ess
from the East. Whether she went with the hope of emulation in her
heart or not none can venture to say. Maybe it was in search of
manhood, a different kind of man.

Anyhow, she went. And found a school to teach. And disillusionment.
She could not teach school; she knew more than her scholars, yet not so
much more of what they needed to be taught. It was not always clear in
her mind whether it had been the Delaware or the Rappahannock which
furnished Washington's transportation problem. And two and two didn't
always make four; not if she didn't keep her mind terribly
concentrated, when she wanted to dream.

The children loved her; they cried, unaccountably to their parents,
when she had to leave. But the parents were ruthless about it; they
weren't paying school taxes to support a slip of a girl who couldn't
hammer the three essential R's into their undoubtedly gifted
offsprings' heads, even though her hair was high-piled and tawny-red,
and her skin like cream; even though there were violet lights in her
singularly eager eyes.

When one less practical than the rest tried to point out that she had a
bearing different from theirs; "genteel" he called it, yet without
offense to the most humble, and that she "talked good, too," and in a
less nasal way, they rode him down. Their progeny was yet a long step
from a drawing-room they averred, or the need to know how to enter one.

She lost her position. In Estabrook, loath to acknowledge herself
disappointed, she found another, and lost that. But she considered
this scarcely a mishap, for she couldn't have lived upon what it paid
anyway. Moreover she was becoming rapidly afraid of this country; it
was bigger and she was littler than she had supposed. And no dashing
horsemen had ridden up to her schoolhouse door and handed her nosegays
and assured her that her eyes were the same shade of blue. She'd
pricked that bubble! Most of them chewed tobacco with no delicate
regard for outward appearances.

With her money running perilously low she had taken stock of her
wardrobe and found it already shabby, and decided to go back East while
there was still time. She'd try New York. Her pride would not
handicap her there any more than it had here, for no one would know
her. She'd find something to do in New York; of course she would.
She'd have to!

Then the toad-person had laid unclean eyes upon her in the dining-room
of the Cactus House, and contrived meetings