kle soul constant to it--to satisfy the hopes of
her heart. Every man she met was a prince; yet was he, too, bare and
poor and mean compared with The Man to come. The child in her was gauche
and crude, sitting in judgment--as cynical, as critical a spectator as
Sissy herself--upon the very hopes the woman awakened. In her eyes the
flash of coquetry was succeeded by the blank, childish irony which
denied the emotion hardly passed. She loved to shock pretense, yet she
was the most absurd and innocent of pretenders, for the terms in which
convention speaks were Greek to her. She was masterful, being a Madigan,
and daring and impertinent. A creature utterly impatient of forms, with
a boy-like chivalry, revealing how incomplete the work of sex was yet,
for the woman misunderstood--whom she, in her crude purity, understood
least of all. This was Kate, ready, at fifteen, to battle single-handed
with windmills, with world-old problems, with world-young prejudices; to
burn intolerance to ashes in the white flame of her brave young
innocence; to cry aloud the word that older, wiser cowards whisper or
stifle in their hearts; to make no compromise; to know that black is
black and white is white; to be unforgiving, as only cruel young
inexperience can be; to flame at a wrong and glow at its righting; and
yet to have her contradictions cased in a body of such vivid grace, a
mind leavened by humor, and a heart of such sweetness as made her the
irresistibly lovable Pretense she was.

Pretending to be a child, to annoy her Aunt Anne; pretending to be a
woman, to infuriate her younger sisters; pretending to be a saint,
pretending to be a sinner; pretending to scorn the world, yet quaffing
its first sweet draughts of individual power and experience with
full-opened throat; pretending to be mannish--driven to that extremity
by the super-femininity of Henrietta Bryne-Stivers; pretending to be
frivolous, to shock rigid Mrs. Pemberton; pretending to be a
blue-stocking with a passion for the solid and heavy in literature;
pretending to be a Spartan who must rise at dawn and, after a plunge in
ice-cold mountain water, climb, with only big Don, the Newfoundland, for
company, up to the sluice-box; there to pretend she was an esthete to
whom the sunrise, while she communed alone with nature, revealed things
invisible to the world below.

But Reality's day came. Miss Madigan went out into the future, sent
thither by her auntly sense of responsibil