irginity, however, is not for
poor girls, nor for operatic singers, nor for kings' daughters, none
of whom, for various reasons, can live, or are allowed to live,
without husbands. Unless she be a hunchback, an unmarried royal
princess is almost as great an exception as a white raven or a cat
without a tail; a primadonna without a husband alive, dead, or
divorced, is hardly more common; and poor girls marry to live. But
give a modern young woman a decent social position, with enough money
for her wants and an average dose of assurance, and she becomes so
fastidious in the choice of a mate that no man is good enough for
her till she is too old to be good enough for any man. Even then the
chances are that she will not deeply regret her lost opportunities,
and though her married friends will tell her that she has made a
mistake, half of them will envy her in secret, the other half will not
pity her much, and all will ask her to their dinner-parties, because a
woman without a husband is such a convenience.

In respect to her art Margarita da Cordova was in all ways a thorough
artist, endowed with the gifts, animated by the feelings, and
afflicted with the failings that usually make up an artistic nature.
But Margaret Donne was a sound and healthy English girl who had been
brought up in the right way by a very refined and cultivated father
and mother who loved her devotedly. If they had lived she would not
have gone upon the stage; for as her mother's friend Mrs. Rushmore had
often told her, the mere thought of such a life for their daughter
would have broken their hearts. She was a grown woman now, and high
on the wave of increasing success and celebrity, but she still had
a childish misgiving that she had disobeyed her parents and done
something very wrong, just as when she had surreptitiously got into
the jam cupboard at the age of five.

Yet there are old-fashioned people alive even now who might think that
there was less harm in becoming a public singer than in keeping Edmund
Lushington dangling on a string for two years and more. Those things
are matters of opinion. Margaret would have answered that if he
dangled it was his misfortune and not her fault, since she never, in
her own opinion, had done anything to keep him, and would not have
been broken-hearted if he had gone away, though she would have missed
his friendship very much. Of the two, the man who had disturbed her
maiden peace of mind was Logotheti, whom sh