r disappointment, lost
sight of her entirely, and gave up the pursuit.

She went her way, with hanging head. "Mother would have caught her," she
thought, "or Jemmy. They'd have _made_ her wait!"

For long afterwards she was haunted by that brief glimpse of the
creature who a few months before had been as round and sleek and pretty
as a petted kitten; the tragic eyes, old for all their feverish
brilliance, the soft cheeks already hollow beneath their paint. However
unjustly, Mag Henderson came to typify for Jacqueline the spirit of New
York.

Her feet were dragging when she reached the respectable, shabby
brownstone front that housed her and her ambitions, together with those
of some thirty other more or less hopeful aspirants to fame and fortune,
who might be heard as she entered amid much clattering of dishes in the
basement dining-room.

The halls were faintly reminiscent of meals that had gone before, and
Jacqueline, holding her jonquils to her face, decided against dinner.
She made her way up two flights to her room, and sat down upon the bed,
shivering, battling with a sense of discouragement that was almost
panic.

The streets had lost their fleeting semblance of Spring long before she
reached this place she called home, and were like bleak canyons through
which the wind whistled hungrily. Jacqueline remembered a time not long
since when she had found the wind bracing, stimulating, a playmate
daring her to a game of romps. But that was a country wind, coming clean
over wide spaces of hill and meadow; not this thing which filled her
eyes and lungs with gritty dust, and whirled old newspapers and
orange-peel and filthy rags along the gutters.

It was not the first time she had found herself lately battling with a
sense of acute discouragement. Her singing-master, a fat and
onion-smelling artist recommended very wisely by Channing, had been at
first enthusiastic about the possibilities of her voice; but recently
she had found it difficult to please him.

"Der organ is there, _ja wohl_, der organ. But Herr Gott im Himmel, is
it mit der organ alone dot zinging makes himself? Put somesing _inside_
der organ, meine gnaediges frauelein, I beg of you!"

That was just what Jacqueline seemed no longer able to do. What energy,
what spirit she had, went into the mere business of living, and there
was none left for song. A voice is, more than any other physical
attribute, the essence of vitality; and nature had other