saving complement in
life. Perhaps she unconsciously cared for Arthur Vibert; and arguing the
question as dispassionately as I could my eyes fell upon "Thus Spake
Zarathustra," and opening the fat unwieldy volume I read:

"Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the
dreams of an ardent woman?"

"Pooh!" I sneered. "Nietzsche was a rank woman-hater;" then I began my
work on Mrs. Beacon's portrait, the fashionable Mrs. Beacon, and tried
to forget all about the finer issues and the satisfied sterility of its
ideals.

AN IBSEN GIRL

I

As Ellenora Vibert quietly descended the stairs of the apartment house
in Harlem where she had lived with her husband until this hot morning in
May, she wondered at her courage. She was taking a tremendous step, and
one that she hoped would not be a backward one. She was leaving Arthur
Vibert after a brief year of marriage for another man. Yet her pulse
fluttered not, and before she reached the open doorway a mocking humor
possessed her.

Her active brain pictured herself in the person of Ibsen's Nora Helmer.
But Nora left children behind, and deserted them in hot blood; no woman
could be cold after such a night in the Doll's House--the champagne, the
tarantella, the letter and the scene with Torvald! No, she was not quite
Nora Helmer; and Paul, her young husband, was hardly a Scandinavian
bureaucrat. When Ellenora faced the cutting sunshine and saw Mount
Morris Park, green and sweet, she stopped and pressed a hand to her hip.
It was a characteristic pose, and the first inspiration of the soft air
gave her peace and hardihood.

"I've been penned behind the bars too long," she thought. Arthur's
selfish, artistic absorption in his musical work and needless
indifference to the development of her own gifts must count no longer.

She was free, and she meant to remain so as long as she lived.

Then she went to the elevated railroad and entered a down-town train,
left it at Cortlandt Street, reached the Pennsylvania depot before
midday, and in the waiting-room met Paul Goddard. A few minutes later
they were on the Philadelphia train. The second chapter of Ellenora
Vibert's life began--and most happily.

II

Paul Goddard, after he had returned from Bayreuth, gave his musical
friends much pain by his indifference to old tastes. His mother, Mrs.
Goddard of Madison Square, was not needlessly alarmed. She told her
friends that Paul always had been a butterf