o catalogue a life
like this, add that it was the life of a handsome, well-dressed,
high-spirited girl, and pretend that it was an existence unqualified by
male adjectives, would be the merest absurdity.

I hear that from the tiniest, most impudent printer's devil up to the
Dean of College Presidents, who became so interested in her during his
famous interview of "_After Democracy--What?_" that his wife asked her
to luncheon and she spent the day with them, every man she encountered
"swore by her," as they say. In a novel, the editor-in-chief would
have married her and Eleanor would have been delighted; but in a novel
the editors-in-chief are handsome, athletic young bachelors (which
rarely occurs, as a matter of fact) or magnificent widowers whose first
marriages were tragic mistakes, so the emotional field is really clear.
Now Molly's editor-in-chief was, so far as is known, quite happy with
his wife, and his four daughters were not so much younger than Molly
herself. It is true, the art editor of the Sunday edition was supposed
to be pretty far gone, but he was married, too, and even his
stenographer, who was furiously jealous, admitted that Molly never gave
him the slightest encouragement. Such reporters as were free to do so
are generally credited with proposals in strict order of income (there
had to be some working system), but nothing but continued good feeling
ever came of it; and the French portrait-painter who spent three days
at the Metropolitan Art Museum with her out of the ten he vouchsafed
America, declared openly that she was perfectly cold, a charming,
clever boy in temperament--"absolutely insulated." And perhaps she
was. She always said that she knew too many men to take them too
seriously. And yet when Kathryn remarked once that it was encouraging
to observe how women were gradually growing independent of men, Molly
laughed consumedly. So there, as the great Anglo-American novelist
says, you are!

Living, as she did, alone, utterly unrestricted in her goings,
uncensored except by her own common-sense, one readily imagines that
there may have been scenes ... how could they have been avoided,
mankind being as it is? But if her house was of glass, it was, by its
very nature transparent, and I do not see how any one who didn't
deserve it could have kept the consistent respect of the entire force
of _The Day_.

On her twenty-eighth birthday she came home from a very gay supper at a
very gay r