asked permission to
accompany me as usual.

My mother laughed and told him to ask me.

"I have asked Miss Geraldine," he said sadly; "but she does not seem to
care for my attentions."

A few days later he went skating, the ice broke, and he was drowned.
Instantly I became a widow. Drama--real drama--had come into my life,
and with all the feeling of an instinctive actress I played my role. I
dressed in black; abandoned all gayeties; went to and from school
mopping my eyes with a black-bordered handkerchief; and the other boys
and girls stood aside in silence as I passed, leaving me alone with my
grief.

For six weeks I played the tragedy; and then in the twinkling of an eye
the mood, in which I had been genuinely serious, passed away. In life
this young boy had meant absolutely nothing to me; in death he became a
dramatic possibility which I utilized unconsciously as an outlet for my
emotion. I was not pretending; I was terribly in earnest. I actually
believed in my grief. Who can say that it was "only acting"?

A temper, which I regret to confess time has not very much chastened,
came to the front in my school days, to the dismay of my mother. In
1892, when I was ten years old, the city of Melrose held a carnival and
celebration to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the
discovery of America. Floats were planned to represent the thirteen
original States. The selection of the school girl to impersonate
Massachusetts fell to my class in the Grove Street School, and I was
anxious for this honor, not only because of the personal glory and
prominence, but because I really believed that I could impersonate
Massachusetts better than any other girl in the class!

Well, I did appear as Massachusetts, and, with the other "twelve
States," was driven through the streets of Melrose, mounted on the
float, bearing the flag of the nation. But two girls in the school, who
had voted against me in the election, watched me from afar with swollen
and blackened eyes; I had struck them in a moment of quick anger because
their choice had been against me.

[Illustration: A YOUNG GIRL WITH A PHENOMENAL SOPRANO VOICE]

The following winter, while many of the boys and girls were skating,
a boy of twelve or thirteen, named Clarence, annoyed me exceedingly by
trying to trip me with his hockey stick. I warned him three times that
he "had better let me alone," but he persisted in his persecution. After
the third time, I skated to