utterly devoted to. Maybe, instead of any of these things,
I'm a poor, old wizened-up, Shut-In, tossing day and night
on a very small bed of very big pain. Maybe worse than being
sick I'm starving poor, and maybe, worse than being sick or
poor, I am most horribly tired of myself. Of course if you
are very young and very prancy and reasonably good-looking,
and still are tired of yourself, you can almost always rest
yourself by going on the stage where--with a little rouge
and a different colored wig, and a new nose, and skirts
instead of trousers, or trousers instead of skirts, and age
instead of youth, and badness instead of goodness--you can
give your ego a perfectly limitless number of happy
holidays. But if you were oldish, I say, and pitifully 'shut
in', just how would you go to work, I wonder, to rest your
personality? How for instance could you take your biggest,
grayest, oldest worry about your doctor's bill, and rouge it
up into a radiant, young joke? And how, for instance, out of
your lonely, dreary, middle-aged orphanhood are you going to
find a way to short-skirt your rheumatic pains, and braid
into two perfectly huge pink-bowed pigtails the hair that
you _haven't got_, and caper round so ecstatically before
the foot-lights that the old gentleman and lady in the front
seat absolutely swear you to be the living image of their
'long lost Amy'? And how, if the farthest journey you ever
will take again is the monotonous hand-journey from your
pillow to your medicine bottle, then how, for instance, with
map or tinsel or attar of roses, can you go to work to solve
even just for your own satisfaction the romantic, shimmering
secrets of--Morocco?

"Ah! You've got me now, you think? All decided in your mind
that I am an aged invalid? I didn't say so. I just said
'maybe'. Likelier than not I've saved my climax for its
proper place. How do you know,--for instance, that I'm not
a--'Cullud Pusson'?--So many people are."

Without signature of any sort, the letter ended abruptly then and
there, and as though to satisfy his sense of something left
unfinished, the Doctor began at the beginning and read it all over
again in a mumbling, husky whisper.

"Maybe she is--'colored'," he volunteered at last.

"Very likely," said Stanton perfectly cheerfully. "It's