Miss Kauser studied for two years at the Ecole Monceau in Paris, although she had been her father’s housekeeper and a mother to the younger children since the age of twelve.  Both in Paris and Buda Pest she was in constant association with friends of her father, who developed her intellectual breadth.

Financial reverses brought the family to America and they settled in Pensacola, Florida.  Here Miss Kauser thought it was high time to put her accomplishments to some use and help out the family exchequer.  She began almost at once to teach French and music.  When her brothers were older she made up her mind to seek her fortune in New York and arrived with, a letter or two.  For several months she taught music and literature in private families.  Then Mary Bisland introduced her to Miss Marbury, where she attended to the French correspondence of the office for a year.

But these means of livelihood were mere makeshifts.  Ambitious, imperious, and able, it was not in her to work for others for any great length of time.  As soon as she felt that she “knew the ropes” in New York she told certain friends she had made that she wished to go into the play brokerage business for herself.  As she inspires confidence—­this is one of her assets—­her friends staked her, and she opened her office with the intention of promoting American plays only.  Her trained mind rapidly adapted itself to business and in the course of a few years she was handling the plays of many of the leading dramatists for a proportionate number of leading producers.  When the war broke out, so successful was she that she had a house of her own in the East Thirties, furnished with the beautiful things she had collected during her yearly visits to Europe—­for long since she had opened offices in Paris and London, her business outgrowing its first local standard.

The war hit her very hard.  She had but recently left the hospital after a severe operation, which had followed several years of precarious health.  She was quite a year reestablishing her former strength and full capacity for work.  One of the most exuberantly vital persons I had ever met, she looked as frail as a reed during that first terrible year of the war, but now seems to have recovered her former energies.

There was more than the common results of an operation to exasperate her nerves and keep her vitality at a low ebb.  Some thirty of her male relatives were at the Front, and the whole world of the theater was smitten with a series of disastrous blows.  Sixteen plays on the road failed in one day, expensive plays ran a week in New York.  Managers went into bankruptcy.  It was a time of strain and uncertainty and depression, and nobody suffered more than the play brokers.  Miss Kauser as soon as the war broke out rented her house and went into rooms that she might send to Hungary all the money she could make over expenses, and for a year this money was increasingly difficult to collect, or even to make.  But if she despaired no one heard of it.  She hung on.  By and by the financial tide turned for the country at large and she was one of the first to ride on the crest.  Her business is now greater than ever, and her interest in life as keen.