Yes, I had a good time, a really lovely girlhood, and when the days of worry came I could look back with pleasure to those happy years. The remembrance helped me—but I missed the old life. It doesn’t matter being born poor, that is no crime, and we cannot miss what we never had; but the poverty which robs of the luxuries—that use has really made necessaries—of existence is a cruel, rasping kind of poverty, that irritates like a gall on a horse’s back until one learns the philosophy of life. Luxury is merely a little more self-indulgence than one is accustomed to. Prolonged luxury becomes habit. The well-born can do without cream, but they cannot do without clean linen. Those girlhood days were bright and happy. I had no cares, just a rollicking time in a refined and cultured home, with lots of young men ready to amuse me, and after all these years I am proud to say girl friends of my school days, and even of the kindergarten, are still constant visitors at my home. As I write a beautiful white azalea stands before me, an offering from a woman, who sent it with a note, saying, “It was so kind of you to let me come and see you after nearly thirty years, and so charming to find you so little changed from my school-playmate, in spite of all you have done since we met. Accept this flower with gratitude and affection from a friend of your early youth.” These are the pretty little things that make life pleasant. FOOTNOTES: [3] _Behind the Footlights._ PART III WOMANHOOD CHAPTER III “WOOED AND MARRIED, AND A’” Iceland seems a strange place to go to, but it came about in this wise. My brother was ill after completing his medical education, and wanted a holiday. Not having the slightest idea where to go, Iceland was suggested. To Cook’s I then went. The young man behind the counter shook his head. They had never been asked for a ticket to Iceland. Indeed, they did not know how to get there. They knew nothing about the place. That decided the matter, and to Iceland, in 1886, we young folk went. Then it was that my father besought me to keep a diary. “There will be no possibility of sending letters home,” he said, “because there are only two or three posts a year, and there is no telegraphic communication. So by the time you come back, you will have forgotten many of the interesting details, all of which your mother and I would like to know. Consequently I beg you will keep a diary.” Therefore I took with me some funny little black-backed shiny books at a penny each, and scrawled down notes and impressions, sometimes written from the back of a pony, sometimes in the darkness of a tent in which one could not stand up; sometimes sitting beside a boiling geyser while our meal bubbled in a little tin can on the edge of the pool, but always beneath the gorgeous skies, the endless days and little-known nights of the Arctic in summer. To that little trip romance is attached.