they are twenty-nine."

Aurora Dudevant saw her thirtieth birthday looming on the horizon of her
life. Nine years before she had been married to an ex-army-officer, who
dyed his whiskers purple. Aurora had been a dutiful wife, intent for the
first few years on filling her husband's heart and home with joy. She
had failed in this, and the proof of failure lay in that he much
preferred his dogs, guns and horses to her society. For days he would
absent himself on his hunting excursions, and at home he did not have
the tact to hide the fact that he was awfully bored.

Thackeray, once for all, has given us a picture of the heavy dragoon
with a soul for dogs--one to whom all music, save the bay of a
fox-hound, makes its appeal in vain. Aurore detested dogs for dogs'
sake, yet she rode horses astride with a daring that made her husband's
bloodshot eyes bulge in alarm. He didn't much care how fast and hard she
rode at the fences and over the ditches, but he was supposed to follow
her, and this he did not care to do. He had reached an age when a man is
mindful of the lime in his bones, and his 'cross-country riding was
mostly a matter of memory and imagination, and best done around the
convivial table.

Aurore was putting him to a test, that's all. She was proving to him
that she could meet him on his own preserve, give him choice of weapons,
and make him cry for mercy.

Her bent was literature, with music, science and art as side-lines. She
read Montaigne, Rochefoucald, Racine and Moliere, and a modern by the
name of Alfred de Musset, and quoted her authors at inconvenient times.
She flashed quotations and epigrams upon the doughty dragoon in a way he
could neither fend nor parry. At other times she was deeply religious
and tearfully penitent.

In fact, she was living on a skimped allowance of love, and had never
received the attention that a good woman deserves. Her chains were
galling her. She sighed for Paris--forty miles away--Paris and a career.

The epigrams were coming faster, shot in a sort of frenzy and fever. And
when she asked her liege for leave to go to Paris, he granted her
prayer, and agreed to give her ten dollars a week allowance.

She grabbed at the offer, and he bade her Godspeed and good riddance.

So leaving her two children behind, until such a time as she could
provide a home for them, with scanty luggage and light heart and purse,
she started away.

Other women have gone up to Paris from countr