everses brought the family to America and they settled in
Pensacola, Florida. Here Miss Kauser thought it was high time to put
her accomplishments to some use and help out the family exchequer.
She began almost at once to teach French and music. When her brothers
were older she made up her mind to seek her fortune in New York and
arrived with, a letter or two. For several months she taught music and
literature in private families. Then Mary Bisland introduced her to
Miss Marbury, where she attended to the French correspondence of the
office for a year.

But these means of livelihood were mere makeshifts. Ambitious,
imperious, and able, it was not in her to work for others for any
great length of time. As soon as she felt that she "knew the ropes" in
New York she told certain friends she had made that she wished to go
into the play brokerage business for herself. As she inspires
confidence--this is one of her assets--her friends staked her, and she
opened her office with the intention of promoting American plays only.
Her trained mind rapidly adapted itself to business and in the course
of a few years she was handling the plays of many of the leading
dramatists for a proportionate number of leading producers. When the
war broke out, so successful was she that she had a house of her own
in the East Thirties, furnished with the beautiful things she had
collected during her yearly visits to Europe--for long since she had
opened offices in Paris and London, her business outgrowing its first
local standard.

The war hit her very hard. She had but recently left the hospital
after a severe operation, which had followed several years of
precarious health. She was quite a year reestablishing her former
strength and full capacity for work. One of the most exuberantly
vital persons I had ever met, she looked as frail as a reed during
that first terrible year of the war, but now seems to have recovered
her former energies.

There was more than the common results of an operation to exasperate
her nerves and keep her vitality at a low ebb. Some thirty of her male
relatives were at the Front, and the whole world of the theater was
smitten with a series of disastrous blows. Sixteen plays on the road
failed in one day, expensive plays ran a week in New York. Managers
went into bankruptcy. It was a time of strain and uncertainty and
depression, and nobody suffered more than the play brokers. Miss
Kauser as soon as the war broke out re