it has lit upon a personality that cannot be
immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for
this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather
monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with
any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have
is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is
throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. We obey
the law of nature--and nature so abhors variety that, whenever
a variation from a type happens, she tries to kill it, and,
that failing, reproduces it a myriad times to make it a type.
When an original man or woman appears and all the strenuous
effort to suppress him or her fails, straightway spring up a
thousand imitators and copiers, and the individuality is lost
in the school, the fashion, the craze. We have not the courage
to be ourselves, even where there is anything in us that might
be developed into something distinctive enough to win us the
rank of real identity. Individuality--distinction--where it
does exist, almost never shows until experience brings it
out--just as up to a certain stage the embryo of any animal is
like that of every other animal, though there is latent in it
the most positive assertion of race and sex, of family, type,
and so on.

Susan had from childhood possessed certain qualities of
physical beauty, of spiritedness, of facility in mind and
body--the not uncommon characteristic of the child that is the
flower of passionate love. But now there was beginning to show
in her a radical difference from the rest of the crowd pouring
through the streets of the city. It made the quicker observers
in the passing throng turn the head for a second and wondering
glance. Most of them assumed they had been stirred by her
superiority of face and figure. But striking faces and figures
of the various comely types are frequent in the streets of New
York and of several other American cities. The truth was that
they were interested by her expression--an elusive expression
telling of a soul that was being moved to its depths by
experience which usually finds and molds mere passive material.
This expression was as evident in her mouth as in her eyes, in
her profile as in her full face. And as she sat there on the
edge of the bed twisting up her thick dark hair, it was this
expression that disconcerted Freddie Palmer, for the first time
in all his contemptuous dealings with the female sex. In his
e