in heaps. During these visits, which were continued every
Sunday until the old lady died, an invariable programme was observed:
the child repeated the catechism, recited a verse from the hymnal, after
which she was gratified with sponge-cake and a glass of milk, and then
was permitted to look at the pictures in a large Bible, in which, by way
of frontispiece, was an engraving of a man with a white beard, whom her
grandmother said was God. Such, with the exception of tiresome
promenades on Second Avenue, where her father's house was situated, such
were her relaxations.

And so it came about that in the enforced loneliness of her childhood
she ransacked a library in which the "Picara Justina" of Fray Andrs
Perez stood side-by-side with the Kalevala, a library in which works
stupid as the Koran and dead as Coptic touched covers with the "Idyls of
the King" and the fabliaux of mediaeval France. Soon she had made friends
with the heroes and heroines that are the caryatides of the
book-shelves. In their triumphs she exulted; by their failures she was
depressed. At the age of thirteen she spoke of King Arthur as though he
were her first cousin. The next year she was in love with Amadis of
Gaul.

A little later she hung on the wall of her bedroom a bit of embroidery
of her own manufacture, a square piece of watered silk, on which in bold
relief stood the characters 60 H, a device understood by no one but
herself, one which her imagination had evolved out of the aridity of a
French copy-book, and which each night and each morning said to her,
_Sois sans tache_.

Indeed, her brain had been the haunt of many an odd conceit, the home of
fays and goblins. Her imagination was always a garden to her except
when it happened to be a morass. She had not only castles in Spain, she
had dungeons as well; and of them she was architect, mason, and
inhabitant too. It was her mood--a circumstance aiding--that dowered her
fancy with wings. Now she would be transported to new horizons where
multicolored suns battened on intervales of unsuspected charm, now she
would be tossed into the opacity of an abyss where there would not be so
much as a goaf for resting-place. Now Pleasure would lord the day, now
the sceptre would be held by Pain. As often as not the intonation of a
voice, the expression of a face, any incident however trivial would
suffice, and at once a panorama would unroll, with no one but herself
for spectator. As she grew older her