affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the
thought that "strange people" should know that my handsome father
owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire
to protect him from his fate, I was not quite easy in the
sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the
reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway,
his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do not know that
I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it
thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in
spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black
moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might
not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid
before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very
trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his
bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to
me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful
touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat
and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public
recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass
of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself
made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity
of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as
absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to
collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express
this doglike affection. The house at the end of the village in
which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to
Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had opposite to it--only
across the road and then across a little stretch of