It was then that a little girl-child was born into the world, a little girl who was called by the name of Regina, and whose father and mother bore the homely appellation of Mr. and Mrs. Brown; yes, plain, simple and homely Brown, without even so much as an "e" placed at the tail thereof to give it a distinction from all the other Browns. So far as I have ever heard, the young childhood of Regina Brown was passed in quite an ordinary and conventional atmosphere. Her parents were well-meaning, honest, kindly, well-disposed, middle-class persons. According to their lights they educated their daughter extremely well; that is to say, she was sent to a genteel seminary, she was always nicely dressed, and she wore her hair in ringlets. This state of things continued, without any particular change, until Regina was nearly twenty years old. By that time the great Franco-Prussian War had beaten itself into peace, the horrors of the Commune of Paris had come and gone, and the sun of Regina Brown's twentieth birthday rose upon a world in which nations had come once more, at least to outward seeming, to the conclusion that all men are brothers. It might have been some long-forgotten echo from the early days when France and England fought against Russia, or it might have been in a measure owing to the conflict, so long, so deadly and so bloody, between France and Germany, but certain is it that, when Regina Brown realized that she was twenty years old, she came to the conclusion that she was leading a wasted life. If the period in which she lived had been that of to-day, I think Regina Brown would have entered herself at any hospital that would have accepted her and would have trained for a nurse; but, in the early seventies, nursing was not, as now, the almost regulation answer to the question, "What shall we do with our girls?" "What shall I do with my life?" she said, looking in the modest little glass which swung above her toilet-table. "What shall I do with my life? Live here, pandering to my father and mother, listening to my father's accounts of how some man at the club wagered a shilling on a matter which could make no difference to anyone; hearing mother's elaborate account of the delinquencies of Charlotte Ann, who really is not such a bad girl, after all. I can't go on like this--I can't bear it any longer. It's a waste of life; it's a waste of a strong, capable, original brain. I must get out into the world and do something." In the course of life one comes across so many people who are always yearning to go out into the world and do something, but Regina Brown was not a young woman who could or would content herself with mere yearning. With her to think was to do. With her a resolve was a fact practically accomplished.