she saw the struggling flotsam of feminine youth, living easily,
luxuriously to-day, careless of any less prosperous morrows, and, when
those swift, inevitable morrows came, she had seen the girlish, exotic
queens of an hour, haggard, stripped of their transient splendor,
uncomprehending, almost helpless.

She saw readily enough that it was not only her superior talents and
training, the hard work and hard study which she gave to her profession
which set her above the butterflies and apart from them, but her
mother's constant presence during those early years was of almost equal
value.

All this she realized at an age when strong impressions are indelibly
retained. Her value, the tremendous value of an unsmirched virtue, a
woman's greatest asset in a world of desire and barter, became to her a
possession she cherished above her jewels, above the money she could
earn and save and the greater sums she dreamed of earning or winning by
any means--all means but one.

Her observations of the women about her who gave all for so little, her
meditations upon them, and the conclusions she drew from their maimed
lives only emphasized the resisting force of her nature. She was not
born to be a leaf in the current, whirled by the force of waters into a
safe haven or an engulfing whirlpool as chance might decide; she must
dominate the currents.

And with the temptations of her youth, and her ardent emotional
temperament, would also come the remembrance of those haggard girls with
their pinched blue lips, the suffering in their eyes, their delicate
faces aged and yellowed and lined and spoiled, weeping with shaking