My maiden name was Margaret McDonald, and I am seventeen next New Year’s Day.  My father is of Scotch descent, and a lawyer; my mother was a Barnard, from New Orleans, and has the best blood of the two.  I am an only child, and very handsome—­so everybody says—­and I should know it if they did not say it, for can’t I see myself in the glass!  And still I really do not care so much for my good looks except as they serve to attain the end for which father says I was born.

Almost the first thing I can remember is of his telling me that I must marry young and marry rich, and I promised him I would, and asked if I could stay at home with mother just the same after I was married.  Another thing I remember, which made a lasting impression, and that is the beating father gave me for asking before some grand people staying at our house, “Why we did not always have beefsteak and hot muffins for breakfast, instead of just baked potatoes and bread and butter.”

I must learn to keep my mouth shut, father said, and not tell all I knew; and I profited by the lesson, and that is one reason, I suppose, why I so rarely say what I think, or express an opinion whether favorable or otherwise.

I do not believe I am deceitful, though all my life I have seen my parents try to seem what they are not; that is, try to seem like rich people, when sometimes father’s practice brought him only a few hundreds a year, and there was mother and myself and Tom to support.  Tom is my cousin—­Tom McDonald—­who lived with us and fell in love with me, though I never tried to make him.  I liked him ever so much, though he used to tease me horribly, and put horn-bugs in my shoes, and worms on my neck, and Jack-o’-lanterns in my room, and tip me off his sled into the snow; but still I liked him, for with all his teasing he had a great, kind, unselfish heart, and I shall never forget that look on his face when I told him I could not be his wife.  I did not like him as he liked me, and I did not want to be married anyway, and if I did marry it must be to some rich man.  That was in Chicago, and the night before he started for South America, where he was going to make his fortune, and he wanted me to promise to wait for him, and said no one would ever love me as well as he did.

I could not promise, because, even if he had all the gold mines in Peru, I did not care to spend my days with him—­to see him morning, noon, and night, and all the time.  It is a good deal to ask of a woman, and I told him so, and he cried so hard—­not loud, but in a pitiful kind of way, which hurt me cruelly.  I hear that sobbing sometimes now in my sleep, and it’s like the moan of the wind round that house on the prairie where Tom’s mother died.  Poor Tom!  I gave him a lock of my hair and let him kiss me twice, and then he went away, and after that old Judge Burton offered himself and his million to me; but I could not endure his bald head a week, and I told him no,