experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from her
earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with
the people about her,--the only people she knew. Before she was out of
short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an
actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be
much admired by men and would have everything she wanted. When she was
thirteen, and was already singing and reciting for church entertainments,
she read in some illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czar
of Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it. After
that, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, or
sitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself by
trying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar's
mistress when she played in his Capital. Now Edna had met this
fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida,--her hard-worked little
mother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind the
linen chest. In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men were
called by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one;
of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest. But then, Edna had
never lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like
"Sapho" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin," secretly sold in paper covers
throughout Illinois. It was as if she had come into Huntington, into the
Bowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behind
their back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to take
her out.

As she grew older and handsomer, she had many beaux, but these small-town
boys didn't interest her. If a lad kissed her when he brought her home
from a dance, she was indulgent and she rather liked it. But if he
pressed her further, she slipped away from him, laughing. After she began
to sing in Chicago, she was consistently discreet. She stayed as a guest
in rich people's houses, and she knew that she was being watched like a
rabbit in a laboratory. Covered up in bed, with the lights out, she
thought her own thoughts, and laughed.

This summer in New York was her first taste of freedom. The Chicago
capitalist, after all his arrangements were made for sailing, had been
compelled to go to Mexico to look after oil interests. His sister knew
an excellent singing master in New York. Why should not a discreet,
well-balanced girl like