orth in
realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to
lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I
was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.

CHAPTER XX

THE HERITAGE

One of the inherent disadvantages of premature biography is that it
cannot go to the natural end of the story. This difficulty threatened
me in the beginning, but now I find I do not need to tax my judgment
to fix the proper stopping-place. Sudden qualms of reluctance warn me
where the past and present meet. I have reached a point where my
yesterdays lie in a quick heap, and I cannot bear to prod and turn
them and set them up to be looked at. For that matter, I am not sure
that I should add anything really new, even if I could force myself to
cross the line of discretion. I have already shown what a real thing
is this American freedom that we talk about, and in what manner a
certain class of aliens make use of it. Anything that I might add of
my later adventures would be a repetition, in substance, of what I
have already described. Having traced the way an immigrant child may
take from the ship through the public schools, passed on from hand to
hand by the ready teachers; through free libraries and lecture halls,
inspired by every occasion of civic consciousness; dragging through
the slums the weight of private disadvantage, but heartened for the
effort by public opportunity; welcomed at a hundred open doors of
instruction, initiated with pomp and splendor and flags unfurled
seeking, in American minds, the American way, and finding it in the
thoughts of the noble,--striving against the odds of foreign birth and
poverty, and winning, through the use of abundant opportunity, a
place as enviable as that of any native child,--having traced the
footsteps of the young immigrant almost to the college gate, the rest
of the course may be left to the imagination. Let us say that from the
Latin School on I lived very much as my American schoolmates lived,
having overcome my foreign idiosyncrasies, and the rest of my outward
adventures you may read in any volume of American feminine statistics.

But lest I be reproached for a sudden affectation of reserve, after
having trained my reader to expect the fullest particulars, I am
willing to add a few details. I went to college, as I proposed, though
not to Radcliffe. Receiving an invitation to live in New York that I
did not like to refuse, I went to Barnar