submission. She knew that from the first. All three
faced destitution; she was the one financial asset, she and her poor
flesh. She had to face it, and with what dignity she could muster.

Margaret had great piety. She kept constantly before her mental vision
the fact in which she believed, that the world which she found so hard,
and which put her to unspeakable torture, was not all.

A week elapsed before the wretched little show of which she was to be a
member went on the road, and night after night she prayed. She besieged
her God for strength. She never prayed for respite. Her realization
of the situation and her lofty resolution prevented that. The awful,
ridiculous combat was before her; there was no evasion; she prayed only
for the strength which leads to victory.

However, when the time came, it was all worse than she had imagined. How
could a woman gently born and bred conceive of the horrible ignominy
of such a life? She was dragged hither and yon, to this and that little
town. She traveled through sweltering heat on jolting trains; she slept
in tents; she lived--she, Margaret Lee--on terms of equality with the
common and the vulgar. Daily her absurd unwieldiness was exhibited to
crowds screaming with laughter. Even her faith wavered. It seemed to her
that there was nothing for evermore beyond those staring, jeering faces
of silly mirth and delight at sight of her, seated in two chairs, clad
in a pink spangled dress, her vast shoulders bare and sparkling with a
tawdry necklace, her great, bare arms covered with brass bracelets, her
hands incased in short, white kid gloves, over the fingers of which she
wore a number of rings--stage properties.

Margaret became a horror to herself. At times it seemed to her that she
was in the way of fairly losing her own identity. It mattered little
that Camille and Jack were very kind to her, that they showed her the
nice things which her terrible earnings had enabled them to have.
She sat in her two chairs--the two chairs proved a most successful
advertisement--with her two kid-cushiony hands clenched in her pink
spangled lap, and she suffered agony of soul, which made her inner self
stern and terrible, behind that great pink mask of face. And nobody
realized until one sultry day when the show opened at a village in a
pocket of green hills--indeed, its name was Greenhill--and Sydney Lord
went to see it.

Margaret, who had schooled herself to look upon her audience as if