trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft
voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life
of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known
nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty
conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you
come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an
existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In
spite of her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all
about her from the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world,
Mildred Gower at twenty-three still retained something of these dream
flowers sown in the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or
play or perhaps by some casually read and soon forgotten article in
magazine or newspaper. We have the habit of thinking only weeds
produce seeds that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere. The
truth is that fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of
rarest color and perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity. Pull
away at the weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not
so. Though you may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if
you but clear a little space of its weeds--which you have been planting
and cultivating.

Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she had
not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including herself,
predicted for her and expected of her. On the contrary, it was the
most savage indictment possible of the marriageable and marrying men
who had met her--of their stupidity, of their short-sighted and
mean-souled calculation, of their lack of courage--the courage to take
what they, as men of flesh and blood wanted, instead of what their
snobbishness ordered. And if Stanley Baird, the nearest to a
flesh-and-blood man of any who had known her, had not been so
profoundly afraid of his fashionable mother and of his sister, the
Countess of Waring-- But he was profoundly afraid of them; so, it is
idle to speculate about him.

What did men see when they looked at Mildred Gower? Usually, when men
look at a woman, they have a hazy, either pleasant or unpleasant, sense
of something feminine. That, and nothing more. Afterward, through
some whim or some thrust from chance they may see in her, or fancy they
see in her, the thing feminine that their souls--it is always
"soul"--most yearns afte