becoming a New Yorker, gaining assurance day by day, feeling "her type" emerge in the glass where she studied herself with impatient delight.

There were little reminders now and then of what she had left behind her. One day in a department store, as they stood before a counter looking at silk stockings, all at once to Ethel's ears came the deep tones of an organ, and turning with a low cry of surprise she looked over the bustling throngs of women to an organ loft above, where a girl was singing a solo in a high sweet soprano voice. In a flash to Ethel's mind there came a vivid picture of the old yellow church at home. And with a queer expression looking about her at the crowds, she exclaimed, "How funny!" She was again reminded of church when one afternoon in a large darkened chamber she sat with scores of women whose eyes were fixed as though in devotion upon a softly lighted stage where "models" kept appearing. What lovely figures some of them had. Others rather took her breath, and gave her the feeling she'd had before in her sister's bedroom. But then as her eye was caught again by the rapt faces all about, she chuckled to herself and thought, "There ought to be candles and incense here!"

She was appalled at the prices. And as the exciting days wore on, uneasily in her room at night she would sit down with pencil and paper and ask, "How much did I spend today?" Her father had left her nothing but the shabby old frame house. This she had sold to a friend of his, and the small fund thus secured she had resolved to husband.

"Oh, Ethel, go slow, you little fool. This is every penny you have in the world."

But the adorable things she saw, and the growing hunger she felt as she began to notice with a more discerning eye the women in shops and on the streets—just why they were so dashing and how they got this and that effect—all swept aside her caution, the easier because of the fact that everything she bought was charged.

One evening in a large café she sat watching Amy who was dancing with her husband. It was at the time when the new style dances were just coming into vogue. In Ohio they had been only a myth. But Amy was a beautiful dancer; and watching her now, Ethel reflected, "She expects me to be like that. If I'm not, she'll be disappointed, ashamed. And why shouldn't I be! What do you ever get in this world if you're always saving every cent? You miss your chance and then it's too late. I'll be meeting her friends in a few weeks more. I've simply got to hurry!" And with Amy's dancing teacher she arranged for lessons—at a price that made her gasp. But the lessons were a decided success.

"You've a wonderful figure for dancing," the teacher said confidingly, "and a sense for rhythm that most of these women haven't any idea of." He smiled down at her and she fairly beamed.

"Oh, how nice!" sighed Ethel. Something in the little look which flashed between them gave her a thrill of assurance. And this feeling came again and again, in the shops and while she was seated at luncheon in some crowded restaurant, or on the streets or back at home, where even Joe was beginning to show his admiring surprise.

"You're making a fine little job of it," she heard him say to Amy one night.

She caught other remarks and glances from strangers, men and women. And Ethel now began to feel the whole vast bustling ardent town centred on what in her high-school club, as they read Bernard Shaw, they had quite frankly and solemnly spoken of as "Sex." All the work and the business, the scheming and planning and rush for money, were focussed on this. And for this she was attracting those swift admiring glances. What she would be, what she wanted to be, what she now ardently longed to become, grew clearer to her day by day. For the picture was there before her eyes. Each day it grew more familiar, as at home in Amy's room she watched her beautiful sister, a stranger no longer to her now, seated at her dressing table good-humouredly chatting, and meanwhile revealing by numberless deft little things she was doing the secrets of clothes and of figure, and of cheeks and lips and eyes, with subtle hints behind it all of the ancient magic art of Pan. She felt Amy ceaselessly bringing her out. This gave her thrills of excitement. And looking at her sister she asked:

"Shall I ever be like that?"

And they kept talking, talking. And through it all the same feeling was there, the sense of this driving force of the town.

With the sturdy independence which was so deep a part of her, Ethel strove to hold up her end of these intent conversations and show that she had views of her own. She was no old-fashioned country girl, but modern, something different! They had discussed things in her club which would have shocked their mothers, discussed them long and seriously. They had spoken of marriage and divorce, of love and having children, and then had gone eagerly on to suffrage, jobs and "mental science," art, music and the rest of life. She had gathered there an image of New York as a glittering region of strong clever men and fascinating women, who not only loved to dance but held the most brilliant discussions at dinners livened by witty remarks—a place of vistas opening into a world of great ideas. And now with her older sister, she questioned her about it all, the art and all the "movements," the "salons" and the clever talk. She asked:

"Do you know any suffragists? Do you know any men who write plays or novels, or any musicians or painters—or actresses?" And again and again by an air of assurance Ethel tried to hide her dismay, as her sister subtly made all this seem like a school-girl's fancies.

"Yes," Amy would say good-humouredly, "there are such people, I suppose—plenty of them, all over town. And they talk and talk and hold meetings, and they go to high-brow plays—and some women even work. But it doesn't sound very thrilling, does it? I don't know. They never seem to me quite real."

And then Amy would go on to hint what did seem real to her in life. And again that picture of the town, all centred on what emerged from the shops and poured into the cafes to dance, was painted for her sister.

But behind her smiling manner of one with an intimate knowledge of life, Amy would glance at the girl by her side in a curious, rather anxious way. For vaguely she knew that years ago when she herself had come to New York, she too had had dreams and imaginings of what her young sister called "the real thing." And she knew that these had dropped away—at first in the struggle, which for her had been so intense and narrowing, to gain a foothold in the town; then through rebuffs from the clever friends of Joe Lanier when she married him; and later through a feeling of lazy acceptance of her lot. But Ethel's talk and Ethel's eyes recalled what had been left behind. And Amy thought of her present friends, and again with a little uneasy pang she put off their meeting with Ethel. For they did not seem good to her then, and the picture she found herself painting of their lives and her own appeared a bit flat and trivial in the light of Ethel's eagerness. They dressed and went shopping, they went to tea dances, they dined in cafés or in their homes, rushed off in taxis to musical plays, and had supper and danced. They loved and were loved, they "played the game."

"My dear," she said decisively, "it's not what you say that interests men; it's how you look and what you have on."

But despite her air of assurance and her own liking of her life, she felt the picture growing flat, and so she added quietly:

"Oh, my friends aren't all I'd like. They never are, if you've anything in you. If you really want to be somebody—" and here her whole expression changed to one of resolute faith in