really going away. She would be with me always. Shortly after that, she managed to raise enough capital to start and edit a little paper called the “Silver Dollar Weekly.” But after a few issues, its financial success was too negligible to carry on. Her letters said she was giving the project up and going to Chicago. If she failed there she would enter a convent in the mid-West that Uncle Peter knew about. The years passed slowly by. A few letters came and then only silence. Imagine my horror one September night in 1925! I had come to Denver to pass the winter and had stopped at the desk of my cheap little hotel before going to bed. The clerk surveyed me with a kind of contemptuous awe and asked: “Is that your daughter I seen in the paper tonight was murdered in some Chicago scandal?” “Certainly not,” I flared back. “My daughter is in a convent.”