Margaret Belinda Rysam was the daughter of a New Yorker on the up-grade. Her father began to make money when she was a baby and never left off, even to take breath, until she was between thirteen and fourteen. Then his wife died, not of a broken heart, but of her appetites fed to repletion, and an overwhelming desire for further provender. Her poor mouth, so much larger than her stomach, was always open. He piled a great house on Fifth Avenue into it and a bewilderment of furniture, modern old Masters and antiquities, also pearls and other jewellery. She never shut it, although later there were a country house to digest and some freak entertainments, a multiplicity of reporters and a few disappointments. The really “right people” were difficult to secure, the nearly “right people” were dust and ashes. A continental tour was to follow and a London season.... Before they started she died of a surfeit which the doctors called by some other name and operated upon, expensively. In the pause of the hushed house and the funeral Edgar B. Rysam began to think that perhaps he had made sufficient money. He really grieved for that poor open mouth and those upturned grasping hands, realising that it was to overfill them that he had worked. He gave up his office and found the days empty, discovered his young daughter, and, nearly to her undoing, filled them with her. During her mother’s life she had been left to the happy seclusion of nursery or schoolroom; subsidiary to the maelstrom of gold-dispensing. Now she had more governesses and tutors than could be fitted into the hurrying hours, and became easily aware of her importance, that she was the adored and only child of a widowed millionaire. Forced into concentrating her entire attention upon herself she discovered a remarkable personality. Bent at first on astonishing her surroundings she succeeded in astonishing herself. She found that she acquired knowledge with infinite ease and had a multiplicity of minor talents. She wrote verses and essays, sang, and played on various instruments. Highly paid governesses and tutors exclaimed and proclaimed. The words prodigy, and genius, pursued and illuminated her. At the age of sixteen no subject seemed to her so interesting as the consideration of her own psychology. Nothing could have saved her at this juncture but what actually occurred. For she had no incentive to concentration, and every battle was won before it was fought. To be was almost sufficient. To do, superfluous, almost arrogant.