ich we heard in the
story of Elsa Muller's hopeless love, was before her, among several
portraits of actresses and salaried beauties. She had taken them out
from under the paper in the top drawer of the bureau. She always kept
them there, and always took them out and spread them in the lamp-light
when she was alone in her room. She glanced approvingly at the portrait
of herself as a picture of which she had said to more than one girlish
confidante that it showed as neat a figure and as perfectly shaped limbs
as any actress's she had ever seen. But the suggestion of a frown
flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once
been "stage-struck"--how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could
quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage. Julia Fogarty's
case proved that. Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where
was Julia--or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself? She started
well as a figurante in a comic opera company up-town, but from that she
dropped to a female minstrel troupe in the Bowery, and now, Lewy Tusch
told Cordelia, she was "tooing ter skirt-tance in ter pickernic parks
for ter sick-baby fund, ant passin' ter hat arount afterwarts." And evil
was being whispered of her--a pretty high price to pay for such small
success; and it must be true, because she sometimes came home late at
night in cabs, which are devilish, except when used at funerals.

It was Cordelia who attracted Elsa Muller's sweetheart, Yank Hurst, to
her side, and left Elsa to die yearning for his return. And it was
Cordelia who threw Hurst aside when he took to drink and stabbed the
young man who, during a mere walk from church, took his place beside
Cordelia. And yet Cordelia was only ambitious, not wicked. Few men live
who would not look twice at her. She was not of the stunted tenement
type, like her friends Rosie Mulvey and Minnie Bechman and Julia
Moriarty. She was tall and large and stately, and yet plump in every
outline. Moreover, she had the "style" of an American girl, and looked
as well in five dollars' worth of clothes--all home-made, except her
shoes and stockings--as almost any girl in richer circles. It was too
bad that she was called a flirt by the young men, and a stuck-up thing
by the girls, when in fact she was merely more shrewd and calculating
than the others, who were content to drift out of the primary schools
into the shops, and out of the shops into haphazard matrimony. C