She remembered the day she had discarded her own name, how one morning she was Frances Rice, or often plain Fanny Rice, and the next morning Cordelia Vaughan. She took the name from the Virginia branch of her family, after much hesitation, she recalled, because Valerie Vaughan, her cousin, had already identified that patronymic with the gentle art of letters, smiling bitterly at the thought that under that new name she had sprung into being as an artist as maturely and as miraculously as the goddess Minerva herself. Then she let her busy thoughts dwell on her first triumphant year in New York, on many memories of the growing belief of her friends that she was the daughter of an old and aristocratic Kentucky family, of her interviews and her invitations, of her first intoxicating draught of publicity, of her gradual dismay as she found herself being forgotten, of her months of silent and agonized effort, that resulted in nothing, of her restless nights and her feverish days, when her spirit cried out for some balm for the itch which was burning and consuming her. She was no fool, she knew; she was as clever as other women. But some essential touch of imagination, some necessary element of creativeness, was not hers; and it had been imposed upon her to seek by sheer strategy and despairing strife that which came so lightly to the hand of others. As she lay there alone in her rocking berth her withered and barren heart itself grew appalled at the thought of those years of smallness, of meanness, of deceit and duplicity, and endless lies. The enormity of her wrong-doing overwhelmed her. And the bitterest sting of all lay in the fact that so much of it was irreparable, that she had wronged not only the living, but the dead as well. The one appeasing oasis in that arid desert of deceit and self-seeking was the memorial week she had journeyed back to the little Kentucky town of her childhood and there watched over the erection of a granite shaft beside the sadly neglected grave of a young Northerner who had once come so intimately into her girlhood life. She was not all bad, not all bad, she cried out to herself, piteously! It was not yet too late. It might cost her much, but Love would show her the way. That old dead past should be wiped out. She would tell her husband everything. She would hold nothing back from him, and, with her slate once clean, from that day she would show him, by her devotion to him and his work, by her patient help, by her humility and her tenderness, how she could be good, as other women--as the best of other women.