“My mother married against the wishes of all her family and they never forgave her.  My father died early—­he had never got on in the world—­and before I was fifteen I became the sole support of my invalid mother as well as of myself.  We lived in Boone, Minnesota.

“You can imagine what sort of support it was, as I had no special talent, no training and only the opportunity given by a crude western town of two or three hundred inhabitants.  I washed dishes in the hotel kitchen—­I who had a millionaire uncle in Detroit and had been fed on tales of wealth and culture by a mother who remembered her own youth and was too ignorant of my real nature to see the harm she was doing.  I washed dishes and ate my own heart out in shame and longing—­bitter shame and frenzied longing, which you must rate at their full force if you would know my story and how I became linked to this man.

“I was sixteen when we first met.  He was not then what he is now, but he was handsome enough to create an excitement in town and to lift the girl he singled out into an enviable prominence.  Unfortunately, I was that girl.  I say unfortunately, because his good looks failed to arouse in me more than a passing admiration; and in accepting his attentions, I consulted my necessities and pride rather than the instincts of my better nature.  When he asked me to marry him I recoiled.  I did not know why then, nor did I know why later; but know why now.  However, I let this premonition pass and engaged myself to him, and the one happy moment I knew was when I told my mother what I had done, and saw her joy and heard the hope with which she impulsively cried:  ’It is something I can write your uncle.  Who knows?  Perhaps he may forgive me my marriage when he hears that my child is going to do so well!’ Poor mother! she had felt the glamour of my lover’s good looks and cleverness much more than I had.  She saw from indications to which I was blind that I was going to marry a man of mark, and was much more interested in the possible reply she might receive to the letter with which she had broken the silence of years between herself and her family than in the marriage itself.

“But days passed, a week, and no answer came.  My uncle—­the only relative remaining in which we could hope to awaken any interest, or rather, the only one whose interest would be worth awakening, he being a millionaire and unmarried—­declined, it appeared, any communication with one so entirely removed from his sympathies; and the disappointment of it broke my mother’s heart.  Before my wedding-day came she was lying in the bare cemetery I had passed so often with a cold dread in my young and bounding heart.