he soprano had chinchilla! I was years younger than the
others and they were very sweet to me.

Living at my boarding house was a young doctor, who also would have
liked to be nice to me. But my exaggerated conscientiousness would not
allow me to have anything to do with one man while I was engaged to
another, and I refused all his invitations to the theatre and to
Saturday afternoon excursions. My one indulgence was in standing-room
tickets for the Metropolitan. What a boon to girls in my situation would
be the inexpensive municipal opera and endowed theatres of Germany with
their system of _Schule Vorstellungen_ (students' performances) of
standard plays and operas at prices that put a comfortable seat within
the means of even the most humble purse! This was the lack the Century
Opera would have supplied.

My church engagement was to come to an end May first. The thought of
turning my back on the start I had made depressed me fearfully. I had
given my word to marry and did not think of wavering. But the letters of
my fiance and his rare visits to New York had not helped us to
understand each other better. Many hours I walked the floor longing for
advice, and wrestling with myself. I said to my sister, "I have my foot
on the first rung of the ladder and now I must take it off." It all
seems so simple now. Almost any other girl would have broken her
engagement without much thought. But I had not been brought up that way,
and so I had hours and days of misery.

The one thought that comforted me was that I could go on at any rate as
well as it was possible in my own town, and though it would be much
harder to make a career from there, it _could_ be done with the
co-operation of my husband. It was hard for me to talk in those days,
but one day driving down Fifth Avenue in a hansom, a rare treat, I
remember my feelings were too much for me, and I burst through my
repression and told him how I _must_ develop that side of me, and he
said, "And I'll help you, little girl; you can count on me." I believed
him of course. But while I was dreadfully serious, he, as I learned
later, ranked my singing with the china-painting and fancy-work of his
relations, as a sort of harmless pastime, to occupy my leisure moments.
The truth was, of course, that, as often happens, he had entirely
mistaken my character, had made his ideal woman out of his head, given
her my outward appearance, and fallen in love with her. The real "me"
was a dis