f the men with whom she had had to do. It was one
thing to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like Bouchalka, but
quite another to stand behind a financier. And Brown would be a financier
or nothing. After her marriage with him, Cressida grew rapidly older. For
the first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live--to get
Jerome Brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouraged
activities. But Brown was not a man who could be amused and kept out of
mischief in Continental hotels. He had to be a figure, if only a "mark,"
in Wall street. Nothing else would gratify his peculiar vanity. The
deeper he went in, the more affectionately he told Cressida that now all
her cares and anxieties were over. To try to get related facts out of his
optimism was like trying to find framework in a feather bed. All Cressida
knew was that she was perpetually "investing" to save investments. When
she told me she had put a mortgage on the Tenth Street house, her eyes
filled with tears. "Why is it? I have never cared about money, except to
make people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. It has
spoiled all my relations with people. Fortunately," she added
irrelevantly, drying her eyes, "Jerome and Poppas get along well." Jerome
could have got along with anybody; that is a promoter's business. His
warm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funny
story,--Poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man like
that.

Though Brown's ventures never came home, there was nothing openly
disastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in Mexico jeopardized
his interests there. Then Cressida went to England--where she could
always raise money from a faithful public--for a winter concert tour.
When she sailed, her friends knew that her husband's affairs were in a
bad way; but we did not know how bad until after Cressida's death.

Cressida Garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the _Titanic_.
Poppas and Horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a week
earlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out of
their London hotel. But Cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea
monster--she still believed that all advertising was good--and she went
down on the road between the old world and the new. She had been ill, and
when the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest one
somewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically.
Appar