During the years of my childhood and girlhood, our family passed from wealth to poverty.  My father and only brother were killed in battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations melted from my mother’s white hands during the Reconstruction days; our big town house was sold for taxes.

When I married, my only dowry was a fierce pride and an overwhelming ambition to get back our material prosperity.  My husband was making a “good living.”  He was kind, easy-going, with a rare capacity for enjoying life and he loved his wife with that chivalrous, unquestioning, “the queen-can-do-no-wrong” type of love.

    But even in our days of courting I answered his ardent love-making
    with, “And we will work and save and buy back the big house; then we
    will—­” etc., etc.

    And he?  Ah, alone at sixty, I can still hear echoing down the years
    his big tender laugh, as he’d say, “Oh, what a de-ah, ambitious
    little sweetheart I have!”

He owned a home, a little cottage with a rose garden at one side of it—­surely, with love, enough for any bride.  But I—­I saw only the ancestral mansion up the street, the big old house that had passed out of the hands of our family.

I would have no honeymoon trip; I wanted the money instead.  John kissed each of my palms before he put the money into them.  My fingers closed greedily over the bills; it was the nest egg, the beginning.

Next I had him dismiss his bookkeeper and give me the place.  I didn’t go to his store—­Southern ladies didn’t do that in those days—­but I kept the books at home, and I wrote all the business letters.  So it happened when John came home at night, tired from his day’s work at the store, I had no time for diversions, for love-making, no hours to walk in the rose garden by his side—­no, we must talk business.

I can see John now on many a hot night—­and summer is hot in the Gulf States—­dripping with perspiration as he dictated his letters to me, while I, my aching head near the big hot lamp, wrote on and on with hurried, nervous fingers.  Outside there would be the evening breeze from the Gulf, the moonlight, the breath of the roses, all the romance of the southern night—­but not for us!

The children came—­four, in quick succession.  But so fixed were my eyes on the goal of Success, I scarcely realized the mystery of motherhood.  Oh, I loved them!  I loved John, too.  I would willingly have laid down my life for him or for any one of the children.  And I intended sometime to stop and enjoy John and the children.  Oh, yes, I was going really to live after we had bought back the big house, and had done so and so!  In the meanwhile, I held my breath and worked.

“I’ll be so glad,” I remember saying one day to a friend, “when