the first step was to secure a teacher
who would correct her errors and give her skill in the performances
which had robbed so many of her friends of all reserve and had taught
them the abandonment of motion.

She had tried to take a nap that afternoon but sleep would not come
though she obeyed all the rules for capturing it. Her father's blood was
in her veins and even her training had failed to obliterate all of the
hard sense which had helped him pass his neighbors in the race for money
which should win the coveted title "A Success."

She did not like the dances, she knew she was not equal to the round of
varied functions that lay before her. But she was a worshiper--she
blindly followed Fashion--she bowed in the presence of Pleasure--and at
last sighing wearily, murmured softly, "Well, there is no way out.
Mother has set her heart on it and one might as well die as to be out of
everything"--she laid her sacrifice upon the altar, took up a book and
stopped thinking.

It is easy to think that she is but one, and perhaps the great
exception, that because she is not physically strong she shrinks from
the long gay season. But she is only one of many, some very young and
strong, and some in the twenties who have hearts and find them
unsatisfied, who long to be free but held in the grip of the twin idols
at last bow down and worship.

In the home of a shoemaker where food was coarse but plentiful and where
the loose casements and cracks in walls and doors defied all efforts to
keep out the air, grew up a little rosy-cheeked, black-haired girl. When
she was fourteen she was tall for her age, her black hair was abundant
and beautiful, her large, dark eyes snapped and sparkled in laughter or
in anger. She went to work. As yet she had thought little about the twin
idols. Before the year had passed, she knelt before them. At the end of
the second year she had offered in their name, truth and honesty in
exchange for furs, a silver purse and a beautiful necklace. Her parents
unable to speak English, ready to believe that anything was possible in
the new land suspected nothing. Before the close of the third year, when
she was but seventeen, in mad devotion to Fashion and Pleasure, she had
laid herself, a living sacrifice upon the altar.

In the same city where she had followed so madly in pursuit of pleasure
and dress, in a comfortable home upon one of the new avenues where young
shade trees, modern houses, neatly trimmed la