And grateful memory of four busy years,
Accept her portion of it, from your wife.






PART ONE

Poverty




SATURDAY'S CHILD

CHAPTER I


Not the place in which to look for the Great Adventure, the dingy,
narrow office on the mezzanine floor of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's
great wholesale drug establishment, in San Francisco city, at the
beginning of the present century. Nothing could have seemed more
monotonous, more grimy, less interesting, to the outsider's eye at
least, than life as it presented itself to the twelve women who were
employed in bookkeeping there. Yet, being young, as they all were,
each of these girls was an adventuress, in a quiet way, and each one
dreamed bright dreams in the dreary place, and waited, as youth must
wait, for fortune, or fame, or position, love or power, to evolve