red; one could see that.

"And I would sing to them--no! no!" with a quick gesture, "nothing
from the stage; little songs and lullabys I have picked up
traveling around, and," hesitating, "little things I have composed
myself--little things that I thought children would like to hear some
day." What did she not unconsciously throw into those last words? "I
dream of it," she pursued, talking with as little regard to me as
on the stage she sang to the prima donna. "Their little arms, their
little faces, their little lips! And in an asylum there would be so
many of them! When they cried and were in trouble I would take them in
my lap, and I would say to them, with all sorts of tenderness--" She
had arranged that in her program, too--all the minutiae of what she
would say to them in their distress. But women are that way. When once
they begin to love, their hearts are magnifying-lenses for them to
feel through. "And my heart hungers to commence right here, now, at
once! It seems to me I cannot wait. Ah, madam, no more stage, no more
opera!" speaking quickly, feverishly. "As I said, it may be your
beautiful spring, your flowers, your birds, and your numbers of
children. I have always loved that place most where there are most
children; and you have more children here than I ever saw anywhere.
Children are so beautiful! It is strange, is it not, when you consider
my life and my rearing?"

Her life, her rearing, how interesting they must have been! What a
pity I had not listened more attentively!

"They say you have much to do with asylums here."

Evidently, when roles do not exist in life for certain characters, God
has to create them. And thus He had to create a role in an asylum for
my friend, for so she became from the instant she spoke of children
as she did. It was the poorest and neediest of asylums; and the poor
little orphaned wretches--but it is better not to speak of them. How
can God ever expect to rear children without their mothers!

But the role I craved to create for my friend was far different--some
good, honest bourgeois interior, where lips are coarse and cheeks are
ruddy, and where life is composed of real scenes, set to the real
music of life, the homely successes and failures, and loves and hates,
and embraces and tears, that fill out the orchestra of the heart;
where romance and poetry abound _au naturel_; and where--yes, where
children grow as thick as nature permits: the domestic interior of the
o