as the monuments to Memnon. It was as if she had cast them out from her consciousness and was pleading her cause with a justice higher than their opinions. They watched her with some realization of her apartness, some recognition of her possession of a quality not their own, as she went on.

"I thought I loved Clive. Wouldn't any girl, loving life and beauty and romance as I did, and there in that amber moonlight that draws the world into its yellow spell and makes it all gold with soft loveliness, think she loved a man like Clive? Why, it was part of the fairytale, and it was all part of Cairo, like the bougainvillea on the walls.

"When I came back I saw how my love for him had been part of the dream, not all of it. I was afraid to marry him then, for I thought it might have been just that to him, too. But when he came I knew that it wasn't that for him. I was the same to him out here beside the gray lake that I had been in the Levant. He isn't like us." Her gaze came down to Kingsley, as if to seek confirmation of her assertion. "He doesn't have to go seeking beauty. He makes it for himself. And, when I saw him again, I saw Cairo again. I wanted it, wanted my life to be part of that color and mist and sunshine and splendor. I called it love, because I thought that love was something for the decoration of life, something bright and picturesque and foreign and alluring, and unlike all the ordinary experiences of living. I suppose I imagined it was like the flowers, flaming and pervasive, and covering the cracks and the crannies of the every-day, with color of the East. That's what I thought I was getting when I married Clive.

"I got it, too, for a while. I lived on the top of the wave, first in expectation of Cairo and then in the reality. We went back to live in one of the tall white houses, where the days were like rainbows and the nights of gold or purple. I don't believe I was myself at all through that time. I was playing the part of the beggar maiden whom Cophetua had found there under that same cobalt sky. I never thought there would be an end to it. Even when"-she glanced down upon the lifted faces, then swung on as if

she had decided to discount their presence in her communion with the truth in herself-"even when my baby came, it made no difference except to make the dream seem no dream at all, but the living reality of perfection. Then it changed.

'We went out to Assouan. Clive had to be near his work, he said. He'd spent, too, what money his father had given him. Even when he told me that it didn't seem to matter. I had him and the baby, I thought. But when I came out to where we were to live something in me snapped, and I saw that the dream was over. I was back in the life I had thought forever behind me. For, although it was Egypt, bright and vivid, and gorgeous yet in its sun and moon and skies and trees, it was just as crude, just as hard, just as squalid, as that town on the range had been. Clive couldn't see that. All he saw, all any of you builders of the Assouan saw"

she flung down at Kingsley-" was the result you were working for. But every day we women of the West whom you'd taken there saw the misery and the wretchedness and the futility of our lives there. We struggled with the natives. We fought against the poverty of our living conditions. We tried to keep up a brave front. Some of us did. I think that I might have done it, too, if—if my baby had lived. When he died I couldn't see the use of any effort. The place had killed him, I knew. It was killing me. Love had cheated me. It had led me into a desert. I had expected so much of love. It wasn't that I had expected it to give me luxury, too, but I'd seen so much misery, so much struggle in poverty, that I thought I knew that love couldn't live unless it had beautiful settings, sunlight and warmth and an atmosphere out of the ordinary. Bougainvillea, I had called it. It was that to me. It had grown like a weed upon the walls of the city. There, by the river, in the muck and the mud and the toiling thousands and the beating engines and the daily grinding of existence, it died.

"For months I tried to pretend that it was living. I used to laugh and talk with Clive as if I were simply an actress of the rôle I had created in the time that was past. I think that, if I had been back here where I could have found new inter

ests, I would have crossed the bridge. Most women do. But there, struggling day after day with the pettiness of living, I couldn't. One night I told him. He wouldn't believe me. He treated me as if I were a sick child. 'I hate you,' I told him. "I hate all this place. I hate the ugliness of it. I hate poverty. How can you expect any woman's love to live through this endless purgatory of squalor?'

"He looked at me as if he didn't exactly know what I was talking about. 'Why, that's what love's for,' he said. 'It's the light that makes even purgatory the way to heaven. How can this matter when we have each other?'

"He wouldn't quarrel with me. He wouldn't talk to me about it at all after that. We kept on living side by side, but a million miles apart. I hated it all so terribly that I came to hate him. One night, after he'd come up from the concrete-mixer, and we were sitting on the tiny veranda, it came over me that I couldn't stay any longer. All life stretched out before me, if I stayed, as dull and listless as the flats beside the river below. I was the poorer because I had been so rich. I felt that I should go mad if I didn't leave it. I was sinking down in the mud of the misery that comes out of commonplace poverty. "I'm going away, Clive,' I told him.

"He turned from looking out over the flat, and stared at me. I thought he was going to tell me again that I was ill, that all I needed was a run down to Cairo, that he loved me and that I loved him. I would have screamed if he had. But he didn't. He put down his pipe and looked at me so solemnly that I felt suddenly out of place, as if, somehow, I'd stumbled into some mosque of Islam, the only unbeliever. 'I don't believe that you can, Joan,' he said, 'but if you do you know that it's good-by.'

"Do you think that I'd want to come back?' I cried to him.

"Yes,' he said, 'you will. For love's the only thing in life that counts.'

"I laughed at him, and I went into the house. Some one called him back to the work. A shovel had broken, and they needed him to give an order for its repair. While he was gone I went away. Aunt

"She was raving, poor child," Mrs. Carlin rushed in, too busily trying to gather up the shreds of Joan's life in an effort to shroud the girl's nakedness of soul. It was indecent, she felt, as they all seemed to realize but Kingsley, that any woman should bare her tragedies. Her eyes pleaded with Joan to pick up some rag of raiment, but the girl lifted not the dun cloth of remorse but the scarlet scarf of rage, as she bent over the table, staring into the faces of those who had thought they had known her best.

"Do you think I've told you this to entertain you?" she cried. "Or to justify myself?" She blazed at Kingsley. "I did rush into it. You baited me. It was so contemptible of you that I don't care for your opinion. What are your half-truths to me when I know all the truth now? No, it's because I've known ever since I came back that all of you are to blame, as much as I am, for my mistake that I'm telling you. Is there a single one of you"-her wrath smouldered over Adele Winship and Mrs. Crosman and the wide-eyed girls-"who doesn't believe love to be just what I believed it? Haven't we all, rich and poor, been trained into thinking that it's the frosting on the cake? Bougainvillea on the walls! Have our mothers and our fathers taught us that it is not the petty tinsel of a fairy-tale but the real gold of transmutation? It's a sacrament, that's what it is, not a plaything. But how are we going to know it until it's too late? I thought I could forget love, could put away the memory of all that had lured me and cheated me. But I couldn't. It's Nile water. If you drink of it, you will go back to Egypt. I drank of true love, and I'm dying without it, dying in my heart. Clive was right. I want to go back to him. I don't care where he is, or what he is, or what he has. That's my punishment. Do you suppose that what this man has said of me, that what you think of me, matters when I know that? No, I've lived a fool, the sort of fool that every one of you is yet, but when I go out of life I'll go in the knowledge of what love is. Perhaps that's enough to have lived for."

HE marriage of Washington and the Widow Custis took place January 6, 1759, at her residence, the White House, in New Kent. The great house with its six chimneys, betokening the wealth of its owner, is no more-the 'record of the marriage is lost-and even its exact date rests on the casual remark of Washington said to have been made to Franklin's daughter on its anniversary in 1790, Franklin's birthday.

The honeymoon was spent in visiting in various great houses in the neighborhood. Besides a call at Fredericksburg, where Mother Washington and her daughter Betty dwelt, a week was spent at Chatham House, on the Rappahannock, the grand house of William Fitzhugh, built after plans of Sir Christopher Wren and named by the owner in honor of his schoolfellow, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. That house still stands, nearly one hundred and seventy years old, and perhaps the finest piece of colonial architecture of the Georgian period in Virginia. Williamsburg, the little capital, where Colonel Washington must attend the House of Burgesses and the affairs connected with the settlement of his accounts with the army, was chosen for the winter residence and until adjournment sent the young couple to Mount Vernon in June. The urgent affairs of the great estate of the late Colonel Custis promptly claimed the attention of the young Benedict, and we find that at Williamsburg, on May 1, 1759, he is writing to Robert Cary, the agent of the estate in London, thus:

Custis, properly, as I am told, authenticated. You will, therefore, for the future please to address all your letters, which relate to the affairs of the late Daniel Parke Custis, to me, as by marriage, I am entitled to a third part of that estate, and am invested likewise with the care of the other two thirds by a decree of our General Court, which I obtained in order to strengthen the power I before had in consequence of my wife's administration.

I have many letters of yours in my possession unanswered; but at present this serves only to advise you of the above change, and at the same time to acquaint you, that I shall continue to make you the same consignments of tobacco as usual, and will endeavor to increase them in proportion as I find myself and the estate benefited thereby.

The scarcity of the last year's crop, and the consequent high price of tobacco, would, in any other case, have induced me to sell the estate's crop in this country; but, for a present, and I hope small advantage only, I did not care to break the chain of correspondence, that has so long subsisted.

On the other side is an invoice of some goods, which I beg you to send me by the first ship, bound either to the Potomac or Rappahannoc, as I am in immediate want of them. Let them be insured, and, in case of accident, reshipped without delay. Direct for me at Mount Vernon, Potomac River, Virginia; the former is the name of my seat, the other of the river on which it is situated. I am, etc.

Go. WASHINGTON.

The tone and habit of command as well as the giving of regular, formal proof and documents in support of all statements of