To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we ourselves are posterity, and every man is his own ancestor.  I am to-day what I am because I was yesterday what I was.  The Disagreeable Girl is always pretty, at least we have been told she is pretty, and she fully accepts the dictum.

She has also been told she is clever, and she thinks she is.

The actual fact is she is only “sassy.”

The fine flaring up of youth has tended to set sex rampant, but she is not “immoral” save in her mind.

She has caution to the verge of cowardice, and so she is sans reproche.  In public she pretends to be dainty; but alone, or with those for whose good opinion she does not care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in every feature of her life.  She eats too much, does not exercise enough and considers it amusing to let other people wait on her and do for her the things she should do for herself.  Her room is a jumble of disorder.  The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of shame, she allows no visitor to enter her apartments if she can help it.  Concrete selfishness is her chief mark.  She will avoid responsibility, side-step every duty that calls for honest effort; is untruthful, secretive, indolent and dishonest.

“What are you eating?” asks Nora Hebler’s husband as she enters the room, not expecting to see him.

“Nothing,” is the answer, and she hides the box of bonbons behind her, and soon backs out of the room.

I think Mr. Hebler had no business to ask her what she was eating—­no man should ask any woman such a question, and really it was no difference anyway.  But Nora is always on the defensive and fabricates when it is necessary, and when it isn’t, just through habit.  She will hide a letter written by her grandmother as quickly and deftly as if it were a missive from a guilty lover.  The habit of her life is one of suspicion, for being inwardly guilty herself, she suspects everybody although it is quite likely that crime with her has never broken through thought into deed.  Nora will rifle her husband’s pockets, read his note-book, examine his letters, and when he goes on a trip she spends the day checking up his desk, for her soul delights in duplicate keys.

At times she lets drop hints of knowledge concerning little nothings that are none of hers, just to mystify folks.

She does strange, annoying things simply to see what others will do.

In degree, Nora’s husband fixed the vice of finesse in her nature, for when even a “good” woman is accused she parries by the use of trickery and wins her point by the artistry of the bagnio.  Women and men are never really far apart anyway, and women are largely what men have made them.

We are all just getting rid of our shackles; listen closely, anywhere, even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can detect the rattle of chains.