battery of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image
the next day.

The beginning of my interest in this "belle" from far South was when
I picked up the paper at my breakfast table, and found her gazing at
me, with the wide-open, innocent eyes of a child; a child who had
come from some fairer, more gracious world, and brought the memory
of it with her, trailing her clouds of glory. She had stepped from
the train into the confusion of the roaring city, and she stood,
startled and frightened, yet, I thought, having no more real idea of
its wickedness and horror than a babe in arms. I read her soul in
that heavenly countenance, and sat looking at it, enraptured, dumb.
There must have been thousands, even in that metropolis of Mammon,
who loved her from that picture, and whispered a prayer for her
happiness.

I can hear her laugh as I write this. For she would have it that I
was only one more of her infatuated lovers, and that her clouds of
glory were purely stage illusion. She knew exactly what she was
doing with those wide-open, innocent eyes! Had not old Lady Dee,
most cynical of worldlings, taught her how to use them when she was
a child in pig-tails? To be sure she had been scared when she
stepped off the train, and strange men had shoved cameras under her
nose. It was almost as bad as being assassinated! But as to her
heavenly soul--alas, for the blindness of men, and of sentimental
old women, who could believe in a modern "society" girl!

I had supposed that I was an emancipated woman when I came to New
York. But one who has renounced the world, the flesh and the devil,
knowing them only from pictures in magazines and Sunday supplements;