ch, with her bad preparation, and with
her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. During
those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and
vastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equal
sharers in the finer rewards of her struggle. When her brother Buchanan
told me he thought Cressida ought "to make herself one of them," he
stated the converse of what he meant. They coveted the qualities which
had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it. More
than her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personal
effectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live.

"Sometimes," I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of those
sloppily written letters, "sometimes I get discouraged."

For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered in
Cressida's deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that the
Signorina Garnet was "_dificile_." After dinner I usually found Cressida
unincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either
nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself
interesting to some one of the young women on board. One evening, the
third night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky was
full of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges,
Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown.

I had known each of her former husbands. The first one, Charley Wilton,
Horace's father, was my cousin. He was organist in a church in Columbus,
and Cressida married him when she was nineteen. He died of tuberculosis
two years after Horace was born. Cressida nursed him through a long
illness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three years
of her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to any
discerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number of
chances at marital happiness. There had, of course, been a particular
reason for each subsequent experiment, and a sufficiently alluring
promise of success. Her motives, in the case of Jerome Brown, seemed to
me more vague and less convincing than those which she had explained to
me on former occasions.

"It's nothing hasty," she assured me. "It's been coming on for several
years. He has never pushed me, but he was always there--some one to count
on. Even when I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was still
singing at the Metropolitan, I always fel