door.  She already knew some of the many things that were to happen to her; for instance, that the Chicago millionaire who was going to take her abroad with his sister as chaperone, would eventually press his claim in quite another manner.  He was the most circumspect of bachelors, afraid of everything obvious, even of women who were too flagrantly handsome.  He was a nervous collector of pictures and furniture, a nervous patron of music, and a nervous host; very cautious about his health, and about any course of conduct that might make him ridiculous.  But she knew that he would at last throw all his precautions to the winds.

People like Eden Bower are inexplicable.  Her father sold farming machinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with no acquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town.  Yet from her earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with the people about her,—­the only people she knew.  Before she was out of short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be much admired by men and would have everything she wanted.  When she was thirteen, and was already singing and reciting for church entertainments, she read in some illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czar of Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it.  After that, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, or sitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself by trying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar’s mistress when she played in his Capital.  Now Edna had met this fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida,—­her hard-worked little mother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind the linen chest.  In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men were called by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one; of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest.  But then, Edna had never lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like “Sapho” and “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” secretly sold in paper covers throughout Illinois.  It was as if she had come into Huntington, into the Bowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behind their back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to take her out.

As she grew older and handsomer, she had many beaux, but these small-town boys didn’t interest her.  If a lad kissed her when he brought her home from a dance, she was indulgent and she rather liked it.  But if he pressed her further, she slipped away from him, laughing.  After she began to sing in Chicago, she was consistently discreet.  She stayed as a guest in rich people’s houses, and she knew that she was being watched like a rabbit in a laboratory.  Covered up in bed, with the lights out, she thought her own thoughts, and laughed.