did with the nickel which was given her day before
yesterday, and thus forced to make confession of small extravagances, or
to reply, with such sweetness as she may muster, that she bought a lot
on a fashionable street with part of it, and has the remainder out at
interest. She does not have to stay at home from social affairs because
she has no escort, for the law has not apportioned to her a solitary
man, and she has a liberty of choice which is not accorded her married
friend.

She is not subjected to the humiliation of asking a man for money to pay
for his own food, his own service, and even his own laundry bill. She
can usually earn her own, if the gods have not awarded her sufficient
gold, and there is no money which a woman spends so happily as that
which she has earned herself.

The "career" lies before her, and she has only to choose the thing for
which she is best fitted, and work her way upward from the lowest ranks
to the position of a star of the first magnitude. Opportunity is but
another name for health, obstacles make firm stepping-stones, and that
which is dearly bought is by far the sweetest in the end. Of course
there are "strings to pull," but no one needs them. Success is more
lasting if it is won in an open field, without favour, and in spite of
generous measures of it bestowed upon the opposition.

[Sidenote: The Greatest Consolation]

But of all the consolations of spinsterhood, the greatest is this,--that
out of the dim and uncertain future, perchance in the guise of a
divorced man or a widower with four children, The Prince may yet come.

"On his plain but trusty sword are these words only--Love and
Understand." Across the unsounded, estranging seas, with a whole world
lying immutably between, he, too, may be waiting for the revelation. He
may come as a knight of old, with banners, jewels, and flashing steel,
to the clarion ring of trumpet or cymbal, or softly, in the twilight,
like one whose presence is felt before it is made known.

Out of the city streets The Prince may come, tired of the endless
struggle, when the tide of the human has beaten heavily upon his jaded
soul, or through the woods, with the silence of the forest still upon
him. His path may lie through an old garden, where marigold and larkspur
are thickly interwoven, and shadowy spikes of mignonette make all the
summer sweet, or through the frosty darkness, when the earth is dumb
with snow and the midnight stars have set t