aid.

She gave him an impulsive hand by way of sympathy. "I'd be willing to be
lonely, if I could be famous. But I wouldn't be willing to have mother
lonely," she added. "I never could make up my mind to leave her here
alone."

"Alone? But there's your sister."

"No, there isn't. Not now. She's here, of course, but--" The girl's face
shadowed, but she did not explain. The shock of that terrible scene
between the two beings she loved best was a thing that did not bear
thinking of, much less speaking of. Sometimes at night she woke
trembling and sobbing with the memory of it, as from a nightmare. But by
day she put it from her determinedly, and tried to pretend that
everything was as it always had been in her home.

"Have you told your mother about this ambition of yours?" he asked
curiously.

She shook her head. "No. I've hinted, but they--they laughed at me, and
Jemmy said that it wouldn't be lady-like to go on the stage, even in
grand opera."

Channing smiled. "The standards of the world, fortunately, vary somewhat
from the standards of rural Kentucky. Some of the greatest 'ladies' I
have known happened to be on the stage, and not always in grand opera."

He went on to speak of various singers and actors and painters and
writers of his acquaintance, of studios and greenrooms, customs in
European countries, famous friendships between royalty and artists; and
she had her first glimpse of a world that made her own seem as barren
and desolate as some desert isle.

Certain racial inheritances awoke in her and clamored. Her mother's
family had been people of culture and travel and wide social
affiliations. It had not occurred to her before that her life was
singularly empty. She would have said that her friends were legion. The
horses, the dogs, the negroes, the humbler country folk of the
neighborhood, the tenants on her mother's property--all accepted the
Madam's youngest daughter as one of themselves, and loved her
accordingly. But of intercourse with her own kind, she had none. Her
mother, Philip, Professor Thorpe, even Jemima--regarded Jacqueline as a
playful, happy, charming tomboy, whose sole duty in life was to amuse
herself and them. Philip, indeed, was beginning to observe the deeper
instincts stirring in her; but Charming was the first of her equals to
treat her quite as an equal, and the fact that she looked upon him as a
dazzlingly superior order of being made his recognition of her as a
kindred spiri