§ 28 So far I have put together this story from the memories of Sylvia and Frank Shirley. But now I have come to the point where you may watch the events through my own eyes. I will take a paragraph or two to give you an idea of the quality of these eyes, and then proceed without further delay. Mary Abbott, the teller of this tale, was at the age of forty a crude farmer’s wife upon a lonely pioneer homestead in Manitoba. In winter in that part of the world it begins to grow dark at three o’clock in the afternoon, and it is not fully light until nine o’clock in the morning. We were a mile from the nearest neighbor, and had often three feet of snow upon the ground, with fifty degrees below zero and a sweeping wind. I had a husband whom I feared and despised, and for whom I cooked and washed and sewed, whether I was well or ill. Under these circumstances I had raised three children to maturity. I had moved to town and seen them through high-school; and now, the girl being married, and the two boys in college, I found myself suddenly free to see the world. You must not think of me as altogether ignorant. I had fought desperately for books, and had grown up with my children. Discovering in the town the perpetual miracle of a circulating library, I had read wildly, acquiring a strange assortment of new ideas. But that, I am ashamed to say, made very little difference when I reached the East. It is one thing to read up in the theory of Socialism, and say that you have freed yourself from _bourgeois_ ideals; it is quite another to come from a raw pioneer community, and be suddenly hit between the eyes by all the marvels of the great New Nineveh! I forgot my principles; I wandered about, breathless with excitement. Everything that I had ever read about, in Sunday supplements and cheap magazines—here it was before my eyes! I got myself a hall-room in a “Greenwich Village” boarding-house, and for days I went, thrusting my inquisitive country face into everything that was cheap enough. The huge shops with their amazing treasures of silks and jewels; the great hotels with their gold and stucco splendors; the dizzy, tower-like office-buildings; the newspaper offices with their whirling presses; the theatres, the museums, the parks; the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb and the Bowery—I was the very soul of that thing which the New Yorker derisively calls the “rubber-neck wagon!” I took my place in one of these moving grand-stands, and listened to all that came out of the megaphone. Here was the home of the steel-king, which had cost three millions of dollars! Here was the home where a fifty thousand dollar chef was employed! Here was the old van Tuiver mansion, where the millionaire-baby had been brought up! Here was the Palace Hotel, where Miss Sylvia Castleman was staying!