It was Cordelia who attracted Elsa Muller’s sweetheart, Yank Hurst, to her side, and left Elsa to die yearning for his return.  And it was Cordelia who threw Hurst aside when he took to drink and stabbed the young man who, during a mere walk from church, took his place beside Cordelia.  And yet Cordelia was only ambitious, not wicked.  Few men live who would not look twice at her.  She was not of the stunted tenement type, like her friends Rosie Mulvey and Minnie Bechman and Julia Moriarty.  She was tall and large and stately, and yet plump in every outline.  Moreover, she had the “style” of an American girl, and looked as well in five dollars’ worth of clothes—­all home-made, except her shoes and stockings—­as almost any girl in richer circles.  It was too bad that she was called a flirt by the young men, and a stuck-up thing by the girls, when in fact she was merely more shrewd and calculating than the others, who were content to drift out of the primary schools into the shops, and out of the shops into haphazard matrimony.  Cordelia was not lovable, but not all of us are who may be better than she.  She was monopolized by the hope of getting a man; but a mere alliance with trousers was not the sum of her hope; they must jingle with coin.

It was strange, then, that she should be dressing to meet Jerry Donahue, who was no better than gilly to the Commissioner of Public Works, drawing a small salary from a clerkship he never filled, while he served the Commissioner as a second left hand.  But if we could see into Cordelia’s mind we would be surprised to discover that she did not regard herself as flesh-and-blood Mahoney, but as romantic Clarice Delamour, and she only thought of Jerry as James the butler.  The voracious reader of the novels of to-day will recall the story of Clarice, or Only a Lady’s-Maid, which many consider the best of the several absorbing tales that Lulu Jane Tilley has written.  Cordelia had read it twenty times, and almost knew it by heart.  Her constant dream was that she could be another Clarice, and shape her life like hers.  The plot of the novel needs to be briefly told, since it guided Cordelia’s course.

Clarice was maid to a wealthy society dowager.  James the butler fell in love with Clarice when she first entered the household, and she, hearing the servants’ gossip about James’s savings and salary, had encouraged his attentions.  He pressed her to marry him.  But young Nicholas Stuyvesant came home from abroad to find his mother ill and Clarice nursing her.  Every day he noticed the modest rosy maid moving noiselessly about like a sunbeam.  Her physical perfection profoundly impressed him.  In her presence he constantly talked to his mother about his admiration for healthy women.  Each evening Clarice reported to him the condition of the mother, and on one occasion mentioned that she had never known ache, pain, or malady in her life.  The young man often chatted with her in the drawing-room,