t till the day of his death. She was
the incarnation of the Eternal Feminine, with all the wifeliness and the
maternity left out--she was ancient, yet ever young, and familiar as joy
or tears or sin.

She took good care of Tim in some ways: fed him well, nursed him back
to reason after a period of hard drinking, saw that he put on overshoes
when the walks were wet, and looked after his money. She even prized his
brain, for she discovered that it was a delicate little machine which
produced gold. By association with him and his friends, she learned that
a number of apparently useless things had value in the eyes of certain
convenient fools, and so she treasured the autographs of distinguished
persons who wrote to him--autographs which he disdainfully tossed in the
waste basket. She was careful with presentation copies from authors, and
she went the length of urging Tim to write a book himself. But at that
he balked.

"Write a book!" he cried to her, his gentle face suddenly white with
passion. "Who am I to commit such a profanation?"

She didn't know what he meant, but she had a theory that it was
dangerous to excite him, and so she sat up till midnight to cook a chop
for him when he came home that night.

He preferred to have her sitting up for him, and he wanted every
electric light in their apartments turned to the full. If, by any
chance, they returned together to a dark house, he would not enter till
she touched the button in the hall, and illuminated the room. Or if it
so happened that the lights were turned off in the night time, and
he awoke to find himself in darkness, he shrieked till the woman came
running to his relief, and, with derisive laughter, turned them on
again. But when she found that after these frights he lay trembling and
white in his bed, she began to be alarmed for the clever, gold-making
little machine, and to renew her assiduities, and to horde more
tenaciously than ever, those valuable curios on which she some day
expected to realize when he was out of the way, and no longer in a
position to object to their barter.

O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among the
boys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it, and
yet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius was
entitled to whimsicalities, it was their custom when they called for
him after work hours, to permit him to reach the lighted corridor before
they turned out the g