Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model 9780773587298

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marion

Winnifred Eaton, 1903, New York. In her daily life, Eaton was Mrs Babcock, a (white) wife and mother. Only in her career did she play the role of Onoto Watanna, an exotic (Japanese) noblewoman. 1903 saw the birth of Eaton’s first child and the publication of The Heart of Hyacinth, her fourth novel.

m a r i on the story of an artist ’s model

Wi nnifred Eaton w i t h il l u s t r at ion s by he nry h u t t

in t r od u c t ion by k a r e n e . h . sk in a z i

m c g i l l - q u e e n ’s u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-3962-4 Legal deposit second quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec First published in 1916 by W.J. Watt & Company as Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model by Herself and the Author of “Me” Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Eaton, Winnifred, 1875–1954 Marion : the story of an artist's model / Winnifred Eaton ; introduction by Karen E.H. Skinazi ; illustrations by Henry Hutt. Originally published: New York : W.J. Watt, 1916. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-7735-3962-4 I. Title. ps8459.a86m37 2012

c813'.52

c2011-908480-5

introduction karen e.h. skinazi

I

n April 1916, Hearst’s magazine began serializing the novel Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model by “the Author of ‘Me.’” For eight months, readers followed the tale of Marion Ascough, a young girl growing up in late nineteenth-century Quebec in a large family that, for reasons only vaguely explained, lives outside both French and English society. The narrative tracks Marion’s capricious adventures with men of different backgrounds, and her forays into the world of the stage and onto the pedestal. Early in the novel she meets Reggie, an upper-class Englishman, whom she hopes to marry. The marriage, however, is interminably delayed for reasons that, like her exclusion from French and English society, are not explicit. Ultimately, Marion decides to leave home and try her luck in the United States. At first, she seems to be even less successful there: she is professionally and personally degraded by having to support herself as an artist’s model rather than an artist, and she has to struggle to survive and keep her dignity intact in a bohemian corner of cosmopolitan New York. The conclusion of the novel, however, is satisfying, particularly for a readership that allowed itself to indulge in salacious stories as long as they ended with “a wicked life repented of,” as Daniel Defoe wrote of Moll Flanders, who also wrapped up her tale in the

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safe blanket of legal matrimony. Marion has neither wedded the man of her youthful dreams, nor has she become a great artist, but on the final page of the book, she is given one version of a generic fantasy ending: a sanctified marriage to the tall, blond, handsome man who loves her. This ending enabled readers to forgive Marion’s former lapses in judgment and decorum and to abandon the search for the secret of her identity—a secret that the advertised authors, “Herself and the Author of ‘Me,’” intimated existed by virtue of their own anonymity, as well as the elusive discussion of Marion’s “conspicuous and freaky” family and her mother’s “foreign” nationality in the opening pages (Marion 2, 1). Marion’s author was actually Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954), who could have chosen to identify herself to readers by the pseudonym she had built her writing career on: Onoto Watanna, well-known Japanese authoress of romances. Instead, it was suggested that there were two authors, who are named only by association: the model for Marion and the author of Me: A Book of Remembrance, a fictionalized memoir about Nora Ascough, a young Canadian girl living in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, published a year earlier. The Ascoughs are a thinly disguised version of Winnifred’s family, and Nora is Winnifred’s alter ego. This second novel about the Ascoughs, Marion, elaborates on many of Me’s themes while shifting its focus to the character of Marion Ascough, based on Winnifred’s sister Sara Bosse (1868–1938). Marion opens with Marion’s life in Montreal, her family, her romances, and the prejudices she faces and shares; tracks her experience of immigrating to the United States, her determination to have a career as an artist, and her treatment as a working girl; and, finally, ends with her marriage.1 Like its predecessor, Marion is an interesting story of immigration, racial secrecy, and indiscreet romances. I argue, however, that, unlike

Members of the Eaton family. Back row: Karl [Bosse], David, Bertie, Bobby, Walter. Bottom row: Beryl, Sara, Florence, Rose. Taken in Staten Island, ny, summer 1937. Rose Eaton, Winnifred’s sister, labeled the picture. Courtesy Diana Birchall

Rose, Karl Bosse (Sara’s husband), and Sara. In the novel, Paul Bonnat is French (partly German), attended Harvard, and becomes a Bohemian artist. In life, Karl was German, attended Cornell, and became an artist/medical illustrator. Courtesy Diana Birchall

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Me, Marion offers itself to readers not merely as a story to be read but also as an experience that requires participation. If we understand modeling to be a metaphor for being racially different or ambiguous, we can see that by giving us Marion, who is scrutinized, examined, deconstructed, fragmented, and characterized in different ways for different purposes, Eaton creates a character who embodies the muddledness of categorization. Marion invites the questions and looks that ask, “Who are you?” “What are you?” and “Where do you come from?”; the costumes she is made to wear and painterly manipulations that alter her in diverse ways are the artists’ attempts to answer these questions. Yet artists in the novel who paint Marion are but stand-ins for the audience of this book. They—and, by extension, we—are spectators, investigators, classifiers who analyze the body/text and the accompanying features/illustrations for clues about Marion’s identity. And we, the readers, like the artists, are ultimately responsible for trying to force the heroine into a racial or ethnic category— one that Eaton does not provide.

Who Is the Author of Me? Marion’s Readers Want to Know! Many readers opening the pages of Hearst’s in April 1916 had met Marion before, albeit briefly, when she made her appearance in Me: A Book of Remembrance, the memoir published serially by The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from April through August 1915 (as well as in the book version that the Century Company published immediately after the last instalment in the magazine, accompanied by an introduction by the writer Jean Webster). In Me, Nora leaves her native Quebec and, after an ill-fated job in Jamaica, arrives in Boston. There, by sheer coincidence, she finds herself in the same lodging-house as

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This ad, undated, is taken from the Winnifred Eaton Reeves fonds at the University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections.

her sister Marion, who had also left her home for a chance of happiness in the United States. Nora describes Marion’s reason for leaving Quebec—“an unhappy love-affair”—and her subsequent suffering as an “artist’s model” in Boston (W. Eaton, Me 67). Nora explains: Marion could paint well, and papa had taught her considerably. It was her ambition, of course, to be an artist. In Quebec she had actually had pupils, and made a fair living teaching children to draw and paint on china. But here in Boston she stood little chance of getting work like that. Nevertheless, she had gone the rounds of the studios, hoping to find something to do as assistant and pupil. Nearly every artist she had approached, however, had offered to engage her as a model. (Me 67–8) What would become of such a girl, who “shrank from the thought of being merely a model” but had to work for artists who wanted to exoticize her by using her for “Oriental studies” or eroticize her by having her pose in the nude (68)? Nora, herself a working girl who is eventually “kept” by her lover and engaged to three men simultaneously, warns us that it is “natural for poor girls to slip along the path of least resistance” (69). Eaton does not even suggest the choices that Theodore Dreiser offers in Sister Carrie (1900): “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse” (Dreiser 1).2

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The encounter between the two sisters in Boston, and Nora’s prediction for poor girls in general, set the stage for Marion. In Me, Marion tells Nora that she has run away from her hateful fiancé to teach him a lesson and find work as an artist, but her success in the United States had thus far not been great. When Nora asks Marion what kind of work she had been offered, “[h]er eyes filled with tears, and she said bitterly, that of an artist’s model” (W. Eaton, Me 67). Nora advises Marion to take the job as a model, and Marion advises Nora to take a job in Richmond. Both girls follow the advice given them. Nora, however, foreshadows the consequences of these choices when she laments, “We wanted to help each other, and yet each advised the other to do something that upon more mature thought might have been inadvisable; for both courses held pitfalls of which neither of us was aware” (Me 69). What were these pitfalls? Nora’s were soon revealed to readers but, since she leaves Boston immediately, telling us only that Marion got work posing in “Oriental studies,” Marion’s remained unknown (70). Nora merely reported: “I at once set out for Richmond, and I did not see my sister again for nearly five years. I left her crying at the station” (70). To discover the pitfalls of life as a model, one had to wait for the release of Me’s spin-off, Marion. Hearst’s was depending on readers to remember the scene that foreshadows Marion’s fate, a fate they were giving new life with the publication of Marion, heralded by a full-scale marketing campaign and dazzling graphics. In the contents of the April 1916 edition, rather than a short synopsis (like the one for W.W. Jacobs’s “The Castaways,” published in the same edition: “Comic yarn of the seas on the way— with heed to good mates and none to sailors Carstairs decides to sail”), readers are offered a mystery: “Anonymous master-fiction is always fascinating. Marion hears she is ‘très jolie.’ She is the sister of ‘Me’— know her?” (Hearst’s 29: 251). It is the first story in the magazine and is beautifully illustrated. In its serialization in The Century, Me had

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initially been decorated with small flourishes (glowing lanterns, Cupid with his bow and arrow, elaborate swirls), later reduced to smaller flourishes (diminutive flowers), and by the final two instalments (July and August), nothing. The book version is entirely unadorned. Marion, on the other hand, is enriched with drawings by Henry Hutt, an illustrator in the group of “American Girlhood” artists of the fin-de-siècle that included Charles Dana Gibson (inventor of the “Gibson Girl”).3 Hutt was an accomplished illustrator of cards, advertisements, dust jackets of popular books, and magazine covers and stories, including several stories in Hearst’s.4 Marion, therefore, drew readers as much by its pictorial component by Hutt—both compelling and puzzling— as by its mysterious tale.

Hutt’s Maryette, also known as Carillonette, from Robert W. Chambers’s Barbarians, published in Hearst’s in 1916. Note that the female figure looks remarkably like Hutt’s version of Marion.

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Instalment by instalment, Marion’s story continues until the “thrilling conclusion” in November 1916 (Hearst’s 30: 261). Later that year, the story would be published as a book by W.J. Watt & Company, with all of Hutt’s illustrations included. Although the bodies of text are identical, an apparent shift in authorship occurs between the serial and the novel. In the magazine, the model’s contribution to the story is credited in an author’s note preceding the story: “I present my sister Marion’s story in practically her own simple language, as I have taken it from her notes and journals that she kept over the years” (Hearst’s 29: 254) but the author is listed only as “The author of ‘Me.’” The title page of the book, on the other hand, lists “Herself and the Author of ‘Me’.” The difference suggests, perhaps, that by the time the story came out as a book, “the Author of ‘Me’” no longer seemed as mysterious as it once had, and W. J. Watt felt that an alternate approach – that of authenticity – was needed. Hearst’s, the first to publish the story, was able to capitalize on the intrigue generated by the anonymity of the author of Me and Marion. Included with the story in Hearst’s is an italicized description in the middle of the page, bold enough to capture the attention of anyone who dared to flip through the magazine and almost miss their centerpiece story: The debate is lively: Who wrote “Me,” that excellent story? And right into the midst of the discussion comes a second challenge, a new novel by the same author—“Marion.” Here’s the challenge: You couldn’t place “Me”; can you place my sister “Marion”? This is more than “the story of an artist’s model.” It is an intimate chronicle of the heartaches, the problems of life and love, of a young French-Canadian girl, who hears the call of art and forsakes home and native land to follow it. Instead of becoming an actress or a

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painter she is forced by dire necessity to earn a living as a model for other more successful artists. Her struggles, her many adventures in “Bohemian” life, told in the gripping language of a gifted, experienced author—they are “Marion.” This new novel by the author of “Me” will only serve to enhance further the deserved repute of the anonymous author, who chose to strike out along the new lines unhampered by a literary reputation. “Marion” will increase the desire of many thousands to answer the question, “Who is the Author of ‘Me’?” (Hearst’s 29: 254) This description, highlighting the anonymity of the author and the text’s connection to another, better-known novel, sets Marion apart from the other stories published in Hearst’s, which stand on their own merit. The description emphasizes the story’s exotic flavour (calling Marion a “French-Canadian” girl—which she is not—and hinting at inside information on “Bohemia” and the life of a model), but it is the enigma of the authorship of this sensationalist tale that challenges the reader to buy, read, and investigate Marion. There is no doubt that the publishers of Hearst’s felt that Marion was not just another story published in their magazine—it was a real attraction. Near the end of the April 1916 edition of Hearst’s, readers were offered a sneak peek at the rest of Marion in an advertisement for Hearst’s itself. Taking up half a page, the advertisement features a picture of Marion and her fickle lover, Reggie, who knows that to “marry out of his class would be a serious breach,” along with the pronouncement that Marion “will be the big novel of the year.” Again, Hearst’s makes much of the secrecy surrounding the publication of the story: “The mystery surrounding the anonymous author is reflected in the story itself. Aristocratic society, the studio, the stage— Marion’s stirring adventures have only just begun.” Using this puzzle

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as a plug, Hearst’s tells its readers they ought to “Get this Novel at a Big Saving”: “We know you want every instalment of ‘Marion.’ So we offer 10 months for just $1. The demand of over 600,000 buyers a month sells out every issue the day it is published. Avoid disappointment. Subscribe in advance—today—at a saving of 33 1/3 %. Just tear off and mail this coupon” (Hearst’s 29: 326).

A 1916 advertisement for Hearst’s that banks on the mystique of “Marion.”

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Eaton did well to place her story in Hearst’s. Although The Century Magazine, where Eaton had published Me, was perhaps the more prestigious placement for a novel,5 the difference between the textonly treatment of Me (in a magazine celebrated for its illustrations) and the large illustrations by a well-known artist for Marion made Marion more visually impressive. Furthermore, Hearst’s was evolving into a household name. Begun in 1901 as the “home-study periodical Current Encyclopedia,” the magazine quickly shifted its focus to public affairs. In 1911 William Randolph Hearst acquired the magazine and overhauled it to create a top entertainment venue (Patterson 213). Its circulation was on the rise: in the June 1916 edition, the publishers note that while the circulation had been only 255,000 in 1915, that number had now more than doubled to 610,000, and there would be enough copies of the July edition for every thirty-third person in the United States (Hearst’s 29: 419). Hearst’s did not stop with this success; they continued to promote the magazine and to do so via the expected success of Marion. In July 1916, their selfpromotion campaign assures readers that the story is “not fiction, but the actual experiences of a young woman alone with her ambition in the big city” and reminds them again of its predecessor: “You remember ‘Me’—what a stir it made! How everybody wondered as to the identity of the author who so frankly revealed her innermost heart! ‘Marion’ is the sister of ‘Me’, a girl of tantalizing charm, a girl you will want to know” (Hearst’s 30: 68). In May 1916, Hearst’s furnished readers with a synopsis of the previous month’s instalment—one that focuses on the attractions of this particular text, lest anyone fear the story simply recycles the ploys of its prequel. “Last month this novel began,” reads the synopsis: It is the life-story of Marion, sister of “Me,” a girl who will go far—Montreal, Boston, New York, “Bohemia,”—clinging to her

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ideals, as artist, model, friend of men, wife of one. She was born in the queer little village of Hochelaga, a suburb of Montreal; her father was an English painter, mother a Frenchwoman. Here Monsieur de St. Vidal proposed to her in the snow, and she ran home. Then she went on the stage in local theatricals. Along came Mr. Reggie—call him Bartie, so English, you know—remittance-man, thoroughly good chap. He took her to the ice carnival and when he should have been watching the procession he was looking down at her. Later, he refuses to take her into a flashy all-night restaurant.” (Hearst’s 29: 345) Drawing on their previous inaccurate description of Marion as a “young French-Canadian girl,” the publishers again focus on the exotic nature of Marion’s characters and their environments. They highlight the foreignness of Marion’s mother, incorrectly calling her a “Frenchwoman,” and of her British lover—as well as the “queer” and frozen setting of Hochelega, Quebec, where Marion is proposed to “in the snow” and taken to an “ice carnival.” How quaintly Canadian for the American reader! Looking at the proliferation of Canadian writing that had taken place in the United States a couple of decades earlier, James Doyle, in The Fin de Siècle Spirit: Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/ Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890s, suggests that “American critics and editors were stereotyping Canadian writers as regional nature poets and nationalists” (39). An example of such stereotyping can be found in William Dean Howells’s 1901 review of Gilbert Parker’s novel The Right of Way in the North American Review: “the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and fields, the frozen villages of Canada,” he writes, “give one a realizing sense of the Canadians … and make one feel their interesting temperamental difference from

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Americans” (873). The blurb for Marion directs readers’ attitudes toward national and class differences—between readers and characters as well as among characters. Although readers are expected to find both Mr Reggie and Marion appealing by virtue of their national difference, they are not to be looked at equally. Clearly, part of the story’s controversy lay in the fact that Marion’s Mr Reggie is of an accepted class, whereas Marion is not. Yet these plot details are also powerful because, as the synopsis reminds readers, this is no ordinary story but the tale of the sister of “Me.” A bestseller, Me had tickled the fancy of people of across the country, and “Who is the author of Me?” and “Hurry up! Introduce ME” had appeared on New York billboards and subway ads. Would the success of Me translate into an automatic rush to buy up this new book by the same author? Me’s success had been predicated on a mystery that allowed each reader the chance to become a literary Sherlock Holmes, cracking the codes of its vault of shocking secrets. Following the trail of responses to Me, Katherine Hyunmi Lee writes: “The Toronto Star reported that ‘while shocking the sensibilities of many of the old subscribers,’ Me’s racy subject matter ‘increased [The Century]’s circulation considerably’ … Reviewers responded to both Me’s sensational content (‘if all is true therein, the orthodox will find comfort in that the book ends with the heroine at prayer’ [Clipping, Star, 1915]) and to the question of the author’s identity (‘the author of “Me” is probably much more clever and fascinating than during the impulsive maidenhood of which she writes’ [Clipping, Times, 1915]) (Lee 181). People truly puzzled over the unwholesome character of “Me.” One hypothesis was that it had been written by Dorothy Richardson, who in 1905 had written The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, which details the exploits of a well-read, morally superior girl

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who, because of reduced means, must venture into the often unpleasant world of factories and endure what we would now call sexual harassment by men in power.6 Another hypothesis placed Jean Webster in the role of novelist. Webster was the grandniece of Mark Twain and a well-known writer (of the bestseller novel Daddy-Long-Legs, among other works), as well as an activist on behalf of women’s rights and women’s education. Her acclaim is evident in the fact that her own work in The Century was illustrated with sketches and drawings, and a brightly coloured portrait of her. It made no sense to suggest that she was the debauched main character in Me.7

“The Blue Bowl.” Webster’s brightly coloured portrait graced The Century Magazine in August 1915, thirty pages after the concluding instalment of Me. Whereas the text of Me is largely unillustrated, Webster’s full-page portrait in The Century is striking and colourful. The Century, August 1915, 608

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In time, readers began to move away from their consideration of known, white writers. Me itself offered only a handful of clues about the author, such as ascribing her incipient success as a popular writer to the vague but exotic “foreignness” of her mother. And herein lay the second secret, the reason Hearst’s told readers, suggestively, that “the mystery surrounding the anonymous author is reflected in the story itself ”: within the mystery of authorship lay the secret of race, a secret that was crucial to the story. On the one hand, the narrator tells us that her father came from a grand family and was an Oxford graduate. She dismisses the ways of working girls—their use of slang, for example, or speaking to strange men—as “common.” And among her marriage proposals is one from an exchange editor of the News, a graduate of Cornell, and a teacher at Jane Addams’s Hull House. She is told that he is “ of a splendid family” and eventually, as she tells us, becomes a great success (W. Eaton, Me 270). These details suggest that she must be a part of white society—and, though impoverished, not of the lower ranks of that society. On the other hand, the idea of a white woman in respectable society who would accept expensive gifts and an invitation to Europe from a married man, as well as agreeing to multiple marriage proposals simultaneously, was jarring. Assumption of a non-white identity for the author, however, mitigated the sensationalism of Me, and later of Marion; white readers did not expect non-whites to have the same upright morals as themselves. What made readers abandon the idea that the author was someone white like Jean Webster? One scene played upon the minds of some racist readers: in Jamaica, Nora is kissed and proposed to by a black man (who is called, by Nora and her friend, a “bogy man,” a “great animal,” a “black hound,” and a “nigger”), causing her to catch the next boat to America out of sheer terror (Me 55, 62). Although Nora does not leap to her death, as does Cameron when proposed to by a

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black man in D.W. Griffith’s blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which came out the same year as Me, her response is quite strong. Apparently, however, it was not strong enough for all of her critics. Claiming that Nora’s morals were not those of an Anglo-Saxon, one “Woman Writer” wrote the editor of St. Louis’s Reedy’s Mirror to say: “Me” purports to be written by a woman from Quebec, a Scotch girl. Very well. Now in that story the heroine tells us about how a big, black, greasy negro political boss and financial magnate in Jamaica, approached her in the legislative chamber, after a session of the legislative body, and kissed her. No Anglo-Saxon woman would have written that incident the way the author of “Me” has written it. No Anglo-Saxon woman would have been so fooled in all the ways Nora was fooled in that story. The author of “Me” is not someone who is of our breed— “Saxon and Norman and Dane are we.” She has not our women’s intuitions. (A Woman Writer) In fact, what the reader was probably noticing about the text— though it undoubtedly served the racist aim of “A Woman Writer” to align one’s morals with one’s heritage—was that the book contains clues that allude to Nora’s racial otherness. In her introduction to Me, Webster attributes Nora’s naïveté as well as her generosity to a unique background: “She was unique in many respects—in her peculiar heredity, her extreme ability, and her total unacquaintedness with the world” (Webster,“Introduction”). Although Me’s Nora Ascough clearly has an Anglo-Saxon name—as AngloSaxon, say, as Winnifred Eaton—she quickly begins to drop hints that

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she does not have a face to match it. Without quite detailing the source of her looks, she says, “I myself was dark and foreign-looking” (W. Eaton, Me 41). Whether this darkness is still within the boundaries of whiteness is not altogether clear.8 Nora makes repeated oblique references to her foreignness, commenting that “I come of a race, on my mother’s side, which does not easily forget kindness,” and, kissing her friend’s hand, “women of my race do things like that under stress of emotion” (Me 189, 269). Furthermore, although she does not share the plot of her stories or novel that she writes, she does offer an instructive clue—that her stories were about her “mother’s land,” a place she had never visited but about which she claims, “I have an instinctive feeling about that country … I feel as if I knew everything about that land, and when I sit down to write—why, things just come pouring to me, and I can write anything then” (Me 176). These clues helped readers discover the “true” identity of the author of Me. On 10 October 1915, the New York Times proposed: “As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed in almost every chapter, for she cannot conceal the glow of pride she feels in being half Japanese” (74). Playing the detective, the Times reviewer writes: “every novel of this kind is an ego cipher with a string to it, by means of which it can usually be unraveled. The author generally leaves it there. It has been said that no cipher was ever invented to which in a given time human ingenuity could not give the key. Edgar Allen Poe tells all about that in ‘The Gold Bug.’” As the reviewer moves on to the case of Me, we see this art of detection becoming a science: The first law in the science of finding anonymous writers is geographical. Authors in disguising the names of cities follow parallels of latitude. The next town to which we wish to migrate

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is directly either to the east or the west. That is a primitive instinct. Of course, the author of “Me” did not come from Quebec, as she says, but from Montreal. The main heart interest in her story before she went to Chicago is situated in Richmond. Applying the law of literary latitude move to Louisville, Ky. Although Mrs. Alice Hegan Rice and Colonel Henry Watterson both live in Louisville, neither of them wrote “Me,” for if they did they would have set it in Missouri. Richmond is up in arms against “Me” because she believes that none of the story could have happened there, and Louisville is disturbed because there are certain of her denizens who do resemble characters in this hide-and-seek autobiography. (“Is Onoto Watanna Author” 74) The reviewer then goes on to comment on how clear the evidence is before coming to his or her conclusion that “As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed.” The reviewer’s evidence is derived primarily from the narrator’s self-description. The first piece of evidence for racial difference consists of the narrator’s size: “‘I was a little thing,’ she writes herself,” and “We find her kissing the sleeve of tall Roger Avery Hamilton, because she was so short” (74). The second is her appearance; she mentions she has “black shining eyes and black shining hair,” and further, the reviewer tells us that “the ways of Nippon come to the surface when she tells how strange she looked in even fashionable garments, for the charm of the land of the wistaria is much obscured even by the best of the Occidental modes” (74). The third, and most important, clue is derived from her customs: here we see that, like “A Woman Writer,” the New York Times is determined to prove that Nora’s behaviour and attitudes are as foreign as her shining black hair. There is no doubt in the

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reviewer’s mind that she was kissing Hamilton’s sleeve not only because she was short but because: “such a salute was the custom of her country. That country means Japan. What better proof of Japanese origin is there in the line in which the authoress says that she had never seen a woman in hysterics … That she who has revealed herself in ‘Me’ was thoroughly imbued with the ideas of a Japanese is shown by the serious manner in which she considers the proposal of the merchant from Tokio, once courier to her father, who generously offers to do harm to all her enemies” (74). Triumphantly, the journalist claims to have solved the mystery, revealing the author to be the Japanese writer Onoto Watanna. That Winnifred Eaton was not actually Japanese is not the point. The New York Times reviewer was successful in pulling off only one of Salomé’s veils, revealing “Onoto Watanna,” the “gifted authoress [who] is the daughter of an English father and a Japanese mother whose birthplace was Nagasaki, Japan” (74). Although very few of these details were true—her mother was Chinese and her birthplace was Montreal, Quebec—the New York Times was correct in determining the carefully crafted, pseudonymous, professional identity of Winnifred Eaton. For those who believed the New York Times in 1915, reading Marion in 1916 meant smelling the scent of Kyoto’s cherry blossoms wafting off its pages or hearing the dzin dzin of the samisen in the cracking of its spine. The Ascoughs were Japanese for the New York Times, French Canadian for Hearst’s, and unidentified by the author(s); in the end, they and their author were mysterious, unknowable, categorically resistant, an enigma.

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Rediscovering Eaton’s Marion: A Story not only of “Impulsive Maidenhood” but also of the Crossing of Racial and International Borders The temptation which assails the half Chinese who goes out into the world, as I have done, mixing for the most part with the respectable middle class of the community—the class which is the most antagonistic of all to the “different”—is to pass as wholly white. This is a very easy thing to do, particularly if you have the Caucasian features. Dark hair and dark complexion are not peculiar to the Chinese. There are dark people of other countries. Many French Canadian people are as dark and darker than the Chinese … I know a half Chinese whose features are altogether Mongolian; but as long as she keeps exclusively with the Americans, and is not seen with the Chinese, no one of the Americans among whom she lives would think of her as Chinese. —“The Persecution and Oppression of Me” by A Half Chinese (1911)

Winnifred Eaton was a best-selling authoress whose work had appeared on Broadway at the turn of the twentieth century and later in films, but by the time the writer was living her last days in Alberta, still actively shopping the books written in her youth to filmmakers, she had largely disappeared from the public eye. (The news that legal papers were being drawn up to turn her Alberta ranching novel, Cattle, into a cinemascope-type production arrived a few months after her death [Winnifred Eaton Reeve fonds 2.6]). The screen that obscured Eaton’s biological identity, allowing her to be Japanese, and French Canadian, and unidentifiable, obscured her significance . She ended up being seen as just another writer of Japonisme, not the first one and not the best one. No one recognized her as the first Chinese North American novelist or looked to her writing for examples of

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complicated, nuanced, narrated performances of racial ambiguity or Chinese heritage. It was only years after her death that her books began to be recognized as more than the “holiday gift book[s], enchanting readers with [their] ‘exquisite’ Japanese design and … ‘delicate,’ ‘charming’ tale[s] of Japan” they had once been considered to be (Ouyang 211). Academic work on Eaton began, enthusiastically, in Japan in the 1960s. In 1964 Katsuhiko Takeda published “Onoto Watanna: A Forgotten Writer” in the Japanese journal Orient/West. Takeda’s biographical information and, consequently his literary analysis, are problematic (for example, Takeda assumes that the knowledge Eaton has of Japan can be attributed to her childhood in Nagasaki, where he says she was born). Despite its errors, Takeda’s article marked the beginning of Eaton’s revival. Five years later, Yoshiro Ando, also of Japan, wrote Eaton’s daughter, Doris Rooney, “I have recently found the name of Onoto Watanna in the diary of Kaf Nagai, who was one of greatest writers in Japan” (Winnifred Eaton Reeve fonds 2.12). He then quotes the famous Japanese author’s 1904 diary, explaining how the complimentary entry piqued his interest, causing him to try to find books by “Onoto Watanna,” as well as all relevant biographical information (which was, unsurprisingly, contradictory). After receiving more information from Rooney, in 1970 Ando published “Onoto Watanna to iu Sakka” (A Writer Called Onoto Watanna) in the Japanese journal Eigo Seinen. Ando continued his work on Eaton and even traveled to Alberta to meet Doris, with whom he developed a longstanding correspondence. It was not until the mid-to-late 1970s, however, that North Americans rediscovered Winnifred and her sister Edith. In 1976, S.E. Solberg delivered a talk at the Pacific Northwest Asian American

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Writers’ Conference in Seattle entitled “The Eaton Sisters: Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna” (Cole 159n). For a long time, scholars accepted that there was a distinction between the “good” sister (Edith, who wrote in defence of the Chinese people, her “own” people) and the “bad” sister (Winnifred, who opportunistically claimed the Japanese people as her own, realizing that Japanese people—little known except for their beautiful geishas and strong warriors—were thought of far more favourably than Chinese people, who were considered to be an alien, unassimilable race invading American shores).9 Fortunately, Dominika Ferens’s Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances did an excellent job of forcing readers to rethink the value of the two sisters’ writings. She argues that because both sisters were writing about ethnic groups they could identify with physically, though not culturally (Edith had to learn about Chinese people just as Winnifred had to learn about Japanese people), both were investigators and purveyors of ethnography—they simply chose different subjects for their ethnography. Now, in the twenty-first century, Winnifred Eaton’s hundred-yearold lowbrow gift books are receiving much academic attention. Many of Eaton’s works have been recently republished by academic presses, and scholarship on Eaton has exploded.10 Most of the republications and analyses of Eaton’s novels have centered on her Japonisme— writing that exploited the craze for all things Japanese that began in France in the 1860s and was perpetuated by European and American authors, artists, and designers. Until Eaton’s engagement with the genre, writers of “Japanese” fiction were white men, such as Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, and John Luther Long. They composed romances that took place primarily between white men (wealthy, wandering businessmen) and Japanese women (commodified, objectified, infantilized, and victimized). Eaton “oriented” herself as a Japanese woman

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who is a subject and whose Japanese characters—female and male— are subjects interacting with fellow (Japanese, British, American) subjects.11 Eaton also pushed beyond the romantic pairings she found in the men’s literature. Whereas stories like Madame Butterfly, written by Long in 1897, tell us nothing of the fate of the “purple-eyed” baby that the Japanese heroine, Cho-cho-San, abandoned by the nefarious American Mr B.F. Pinkerton, raises alone, Eaton focused on the hybrid character born to the couple, the Eurasian “half-caste.” As well, Eaton began to unpack the distinct threads of identity in her fiction, separating nationality from race and explaining the hybrid cultures that arise when people of different nations and cultures encounter one another. Although Eaton had written two novels that moved away from Japonisme before Marion—The Diary of Delia, a comical 1907 story told from the perspective of an Irish maid, and Me—Marion is a unique book in Eaton’s canon (tellingly, these are the three novels she wrote in first-person narration). It provides the most detailed writing about the Eaton family by an Eaton, as well as an honest account of the family’s experiences outside French/English societies within Canada. Cole asserts that Marion “in contrast to Me, gave literary scholars what they were looking for: anguished depictions of cultural difference, incidents of both accommodation and resistance, and experiences of discrimination” (80). The other sources of information about the family are the autobiographical essays, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” by Edith Eaton, and “The Persecution and Oppression of Me,” which lists its author as “A Half Chinese” (but is presumed to be by Edith, as well), both published in The Independent (in 1909 and 1911), and what Winnifred Eaton provides in Me.12 But in Me, Eaton is coy about home-grown racism, claiming “It must be remembered that in Canada we do not

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encounter the problem of race. One color there is as good as another … my own mother was a foreigner” (41). In Marion, on the other hand, she is more frank. In fact, Marion’s difference from her neighbours seems to cause her more suffering in Canada than in the United States. In “The Persecution and Oppression of Me,” Edith (or an author with a very similar background) writes of the temptation to pass as white and the ease with which someone who was half Chinese could do this in American society. She writes that “few, if any, of the half Chinese women and men living in America, save those who live with the Chinese side of the family and are dependent upon it, are known to the world as Chinese. This makes living easier for them” (A Half Chinese 421). Yet to tell the story of life in Canada—the part of her biography that is all but omitted in Me, which begins with Nora’s departure from Canada— Eaton must deal with a time in her family’s biography in which they “are known to the world as Chinese.” Life for the Chinese was difficult in Canada, and Edith took up their cause in her articles. In “Girl Slave in Montreal,” she wrote an exposé of the little-known problems of the Chinese residents in that city. “Half-Chinese Children” explained the plight of half-American halfChinese children to the readers of the Montreal Daily Star.“The Ching Chong Episode,” “A Chinese Party,” and “A Plea for the Chinamen” contributed to a project important to Edith: an eloquent defence of the Chinese residents of Canada against the head tax. As she put it, the Chinese were being threatened with an elevated head tax of $500 for the vices of being good workmen, improving the railways, mining the ores, and engaging in agricultural and manufacturing pursuits in Canada (E. Eaton [Far], Spring 193). To be Chinese in Canada was to face discrimination and hardship. In Canada, knowledge of Sara Bosse’s racial heritage would have marked her as among the oppressed; in the United States, ignorance of her situation would be her salvation. The

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words from “The Persecution and Oppression of Me” ring true: “as long as she keeps exclusively with the Americans, and is not seen with the Chinese, no one of the Americans among whom she lives would think of her as Chinese” (421). It is unsurprising, then, to see that Marion, Sara’s counterpart, is no longer being made to feel “freaky and conspicuous” after she moves across the border (Marion 2). Interestingly, the migration that Marion makes from one country to another creates a secondary epiphenomenon: it allows readers to examine the distinct experiences of the same character with the same racial heritage in a “known” world and an “unknown” one, as well to begin to parse the difference between the “cultural mosaic” that Canada would claim for itself some years later and the American ideology of the melting pot.13 Marion lingers in the Quebec setting for more than a third of the book, allowing readers to assess the positionality of ethnic Canadians through attitudes of and responses to white Canadians. Although Eaton does not “out” the family as specifically Chinese, in the first lines of the book she introduces the Ascoughs’ difference through a French Canadian character, shifting the burden of description/examination onto external viewers and making us see the family through the filter of these assessors: In dat familee dere are eleven cheeldren, and more—they come! See dat leetle one? She is très jolie, n’est ce pas? De father he come from Eengland about ten year ago. He was joost young man, mebbe twenty seven or twenty eight year ol’, and he have one leetle foreign wife and six leetle cheeldren … (Marion 1) Rather than counter this description of her family with her own, Marion merely tells us that she feels “ashamed and humiliated” to hear her family spoken of the way they were and explains that they were commonly pointed out and discussed in this way because of “the size

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of our family and my mother’s nationality” (2). While Eaton leaves us with only the description that Marion resents, she does not depict the Ascough girls as without pride in who they were (whoever they were). When a neighbour calls her family “heathenish,” Marion does not, as before, offer an alternative, but she does stick out her tongue in derision (8). When their father returns from a trip to England in which he sought help from his parents, Ada (Edith) triumphantly announces that had he stayed abroad, he could have “‘lived in the lap of luxury,’” but he came back instead—to, as she says, using the words of their peer-judges—his “noisy, ragged little ‘heathens’” (16). Although Eaton does not have Ada reveal exactly why the Ascoughs are thought to be heathens, in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Edith Eaton, without fictional disguise, offers a poignant account of their lives in Montreal: Whenever we children are sent for a walk our footsteps are dogged by a number of young French and English Canadians, who amuse themselves with speculations as to whether, we being Chinese, are susceptible to pinches and hair pulling, while older persons pause and gaze upon us, very much in the same way that I have seen people gaze upon strange animals in a menagerie. Now and then we are stopt and plied with questions as to what we eat and drink, how we go to sleep, if my mother understands what my father says to her, if we sit on chairs or squat on floors, etc, etc, etc. (E. Eaton [Far], “Leaves” 220) This treatment was no doubt painful for Edith, whose early writing suggests her patriotism—in 1889, she described with delight Montreal’s Ice Palace in a story for the Canadian magazine Dominion Illustrated and quoted this same description several years later for the

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Jamaican newspaper Gall’s Newsletter, where she signed her name “A Canadian Fire Fly.” In Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography, Annette White-Parks writes: “In a world that emphasizes nationalism … which of her countries of residence Sui Sin Far really ‘belongs to’ has been seen as important” (White-Parks, Sui 3). Citing critics who refer to Edith as American, White-Parks says: “Research discloses, however, that in her travels on the southerly side of the Canadian-U.S. border, we are seeing only temporary detours in this writer’s life and that the main road—that of ‘home’—invariably started from and led back to eastern Canada” (Sui 3-4). Canada’s “cultural mosaic” meant that there was less concern with assimilating foreigners to a monolithic culture than in the “melting pot” of the United States, but that did not ensure that cultural and racial groups were defended from prejudice. This Canadian lens, through which the Eatons were reflected and refracted, is apparent in Marion. Reading the novel, we are steeped in the prejudices of cosmopolitan late-nineteenth-century Montreal—prejudices that the Ascoughs share. The Ascoughs disparage the “little French Canucks” that surround them and distinguish themselves from the ignorant group that chooses not to get vaccinated during the smallpox epidemic in Montreal in 1885 (Marion 24).14 When Marion and her sister Ellen (based on Grace Eaton, one of the first Asian American women lawyers) move into a boarding house, the stepdaughter of the landlady declares, “Gosh! I wish we were not Jews. Nobody likes us,” and in response to being told by Ellen that they are “God’s chosen people,” continues, “Gosh! I wish He didn’t choose me” (33). Indeed, in the next scene, though in the right in requesting payment owed to her, the Jewish landlady is given the epithet “Shylock” (35). Lu Frazer, an Irish-Canadian friend of Marion, is ridiculed by Ada, who says “she can’t even speak the Queen’s English properly, and her uncle keeps a

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saloon” (42). Although Lu is kind, sympathetic, and “very popular with all the girls,” Marion’s friends call her “the Irish Jew, as she kept a bank account and whenever the girls were short of money they would borrow from Lu, who would charge them interest” (111). Marion describes her Chinese servant, Sung Sung, in terms of his “everlasting superstitions” (38). And even the Americans are not exempt from criticism: our first introduction to the United States and its inhabitants is through an Ascough neighbour, Madame Prefontaine, to whom the neighbours always listened “with great respect” (7). Madame Prefontaine calls New York “one beeg hell” (although noting that one could become a millionaire, if one thought it worthwhile to stay there, which Madame Prefontaine did not: “I prefer my leetle home, so cool and quiet in Hochelaga than be meelionaire in dat New York, dat is like purgatory”) (7). Later, Ada calls Marion’s American friend “noisy” and complains that she “talks through her nose” (42). She tells Marion that they are superior to her: “‘Since we are obliged,’ said Ada, ‘to live in a neighbourhood with people who are not our equals, I think it a good plan to keep to ourselves. That’s the only way to be exclusive’” (41). Although Marion resists her sister’s derisive commentary, she admits “Ada’s nagging had an unconscious effect on me,” and carries this Canadian superiority with her to the United States, disgusted by the ignorance of Americans who thought “Montreal was as far away” from Boston “as Siberia” (42, 139). Marion, then, is no stranger to discrimination, which not only she but all outsider groups in Canada faced, and all groups—insiders or outsiders— internalized. When she moves to the United States, she removes herself from her heritage and becomes “Canadian” instead of ethnic— a far more palatable foreignness. Eaton demonstrates that crossing a border creates, to borrow a term from Mary C. Waters, “ethnic options” (typically associated with people of European descent). Upon

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crossing the border into the United States, Marion redirects the references to her “foreignness” to make them a form of national difference. Although the first person Marion encounters in the United States is baffled by her speech and appearance, saying, “I think she’s a forriner. She sure talks and looks like no folks I know” (139), Marion quickly attributes this perceived foreignness to her nationality rather than her race. Though Marion still needs a “descent” to explain her difference, she has the option of choosing her national descent over her racial descent. The description of Marion’s immigration to the United States bears some of the typical hallmarks of early twentieth-century immigrant American literature. Like Mary Antin, author of The Promised Land (1912), who, in anticipation of her immigration, feels the wind rushing “from outer space, roaring in [her] ears, ‘America! America!’” Marion sets forth not for “the United States,” but, more majestically, for the “Land of the Free” (Antin 129; Marion 136).15 For a person of Chinese heritage, the border crossing would have been, in reality, dangerous and unlawful: the Page Act (which specifically targeted Chinese women) had been instituted in 1875 and the (more thorough) Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, about fourteen and seven years, respectively, before Marion’s immigration. These already restrictive laws were reinforced by the Scott Act of 1888, instituted only a year or so before Marion’s journey. Yet in this narrative, where direct pointers to a Chinese heritage are absent, the high stakes for a Chinese border crosser go unmentioned.16 Once across the border, Marion is free to pass as a white Canadian. This new identity is akin to the one claimed by a woman described by Edith Eaton in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasion,” a woman that Diana Birchall, Winnifred Eaton’s granddaughter and biographer, understands to be another of the Eaton sisters, May, who

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moved to California to escape her fate as a known Chinese woman (Birchall 19). According to “Leaves,” this “half-Chinese half-white girl” keeps her “face … plastered with a thick white coat of paint and her eyelids and eyebrows … blackened so that the shape of her eyes and the whole expression of her face is changed” (E. Eaton [Far], “Leaves” 226). Knowing how Chinese are regarded in the United States, she chooses to “pass.” Reports Edith: “It is not difficult, in a land like California, for a half-Chinese, half-white girl to pass as one of Spanish or Mexican origin” ( “Leaves” 226). While this woman was not able to pass as white as easily as Marion seems to, the implication is clear: at the turn of the twentieth century, the Spanish, as a race, were acceptable, if not ideal.17 The Chinese, thought to be unassimilable, were not. Border crossing allows for a rewriting of history, and May and others chose to use it to omit their Chinese ancestry from their genealogies. Elaine K. Ginsberg explains “passing” as a kind of “trespassing”—a way to assume a new identity and access the privileges of another. Ginsberg argues that “passing” creates the space for agency, including the opportunity to “construct new identities” (Ginsberg 16). But with these advantages come losses. Birchall writes: “May’s concealment of her Chinese blood was complete; the knowledge was not even passed down to her own grandchildren” (Birchall 19). The danger, then, turns out not to be the international border but the epistemological one: by not passing down her story of passing, May leaves her children with only a partial knowledge of who they were. What is striking about Marion is that in this immigration narrative, the role of passing, which in many ways treads familiar ground, inverts the direction of the passing/crossing of the Canada-United States border. Most commonly, immigration narratives involving racial passing were slave narratives or novels fictionalizing the stories of slaves (like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative), where Canada is situated as the person-of-colour’s refuge

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from the oppressive racial laws of the United States. In “‘As if I had entered a Paradise’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-border Literary History,” Nancy Kang highlights the use of American rhetoric of freedom for slaves coming from American slavery into Canada, such as that in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s vision of Sojourner Truth’s arrival onto Canadian soil: The queen comes down unto the shore, With arms extended wide, To welcome the poor fugitive Safe onto freedom’s side. (qtd. in Stowe, “Sojourner Truth” 479) Kang reads Stowe’s “hospitable queen, colonial Canada’s genius loci” as a “reinscription of America’s Lady Liberty” or colorblind Justice—in either case, a welcoming figure promising refuge and a degree of equality unattainable in the United States in the antebellum era (the reality of such equality was, of course, dubious) (434).18 Kang argues persuasively that there is a relationship between racial passing and transnational passing: “crossing the (color) line socially becomes analogous to crossing the (border) line geopolitically, with a better life the ultimate goal for both” (435). This analogy clearly fits the immigration narratives set out in Me and Marion, despite the direction of the border crossing. Marion crosses not only into the United States, but also into whiteness; once away from Montreal, where she was taunted as a child and refused the respectability of marriage as a young woman, she can have a “better life.” References to her difference become oblique and nationalized. Far from the French Canadians who knew her secret and whispered about her family, Marion now bonds with the French. She and a friend, Rose St. Denis, chat in a hybrid French-English language. And Montrealers look out for her. Although she struggles at first,

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unable to find work, her entrée into the world of modeling comes by way of a man who tells her: “Miss Ascough, I am going to give you some good advice, chiefly because you are from my old Montreal” (Marion 148). Marion’s compatriot steers her toward her new career, cementing the advantage of her difference—now as a Canadian—in the United States. Canadianness, in fact, seems to become Marion’s sole identifier, at least until she can begin the process of Americanization that the other foreign-born characters have already undergone. Addressing her as though by name, a bartender asks: “How’s the little Canadian girl?” (227). Following the genre of Anglo-Canadian-American literature of the period, Marion presents a classic structure in which, by becoming steeped in the mores of American life, Marion slowly loses her innocence. Canadianness is no longer linked to racial oppression but, in the United States, to a gentler way of life, while Americanness becomes linked to both decadence and sophistication. Convinced to pose nude for the first time, Marion mentally escapes to her sweet Canadian childhood: a remembered Hochelaga, and a classic Canadian image of her brother pulling her on a sleigh through the thick snow. Yet later, when Marion says,“It was a revelation to me,” referring to mixed-gender associations, that “in Canada, as in Europe, the simple friendship between men and women is not known as in the United States,” we see that modern ideas, such as gender equality, only become available to her in her new country (227). Even the music of Canada loses its provincial charm in contrast to the worldly options to which she is exposed. Listening to Wagner’s operas, she reports: His “Tristan und Isolde” rang in my ears for days, and by the time I heard “Die Meistersinger,” I was able thoroughly to enjoy what had been unknown land to me. We Canadians had never gone much beyond a little Mendelssohn, which the teachers of music

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seemed to consider the height of classical music, and the people were still singing the old sentimental songs, not the ragtime the Americans love, but the deadly sweet melodies that cloy and teach us nothing. (289–90) A thoroughly assimilated American by the end of the text, Marion makes us feel that Marion is something of an immigrant fairy-tale. Just as Mary Antin can trade in the pogroms of 1880s Russia because America “meant the freedom to … throw off the shackles of superstition … unhindered by political or religious tyranny,” even though for the Antins the reality of arrival in America meant spending “three years … in sordid struggle and disappointment,” so too is Marion ultimately willing to overlook her hardships in America, which are lighter than in Canada, and idealize the America she inhabits (Antin 160). Immigration is successful for Marion. Having a different (but not particularly “foreign”) national identity apparently allows her to shed her racial skin; one difference satisfies the curious.19 Yet one way that Eaton continues to remind readers of Marion’s “foreigner” past is through Marion’s cultural mosaic mode of thinking; another is through her modeling. Though de-ethnicized herself, Marion is always interested in the backgrounds of the people she meets—an attitude that seems out of place in melting-pot-America. When her employer, Mr Menna, laughs at Germans, Marion tells him, “You’re a German yourself,” but his response does not make sense to her: “I’m an American” (255). Later she asks Mr Menna about another artist, Mr Bonnat: “Is Mr. Bonnat a Frenchman?” (255). Although “Menna seemed uncertain of his nationality,” he responds firmly in the negative, assuring Marion that Bonnat “went to college in America” and got “his Ph.D. at Harvard” (255). Marion, ever-interested in the non-American background of her acquaintances, insists: “The name is French … Are you sure he’s not French?” (256). These questions and examinations are not of

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Marion (as they are in her modeling career), but by Marion, yet the effect on readers is similar. We continue to focus on individuals’ ancestry through the evaluations and interrogations of others. This emphasis is nowhere more prominent, however, than it is in Marion’s profession—a profession that asks people to inspect her face, her hair, her eyes, her body, to determine her precise colour, to create a kind of story of her very physical expression—modeling.

The Story—and Spectacle—of an Artist’s Model: De-racing, Erasing, and Rebuilding the Model as a Projection of Fantasy Spectacle involves a visual display, designed to provide intense sensory stimulation. By appealing primarily to the senses, it thereby discourages critical engagement and lends itself to consumption or commodification. It is most often associated with the public sphere and is marked by its staged or designed qualities. The excess and artifice of the spectacle serve to thwart recognition of both its status as a substitution for the real, as well as the fact of one’s actual physical separation from the spectacular vision or event. Further, the consideration of spectacle assumes a noninteractive relationship between the seer and the seen. The spectacle is the object of sight, rather than the subject. —“Spectacle,” Jenifer K. Ward, 381

Would a book about a model have interested readers at the turn of the twentieth century? W.J. Watt hoped so; they offered Eaton and her sister, Sara Bosse, a contract with a $500 advance and a robust royalty rate of 15% for the first 5000 copies with 20% thereafter (Winnifred Eaton Reeve fonds 2.3). They were reassured by Eaton’s early achieve-

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ments as Onoto Watanna and later accomplishment with Me, and also by her previously successful collaboration with her sister: three years prior to Marion, Eaton and Bosse had produced a series of articles with recipes and tips on Chinese and Japanese cooking for Harper’s Bazaar and Ladies’ Home Journal (published in 1914 as The Chinese Japanese Cook Book).20 The cookbook is aimed at the “Westerner” who, upon reading their book, will “cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land” (1).21 Like much of Eaton’s writing, the ethnic authenticity (in this case, of the recipes) is often doubtful, but, again like much of her writing, the book offers Westerners a taste of exotic, Orientalist fare.

The cover of Chinese Japanese Cook Book. Eaton uses her Japanese pseudonym here to give the cookbook ethnic authenticity. Her sister uses her real name. Courtesy Peter Berg and “Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project,” at Michigan State University Libraries

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In Marion, Eaton and Bosse again fashion a window into a littleknown world, this time the world of the model. A mysterious figure for much of society, models exhibited and continue to exhibit, as Jenifer K. Ward writes about spectacle, “excess and artifice” that “serve to thwart recognition of … its status as a substitution for the real” (Ward 381). Bosse’s contribution was autobiography; Eaton’s was art. Eaton recognized that, like her and her siblings, who were seen as racially ambiguous beings, models at that time occupied a liminal space. For models, liminality lay between respectability (they modeled the image of American Girlhood, which occupied a very secure place in society) and Bohemian looseness (they were working to support themselves, and doing so through exposure of their bodies). M.H. Dunlop writes in Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-theCentury New York: “The American Girl category was exclusionary along class, race, and nativist lines: it was never suggested that its white upper-class population held anything in common with immigrant girls, African-American girls, working girls, factory girls, girls in domestic service, or shopgirls” (161). Models, however, merely projected the image of American Girlhood; their own realities were hardly as exclusionary. As Eaton demonstrates in Marion, the racially ambiguous individual and the model were subject to similar receptions: both were held up to intense scrutiny. Eaton’s sister Edith acknowledges this scrutiny in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” both in the story in which she tells us that people gazed upon her and her siblings as if they were “strange animals in a menagerie,” as well as in another story from childhood: I am at a children’s party, given by the wife of an Indian officer whose children were schoolfellows of mine. I am only six years

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of age, but have attended a private school for over a year, and have already learned that China is a heathen country, being civilized by England. However, for the time being, I am a merry romping child. There are quite a number of grown people present. One, a white haired old man, has his attention called to me by the hostess. He adjusts his glasses and surveys me critically. “Ah, indeed!” he exclaims. “Who would have thought it at first glance? Yet now I see the difference between her and other children. What peculiar coloring! Her mother’s eyes and hair and her father’s features, I presume. Very interesting little creature!” I had been called from the play for the purpose of inspection. (E. Eaton [Far], “Leaves” 218) Edith’s autobiographical stories reveal the scrutiny to which the racially ambiguous figure is subjected; her sister’s novels and fictionalized auto/biographical stories delve into the same figure’s ability to manipulate such scrutiny. Passing was one method of such manipulation, and in life, Winnifred Eaton passed both ways: East and West. Whereas in her fiction, Winnifred Eaton’s Asianness is emphasized, in other arenas of her life (both personal and professional), her whiteness figures predominantly. As Birchall points out in Onoto Watanna, “Although there were many women in Hollywood [in the early 1930s, when Eaton was a scriptwriter], all the full-time professional screenwriters of the period were white … Winnifred may not have been the first or most successful woman in Hollywood but she was unquestionably one of the earliest Asian American screenwiters” (Birchall 159). Birchall adds the following caveat: “It is tempting to focus on this aspect of her career, but with Winnifred’s characteristic pragmatism in playing the role that would best benefit her, she did not emphasize her Asian heritage or appear in Hollywood as the kimono-

Left: The cover of Miss Numè of Japan bears an image that panders to consumers of Orientalism: a Japanese woman holding a parasol, riding on a rickshaw. This image is contained within yet another Orientalist fetish, the fan. Right: In order to create the Japanese authoress “Onoto Watanna,” Eaton had to manipulate her image. The frontispiece of Miss Numè of Japan complements the outside cover with its representations of authenticity: a photograph of three (presumably “real”) Japanese women and, below it, a picture of the novel’s author, contained, like the outside cover image, in a fan, with her Japanese pseudonym below. This inset image of Eaton invites a parallel between her (the author of the book) and the Japanese setting/content/style/women of the novel depicted on the front cover and frontispiece.

wearing Onoto Watanna. She obtained jobs not because the industry needed a resident Asian for ethnic projects but because she was a capable, hard-working professional. She presented herself as an ordinary white businesswoman, used a Western name (‘Mrs Winnifred

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Reeve’), and dressed in Western business clothing” (Birchall 159). As Birchall makes clear, Eaton’s ability to pass between Asianness and whiteness was quite fluid. Like models, racially ambiguous individuals were often able to reframe their appearances to enter the gates of respectable society, using the very scrutiny of the viewer to uphold their illusions. Simone de Beauvoir would later declare, famously, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”; in her writing, Eaton suggests this notion of identity as a social construct (or, more dynamically, as an everchanging process) throughout her oeuvre. In The Heart of Hyacinth, for example, both actual and metaphorical Eurasians use dress to engage in a fluid movement between Western identity and Japanese identity, affecting their viewers each time.“When Komazawa returned to Sendai,” writes Eaton of Koma, the son of a white British man and a Japanese woman who has spent the last four years in England, “clad in the garments worn by the missionary, Hyacinth regarded him with mingled feelings of terror and fascination. Though he made ceaseless efforts to speak to her, she could not be brought to utter one word in response” (W. Eaton [Watanna], Hyacinth 67). To alleviate the fears of his culturally Japanese, racially white sister/wife, Koma “discarded the heavy, dark, mysterious clothes … [and] appeared like any other Japanese youth,” causing Hyacinth, who but a moment earlier had regarded him as a “stranger,” to run into his arms (71).22 In SunnySan, the transition is similarly remarkable: Sunny is told that although she is a “mongrel,” she can, with ease, “grow into an American” (W. Eaton [Watanna], Sunny 231). So, with a little pluck and a shopping spree, the heroine manages to transform herself into “an American girl,” not because of citizenship but because, as Eaton points out, “[a]ppearances play a great part in the imagination and thought of the young American” and American dress will intimate Americanness

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(231, 117). Gone is the image that marks the memory of the American men who knew Sunny in Japan—“a bizarre and curious little figure, adorned with blazingly bright kimona and obi”—and in her stead is the image of an American girl. In a “sailor hat, slightly rolled” and wearing a “plain serge suit, belted at the waist, with a white collar and jabot,” Sunny is described as standing “the test of American clothes” (114, 117). Fashion is one way that the model—and the racially ambiguous individual—can become a spectacle that acts primarily as an “object of sight, rather than the subject” (Ward 381). Fascination is another. Models were, as David Slater writes in “The Fount of Inspiration: Minnie Clark, the Art Workers’ Club for Women, and Performances of American Girlhood,” “objects of interest because their performances mirrored the posing that took place on the streets and in ballrooms as the achievement of middle- or upper-class status came to depend principally on one’s ability to present the appearance of respectability” (Slater 231–2). This appearance depended on not only attire, but also a lack of intimacy. Rather than being “New York society girls,” the models were often poor and hard working, which could become evident in conversation or through personal knowledge. By moving her heroine from Canada, where she is known, to the United States, where she can reinvent herself, Eaton mimics the reality of (hers and) her sister’s movement and also recreates the distance and thus allure of the model. While the model functions figuratively to allow us to think about racial fluidity, a model could also literally be a racially ambiguous, de-raced, or passing individual. Drawings and paintings were often composites created from multiple models whose actual identities and realities were altered and combined, allowing the artists to create projections of idealized womanhood. Dunlop points out that most

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women were “shut out of the American Girl category, but they could be made to wish for it and to shop for imitations of its accoutrements”; models were used to inspire these desires (Dunlop 163). Slater further adds: “Though they inspired the images of the type … most models, including [Minnie] Clark [the iconic Gibson Girl], were shut out of the American Girl category” (Slater 234). Minnie Clark is an excellent example of the conflation of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor of the model and the racially ambiguous individual. Clark and Evelyn Nesbit, the best-known Gibson girl, were Irish—at a time when “Irishness remained a significant form of racial ‘otherness’” and Gibson himself “drew cartoons caricaturing the ethnic features of the Irish” (240).

A United States Postal Service stamp of the Gibson Girl issued in the 1998 Celebrate the Twentieth Century series. Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, ny, 1900s

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Charles Dana Gibson’s “The Salons of New York.” This picture is entitled “At Mrs. Assistant Drain Commissioner O’Hara’s.” Life, 1892, 380–1

The Irish were, however, as Slater rightly points out, being assimilated at the turn of the century, so Clark’s secret (Irishness), while not well-known and not well-publicized, would not have been thought completely reprehensible if discovered. Hettie Anderson’s secret, however, would have been. Anderson, the “model who posed for two of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ best works, the figure of Victory on the Sherman Monument” at the Southeast entrance of Central Park and “his design [of Liberty] for a twenty-dollar gold coin” (Slater 241), was both a professional model and an African American. Had Anderson’s racial identity been known, the images representing the ideals of Victory and Liberty would have been seen as tarnished.23 Even the

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mistaken belief that an Irish woman had been the primary model for the gold coin caused problems: a New York Times article in 1907 notes that there was a “protest of the Independent Order of Americans at the Harrisburg (Penn.) convention against using the Irish-born girl’s face on the coins.” Mary Cunningham, the woman thought to have been the model, was hidden away at the Gaudens’ villa, with “no outsider … allowed to see her” (“Vexes Son”). The controversy over the use of an Irish model ironically served to deflect attention away from the real secret, which remained hidden for most of the century. According to Slater, “The effectiveness with which Anderson’s ethnicity remained hidden belies both the skill with which the model performed and the lengths to which the artist went to idealize his figure” (241). Slater sees this form of successful passing not as race betrayal but as a victory against racist ideology: “More important, though, [the Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman Monument in New York’s Central Park (1903). Winged Victory is believed to be based on Hettie Anderson, as is Liberty on his $20 coin. Saint Gaudens’s son wrote: “Little or no resemblance can be traced to any model, since he was always quick to reject the least taint of what he called ‘personality’ in such instances” (qtd. in Hagans 81). Picture taken 12 March 2011 (K. Skinazi)

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effectiveness] betrays the artificiality of physiognomic ‘science’ that should have made Clark’s Irishness or Anderson’s blackness palpable in the lines of the artworks they helped to create” (241). As Marion makes clear, passing, as an “American Girl” or simply an American (white) girl, depends heavily on illusions: both the illusion that the girl outside the category is within it, but also the illusion that American girlhood was somehow a special category to begin with, a category available only to a select few, into which one could only be born. The media maintained that the illusion of exceptionality was reality and tried to situate contemporary models within it. At the same time, the media admitted that models had once failed to fit the projected images, and still failed, except in America. A 1905 New York Times article offers the headline: “Evolution of the New York Artist’s Model.” Upholding the image of the clean-cut white American Girl, this article argues that the American women who modeled were now precisely what they represented. “Better Class of Young Women Find Employment in the Studios than in Former Times—the More Intelligent They Are the More Work for Them—What Artists Say” reads the description (“Evolution” 7). One artist interviewed in the article happily reports that the models consist of “a nice class of girls nowadays” (as opposed to “the most commonplace, ignorant women” who had worked in the field previously). The artist goes on to say that these girls come from “good schools” and their intelligence is a great help to the artists. A second artist adds, “I have women posing for me who belong to some of New York’s best families.” A third artist notes that this ideal class of models is only to be found inside national borders. “The best class of models in the world,” Carroll Beckwith is quoted as saying, “are the American girls. The models abroad are cheaper, but they cannot be compared with our girls here, who are so bright and interesting. Above all, they are clean, which is an almost unheard-of quality among models on the other side” (“Evolution” 7).24

Charles Dana Gibson’s “With Life’s 4th of July Compliments to the American Girl.” This picture, published the same year as his “Salons of New York,” with its stereotypical Irish (as well as African American, Dutch, and Jewish) tableaux, uses the Irish American model Minnie Clark to portray the “American Girl.” Life, 1892, 406–7

As Marion is based on Sara Bosse, the half-Chinese, half-white Canadian woman who posed for artists who used parts of their models to create composite figures in their art, she falls into the same category as Minnie Clark and Hettie Anderson—a category of women whose racial differences were massaged into a uniform whiteness. But in Marion, a novel, the massaging of difference—the “passing” of this “passing narrative”—is quite complex. It takes place though the

A page from the New York Times article “Evolution of the New York Artist’s Model.” 2 April 1905

unwillingness of Sara Bosse to reveal her racial background, the manipulation of the artists who used their models as composite parts, the narrative silence of Winnifred Eaton on her character’s background, and the whitewashed illustrations of Henry Hutt. The dynamic symbiosis of these forces allow us to recognize, clearly, the malleability of the human body.

 A pioneer in Asian American fiction, Eaton found at least one early follower of her metaphorical use of modeling to deliberate on the racially ambiguous body: H.T. Tsiang, a Chinese-born American writer

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of political fiction. In his 1937 novel, And China Has Hands, Pearl, the biracial (black-Chinese) heroine, reluctantly becomes an artist’s model, like Marion. Her hesitation about making a living this way is the result of race-shame: “Not only was her own reputation but that of her race involved” (Tsiang 29). Yet Tsiang does not show the white artists as invested in the meaning of Pearl’s body: they “seemed more interested in what was going on on the canvas than in looking at her,” which disappoints Pearl, who spends much of her energy thinking about what people see when they see her (30). Furthermore, contrary to her expectations, she finds that the artists do not require her to take off her clothing. Instead, she is Orientalized, as Marion is, dressed up to play her part for art: “Pearl Chang was urged and begged by the school, for they earnestly desired a Chinese girl. So, finally, it was agreed that she just sit in an embroidered Chinese costume, and all other things would be as usual” (34). This use of her seems unproblematic to Pearl, who herself is unacquainted with and fascinated by all things Chinese—“So she posed” (34). Instead of scrutiny by white artists, as occurs in Marion, Tsiang has the Chinese community perform this task. Despite her racial makeup, Pearl is an ethnic voyeur. In fact, her arrival in Chinatown seems to be much like Edith Eaton’s must have been years earlier. Like Edith, she is racially both Chinese and something else (Edith Eaton was also white; Pearl is also black). Both arrive from afar (Edith from the North, Pearl from the South). Pearl insinuates herself into a community of her Chinese “countrymen” (Tsiang 29), although her country of birth is actually the United States (Edith’s is England), as she is curious about what “real” Chinese people look like and what they do (as Ferens correctly asserts, Edith, like her sister Winnifred, was “involved in the production of … ethnographic knowledge for popular consumption” and knew the Chinatown

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ghettos “into which she ventured as a teacher and sympathetic writer, though not as a resident”[Ferens 1–2, my emphasis]). Even among the Chinese people, Pearl has a hard time (as no doubt did Edith) abandoning stereotypes of Chinese people derived from movies, literature, and general (racist) American culture. In considering the racially ambiguous body in movement, Tsiang sets up a scenario for Pearl similar to Eaton’s for Marion. Marion crosses the Canadian-American border, and in And China Has Hands, Pearl crosses another kind of border—the Mason-Dixon Line—to pass, in this case, as wholly Chinese. The narrator draws the reader in to inspect Pearl, initially writing, “Pearl Chang was every inch a Chinese.” The next line tells us: “The trouble, it seemed to her, was that she had curly hair. When she went out, she had to use a large hat to cover the hair up.” And the “blackness” that is being added to her “every inch a Chinese” does not stop there. The narrator notes the “second trouble,” which is that “she had heavy lips. She had to use lipstick and dark powder to make them look smaller.” Finally, we learn that Pearl cannot really pass as wholly Chinese—at least not in the South, where she is known, and where the color line exists to segregate black from white: “In spite of her skillful makeup she had frequently met the same persecution as other Negresses had met. So Pearl Chang packed up and came to New York City” (Tsiang 33).25 Ultimately, however, Pearl’s non-Chinese characteristics become apparent to the Chinese of New York, though not the whites. This difference is essential: the main character, Wong Wan-Lee, itemizes her body parts in his mind as their sexual encounter rapidly progresses toward inevitability, and his focus is on that which is not Chinese: Wong Wan-Lee looked at Pearl Chang. Pearl Chang’s nose was like an almond seed. Pearl Chang’s eyes were like an autumn stream.

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Pearl Chang’s face was like a watermelon seed. But Pearl Chang’s mouth was not like a little cherry, and she had curly hair. (Tsiang 77) Without simile or poetry, we see the significance of Pearl’s like-butnot-likeness when she goes to work for a Chinese restaurant and her hat is removed: “the [Chinese] owner, with an icy face, said to her, ‘Look at your hair! Curly hair! Look at your lips! Heavy lips! Are you a Chinese?’” (102). Pearl tries to defend herself, naming her Chinese father and pointing out that she speaks Chinese, but the owner notes the missing parent in her genealogy (missing just as Nora and Marion’s mother is essentially missing from theirs): “‘What is your mother?’” and when Pearl protests her mother is dead, the owner repeats,“‘What was she?’” and then, punnily, “Your mother!” (voicing a Chinese slur as well as pinpointing the problem on her family map) (102). When she is fired from the Chinese restaurant, Pearl goes to work for a Chinese cafeteria “because the owner thought that so long as Pearl Chang looked like a Chinese, the Americans would not know whether she was genuine or not” (104).

 The secrets of racial ambiguity, generally cast as tales of “passing,” follow two main lines of descent. In the first, we find the swarthy character who, at the story’s sigh-of-relief conclusion, is revealed to be not other-than-white. The Sheik in the 1921 film The Sheik (played by Italian actor Rudolph Valentino, who was also cast as an Indian prince in The Young Rajah the following year) is dark enough to pass as an Arab and light enough to be revealed, at the film’s close, as the son of an English father and Spanish mother. This revelation is sufficient to redeem Diana, an English girl in white dress and parasol who

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has been kidnapped by, raped by, and forcibly married to the Sheik, causing her to believe that she can never show her face in the civilized world again. In the second, more common tale of “passing,” we find the child of a less-acceptable mixed parentage: the “tragic mulatto” who is depicted variously as sympathetic or opportunistic. According to Kang, racial passing: “plays a foundational role within the African American canon, given its emergence and frequency in such pivotal works as Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (published in 1857, one of the earliest products of the novelistic tradition alongside William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig), Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (an effort that combines a template of chivalric romance with the ‘tragic mulatta’ motif), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man … and Nella Larsen’s Passing” (Kang 431). Indeed, the story of racial passing is fantasized about continually in American fiction, even outside the African American canon. Well-known examples are the mid-nineteenth-century bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which George and Cassy escape enslavement in Spanish garb; Band of Angels, the mid-twentieth-century novel by double Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren, in which Amantha Starr can be a content student of Oberlin college only as long as she is ignorant of her racial reality; and into the twenty-first century, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, with its complicated substitution of a minority religion for a minority race. (All these books have also been made into movies, with their own fraught histories.) Another version of the second passing narrative consists of the powerful white man who has been manipulating innocent victims and then turns out not to be a white man at all—a flipside of the first version. A classic example of this manifestation of racist anxiety is the 1927 film Old San Francisco, featuring the “cruel, mysterious, crafty”

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character Chris Buckwell, who “had grafted his way from an unknown origin to power.” He is a threat to the heroine, Dolores Vasquez, whose ancestral home and virginity he is determined to seize. Of course, the viewers know something that Dolores does not: that Chris Buckwell is really Chinese. We know this fact because, when he is alone, Buckwell opens a secret door, descends into a secret basement, puts on a secret Chinese cap, and bows before a secret statue. Soon he is wearing a Chinese silk robe, holding incense, and kneeling. The man is neither white, nor a Christian! Near the end of the film, the truth is revealed. With the sound and sight of “Christian bells” and a light shining out of a statue of Christ, Buckwell pulls his cape over his face, and the intertitle reads, “In the awful light of an outraged, wrathful, Christian God, the heathen soul of the Mongol stood revealed.” Buckwell escapes, and the next intertitle informs us: “When Chris Buckwell sought solace of his ancestral gods, he knew the eyes of Dolores had penetrated his disguise and guessed his secret.” Indeed, later, Dolores tells her beau: “In a flash that hideous Buckwell revealed himself— and in his soul he knew that I knew—he is a Mongolian!”



The evil Chris Buckwell revealing his secret Chinese self to the audience in the film Old San Francisco.

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Passing, as a concept, always plays on the sharp divide between reinforcement and repudiation of racist ideology. The chronological progression of this idea, however, suggests a shift in its employment: in texts dealing with slavery, passing is often depicted as positive, necessary, and helpful. In stories that take place in the twentieth century or later, the same act is more often written as a race betrayal for comfort and money, or else as a validation of racist fears. Marion confounds these traditions altogether. Like its predecessors and contemporaries, Marion tells the story of a woman who could pass as at least two races because she was two races. But what sets Marion apart is that the narrative does not identify the race secret. Without knowing the historical person on whom Marion was based, we might never access the truth of her lineage. There is no articulation of the secretiveness of Marion’s undisclosed mixed-race identity and therefore no need for the light of Christ to illuminate Marion’s true self. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Johnson identifies the crux of his text in the first lines of his narrator’s autobiography with the words, “I know in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life” (4). As in Old San Francisco, that his race (or rather, his mother’s) is a secret from his peers (but not from the readers) is essential to his story. Similarly, in Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare’s secret, that she is the daughter of a black woman, drives the plot of the novel. Although she is also the daughter of the “pastywhite” janitor Bob Kendry, her secret is her blackness (Larsen 144). Known to her black friends but not her white ones, this secret controls her actions, as well as the actions of those around her. When her bigoted white husband, for example, maligns blacks to black Irene Redfield, Irene feels she cannot defend her own race for fear “that that defence might in some infinitesimal degree lead the way to final discovery of her [Clare’s] secret” (182). Instead of a race secret that the

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reader is aware of and anticipates the consequences of, or one that the reader discovers along with the characters, to his or her shock, Eaton offers a race secret that is never revealed. She draws attention to Marion’s difference without ever directly attributing a racial component to these issues, giving readers the option of using whiteness as the racial default.26 Eaton’s double-play is a disconcerting narrative technique: as readers recreate an author’s characters in their minds, few are accustomed to casting them without colour or ethnicity. We expect to be given identifying characteristics, racial markers, histories, or nationalities. Eaton, through the anonymity of authorship and race in Marion, either frees or encumbers readers by asking them to become participants in the construction and categorization of her characters. Why is this narration of race (or rather, lack thereof) so significant? In a 2010 Modern Fiction Studies article, Stephen Sohn, Paul Lai, and Donald Goellnicht write about the history of modern Asian American fiction and the potential impact of early Asian American fiction: “Focusing on the fiction of earlier historical moments might offer alternative insights into the racialization of Asians in America, as well as the kinds of narratives imaginable within differing configurations of the racial state” (6). Eaton’s refusal to identify the race(s) of the Ascoughs while simultaneously highlighting the way others scrutinize them offers insights into the racialization of Asians in America at the turn of the twentieth century. She suggests it was both violent—a kind of dismemberment, a tearing asunder of the parts from the whole, with each part subject to dissection and examination—and artistic—as the individuals are held up in different lights, against different backgrounds, in different costumes and contexts, to best reveal their essences. In Marion, racialization is not narratively bound to the body but to the body’s observer. In the context of early Asian American literature,

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Marion’s engagement with the raced body is original, but not entirely outside the discourse. Looking at early Asian American literature, David Palumbo-Liu, in his wide-ranging, persuasive book Asian/ American, argues that “Asian/American narratives refuse to jettison the corporeal in order to set forth a story of a purely disembodied psychic adjustment to modern America” since “each remains attached to the materiality of the body and its inscription in the worldly” (9). Yet unlike later fiction, early Asian American literature seemed to have been flexible in its relationship to the corporeal, suggesting that race— its significance, its use, its function in the text—relied more heavily on an interactive engagement between writer and reader, as in Marion. Although he does not examine Marion, Palumbo-Liu cites Toshio Mori’s 1939 story “Japanese Hamlet” as an example of an early Asian American text bearing a complicated relationship between the unnarrated but raced body of the character and its observer. In Mori’s story, the race (its corporeal aspect) of the main character is named (he is, after all, the Japanese Hamlet) and yet determining the role of that race becomes the work of the reader. “Tom has two listeners,” writes Palumbo-Liu, “the narrator and, indirectly, the reader” (127). Tom desperately desires a career on the stage, but, Palumbo-Liu writes, “in a world of racial difference, to be Hamlet, Tom cannot be Japanese; to be Japanese, Tom cannot be Hamlet” (126). The narrator feels he cannot encourage Tom in his desire to act in Shakespeare’s play, though he does not state the “obvious” reason, “for a recognition of racism would implicate him as well,” argues Palumbo-Liu, which “in turn,” he says, “forces the reader to declare his allegiance” (128). While Palumbo-Liu’s argument is believable, it is not the only possible interpretation and a text like Marion, with its repeated discussions of external evaluations of the body, helps us consider why. Unlike Marion, “Japanese Hamlet” does not describe the body of Tom Fukunaga as inspected by his peers. We certainly experience the dis-

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comfort that the narrator experiences in not being able to encourage Tom to play Hamlet but, for all we know, the issue at stake is not Tom’s race but his talent. Perhaps he has none. It is also possible that Mori is making a statement that is more about the difficulty of breaking into acting in general than the difficulty of breaking into acting as a Japanese man. Finally, if Palumbo-Liu is insisting upon the complicity of the audience, it must be recognized that he is part of this complicit audience. The narrator, after all, has no name, no personal history, no recorded details except a relationship with Tom Fukunaga, yet Palumbo-Liu writes that Tom is censored by both the American hegemony as well as “the Japanese Americans themselves (the narrator, Tom’s parents and relatives)” (Palumbo-Liu 129). In other words, Palumbo-Liu assumes that the narrator is Japanese American, though he may in fact be white or black or Chickasaw. Added to the negotiation of racial significance between the narrator and Tom, then, is the one between the reader and the narrator. Through Palumbo-Liu’s interpretation, then, we are able to see “Japanese Hamlet” as a work that subtly delegates the determination of race and its attendant significance to the readers, something that Marion, even earlier, also does. These shifts of burden suggest the difficulty of narrating race that might have driven Mori and Eaton to find creative solutions and that continue to inspire Asian American writers today. Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey (1987) features a writer who chooses the forum of a play rather than a novel precisely to evade the narrated racination of his characters, who would instead take on the race of the actors who played them (34). Describing the seeming necessity of novelistic racination, Tripmaster’s Monkey asks frankly of his own narrative at the conclusion of the first chapter of the book, “Does he announce now that the author is—Chinese? Or, rather, Chinese-American? And be forced into autobiographical confession. Stop the music—I have to butt in

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and introduce myself and my race” (34). Eaton’s text, although it lacks the complexity of Kingston’s negotiation of identity (through multiple literatures, histories, relationships, and narrative devices), does what the Monkey wants to do but Kingston cannot: refrain from “butt[ing] in” and announcing her narrator-protagonist’s race. Readers of Marion take on the task of racially categorizing the character, becoming analogous to the artists looking over the model, portraying her body, and creating a composite of her—as the American Girlhood artists did with models of various races and ethnicities. If they refuse to participate, readers are forced into the uncomfortable position of trying to imagine a Marion who remains forever illegible as a character—perhaps even “inscrutable,” a term so often applied to Asians at the time. Eaton frequently dealt with the idea of the “inscrutable Asian” in her work. In a number of her Japanese novels, she used relations between white and Asian characters to break down stereotypes such as the “inscrutable” Asian. In Miss Numè of Japan (1899), for example, Orito is first depicted as wearing an “impassive look that rendered [his face] almost startling in its inscrutableness” (W. Eaton [Watanna], Miss Numè 6). As the white heroine and readers become familiar with Orito, however, there is a quick succession of phrases that dismantle his inscrutability: “in his gentle, undisguised way, he did not attempt, even from the beginning, to hide from her the fact that he admired her so intensely”; his “face fell. He looked at her so dejectedly”; “his face was eloquent with its earnestness”; he “look[s] puzzled”; “look[s] thoughtfully”; looks “with grave, attentive eyes”; and speaks with “piercing passion in his voice” (16, 17, 21, 25, 30, 114, 36). In Marion, we see a shift in approach, and this shift is precisely what makes this novel different from both Orientalism and its traditional dismantling. In Marion, Eaton uses inscrutability as a strategy. No longer a mask that hides, it

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is a mask that reveals, and what it exposes is the observer’s obsession with classification. In Eaton’s time, determining race had both legal and cultural consequences. In The Chinatown Trunk Mystery, Mary Ting Yi Liu relates a number of stories told in the aftermath of the 1909 murder of Elsie Sigal, a white girl in New York, by, allegedly, a Chinese man named Leon Ling, which show the public’s fascination with racial determination. According to Liu, Chinese and Japanese men were picked up by the police all over the country in the hunt for Leon Ling, but so was a Nicaraguan colonel traveling to New Orleans and a white American traveling to St. Louis, both of whom were thought to “resemble an Oriental” and were intensely scrutinized before being released (Liu 193, 194). In Virginia, a caller “informed Alexandria police that a stranger ‘with short hair and wearing a black sack suit, in white shirt, and a flat brim white straw hat had applied at his house for food, and in excellent English stated that he wanted to find the nearest point where he could board a Chesapeake and Ohio train for the West”; the report goes on to say that “‘at first glance he did not realize that the man was a Chinaman, but on closer scrutiny, he became convinced that he was of that nationality” (193). Liu explains, “Racial identification, equally dependent upon speech, dress, etiquette, and mannerisms, could be easily thwarted by the person’s ability to render a passing cultural performance. If the mystery man was indeed a Chinaman, it would appear that his physically based racial markers were temporarily effaced by his American dress and ability to speak fluent English and affect an American persona” (193). In each story Liu presents, the man in question is scrutinized before he is declared to be white or Chinese. Some seventeen years after the Elsie Segal murder, Robert E. Park, an eminent sociologist and one of the founders of the Chicago School

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of sociology, published “Behind Our Masks,” an essay that PalumboLiu argues uses the face “as the site of racial negotiations and the transformation of racial identity” (Palumbo-Liu 87). As in Liu’s stories, Park’s identification of racial traits and distinctions rely on “differences of dress, of manner, of deportment and by characteristic expressions of the face” (Park 247). Palumbo-Liu quotes Park on his encounter with a Japanese American woman, using italics to highlight the method of detection and inspection inherent in Park’s act of reading race on the body: “I found myself watching her expectantly for some slight accent, some gesture, or intonation that would betray her racial origin. When I was not able, by the slightest expression, to detect the oriental mentality behind the oriental mask, I was still not able to escape the impression that I was listening to an American woman in Japanese disguise” (Park 248 qtd. in Palumbo-Liu 89, Palumbo-Liu’s emphasis). Park here is a master investigator, looking for clues to help him categorize the woman, even as he scrutinizes her (apparently contradictory) physical and cultural features. The Japanese American woman’s own double-consciousness (assuming she has one) is not the issue at stake; the participation of the viewer in an act of identity determination is. Racial formation arises, it would seem, from a silent conversation between the viewed and the viewer, with context playing as large a role as genes. We can imagine, then, how Marion’s chosen professions are particularly appropriate to signify the fluidity of racial identity. Marion is an actress playing dictated but diverse roles; Marion is a canvas who is at once full and blank. The artist creates, but Marion does not become an artist; instead, she becomes something only at the hands of artists. Marion’s earliest job is acting. Acting is not unlike modeling, the career she will later embark on. It enables the performer to inhabit

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roles for an audience without revealing her “true” identity. As an actress, Marion is a kind of moving model who assumes a variety of characters and poses that fuel the fantasies of the viewers, as she does in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Fittingly, Marion is cast as both the rich, white Marie St. Clare, the cruel slave mistress, and the octoroon Cassy, the sex slave of Legree and the owners that preceded him. Marion prefers “being” Marie St. Clare rather than Cassy.“To my joy,” she says,“I wore a gold wig and a lace tea-gown” (Marion 47). She is convinced that Reggie, the British aristocrat who begins to woo her the night he watches her perform in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is enamoured with this golden-haired misrepresentation of her. As for Cassy, Marion admires her for her strength but does not realize that it is Cassy’s fate, more than Marie’s, that foreshadows her own. Convinced by the man she loves that marriage would be impossible, though they could live as though they were man and wife, Cassy turns away from her pious upbringing to become a concubine who is later abandoned, along with her children, by the white man who is in fact her owner. Cassy spends years both controlled by her masters but also using the power of her sexuality to control these masters through their lust. Finally, pale-skinned, she is able to pass as a Creole Spanish woman in order to escape enslavement and cross the border to freedom in Montreal. Similarly, Marion is implicitly asked by Reggie to be his mistress, suffers a series of unwanted sexual advancements and physical abuses, and uses her exotic looks to survive (126). Ultimately, like Cassy, she crosses the Canadian-American border, though in this case south from Montreal. In so doing, she escapes the knowledge of her family that her fellow Montrealers have, knowledge about her “foreign” background that the Americans can only conjecture. Marion’s role in Uncle Tom’s Cabin allows Reggie to indulge in the artifice of the spectacle to “thwart recognition of … its status as a

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substitution for the real” (Ward 381). Reggie recognizes that Marion is in costume as golden-haired Marie St. Clare, but he uses this image to mitigate the reality of a woman who is more like the biracial enslaved woman, Cassy. We see his ambivalence emerge repeatedly through the text. When Marion first takes Reggie to her house, he sees her family’s poverty and profusion, as well as, presumably, colour. After showing him around, Marion says, “Just then in came mama and Ada, and feeling awfully embarrassed and confused, I had to introduce him” (Marion 59). To Marion’s relief, her mother is soon replaced by her father, a white Englishman from an aristocratic family. But her father’s presence is not enough. As Reggie continues to date Marion, he tells her that his father will be very unhappy about their union. When Reggie’s proposal does come, it is on condition that his father agrees to the marriage. But what would “the governor” think of a fiancée who looked like a “little Indian girl,” as she is described by one of the artists (73)? When Reggie continues to delay telling his parents about their engagement, Marion interprets the setback as a class issue. Reggie says: “I’ve been trying to break it to them gradually about our engagement. I told them I knew very well a girl who was the granddaughter of Squire Ascough of Macclessfield, but I haven’t had the nerve yet to tell them—to—er—” I knew what he meant. He hadn’t told them about us here, how poor we were, of our large family, and how we all had to work. (77) Eaton has Marion fill in Reggie’s blank in a particular way for readers, telling us that class alone separates Marion from her lover’s family. This class assumption, however, is never confirmed, the ellipsis never filled

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in. In fact, the assumption, though it is repeated throughout the novel, makes little sense. Not only does Reggie allude to the respectability of the Ascough name and point out that she’s the granddaughter of a squire, but when Marion accuses Reggie of thinking her family is not good enough for his, his response again shows that the family, at least on Marion’s father’s side, is quite suitable for his own: “I’ve always said your father was a gentleman” (80). Instead, the blank space that indicates what he dare not say is likely and logically occupied by the problem of the Ascough mother. After all, Nora announces in Me: “the greatness of my father’s people had been a sort of fairy-story with us all, and we knew that it was his marriage with mama that had cut him off from his kindred” (W. Eaton, Me 26). In both Me and Marion, there is a textual silence surrounding Nora and Marion’s mother and her “foreign” background, and it is so striking that Linda Trinh Moser says she finds it difficult to read Me as autobiographical (Moser 358). Argues Moser: “After devoting attention to describing her father’s British ancestors, the refusal to disclose her mother’s racial background (especially after signalling its importance) creates a narrative gap” (365). Reggie’s focus on the Ascough father at the expense of the Ascough mother also creates a narrative gap—especially glaring considering the treatment of the Ascough children is said to be, on the opening page of the book, a result of their “foreign” mother. For all that it is unnamed and mysterious, the foreign heredity that marks Marion and her sisters appears to be an important element in their relationships with men throughout their lives. For white characters, the “foreign” or “exotic” element becomes conflated with sexual permissibility in this story and others by the Eatons, as was typical in the era of Orientalism. When Reggie suggests cohabitation with Marion, her (foreign) mother’s potential resistance to such an impropriety is dismissed when he laughs and says, “Your mother is a joke”

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(Marion 109). Reggie says this in the context of a discussion of Marion’s mother’s claims that Marion was the most beautiful baby in England, a statement that is humorous only if it is assumed, as it is by him, that her racial difference would make such a designation ridiculous. Eaton does not detail any relations between “Ada” and men in Marion, but in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Ada’s real-life counterpart, Edith Eaton, tells of a similar reception to her raced body: “When it begins to be whispered about the place that I am not all white, some of the ‘sporty’ people seek my acquaintance.” One man frankly tells her: “I would like to know you. You look such a nice little body … I will tell you all about the sweet little Chinese girls I met when we were at Hong Kong. They’re not so shy!” (E. Eaton [Far], “Leaves” 226). In Marion, men repeatedly suggest that Marion is a “little pony” and is “kissable” rather than beautiful (Marion 190). This rhetoric pegs Marion as the kind of girl that men want, but not for marriage. Instead, Reggie says Marion could be his “wife in every way but the silly ceremony” (Marion 126). As before, Eaton has Marion interpret Reggie’s statement for readers along socioeconomic lines: “I was guilty of no fault, save that of poverty. I knew that had I been possessed of those things that Reggie prized so much, never would he have insulted me like this” (126). But Marion, who plainly conceals as much as she discloses about her family, can hardly be relied upon for accurate interpretations of statements about them. What were “those things”? Why would marrying a woman who was not rich make a “mess” of his career, make his father unable to forgive him, and “ruin” his future? And, though discussion of Marion’s explicit difference is avoided once the narrative is set in the United States, readers still encounter another suitor, Jimmy, whose family also rejects Marion, causing him to propose to Marion they “get married on the Q.T.” (196). Marion turns

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down Jimmy after receiving a letter from Jimmy’s mother telling her that if she married Jimmy, “the family would never forgive him and that such a disgrace would break all of their hearts, besides ruining him” (196). Eaton offers Marion’s explanations along the lines of class and money to justify her inability to marry these men, but Reggie’s words (and silences), along with Jimmy’s mother’s letter, tell a different story. There is something more than a large bank account preventing these marriages from occurring (Dear Reader, do you know what it is?).

 Although their exotic appearances keep them from the inner sanctum of respectability, both Nora and Marion cannot help but take pleasure in their desirability. Nora, for example, makes much of the loveliness of her hair. Leaving Canada for the first time, she meets an American girl who tells her, “‘I think you’ve got the prettiest hair of any girl I ever knew,’” and Nora thinks to herself, “My hair did look attractive” (W. Eaton, Me 14). Later, she says that “every one had switches and rolls and rats galore—every one except me. I had a lot of hair of my own. It came far down below my waist, and was pure black in color” (118). Using nationality as a placeholder for race, as Marion does, Nora explains the difference: “Canadian girls all have good heads of hair. I never saw an American girl with more than a handful” (118). And Marion, in the very first chapter of Marion, overhears her appearance being flatteringly discussed between a francophone and an anglophone in Montreal, both of whom clearly look down on her large and part-foreign family, and she feels “exhilarated and utterly charmed” (Marion 3). She turns to the mirror and “gazed long and eagerly at the face I had often heard Monsieur Thebeau say was ‘très

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jolie,’ which French words I now learned must mean: ‘Pretty—quite remarkably pretty!’ as had said that Englishman in the store” (3). Neither Nora nor Marion, however, seems wholly convinced of such atypical prettiness. Nora eyes the white people around her with envy—and with internalized racism, which most readers today cannot miss. “I myself was dark and foreign looking, but the blond type I adored,” she states. “In all my most fanciful imaginings and dreams,” she adds wistfully, “I had always been golden-haired and blue-eyed” (W. Eaton, Me 41). Similarly, Marion idolizes the Anglo-Saxon types, lamenting, even as she stares into the mirror with the men’s compliments ringing in her ears, “if only my hair were gold!” (Marion 3). Of a French beau she has early on, she says, “I secretly wished that he was blond. I did prefer the English type” (20). She describes Bonnat, the man she ultimately marries, by virtue of his physical features: “[His hair] was fair, and the eyes that looked at me questioningly were blue,” she moons, and “he looks like a young viking” (261). Eaton clearly remained ambivalent about “exotic” attractiveness, or what she called “charm” versus traditional (white) “beauty.” In an article about East and West, she claims that Anglo-Saxon beauty is superior: “One thing Western women have, which they can never teach the East. It is beauty—personal beauty. The Oriental woman is charming. But the Occidental woman—preeminently the AngloSaxon type—is beautiful” (qtd. in Birchall 139). Still, the “Oriental” woman’s charms appeal to the Anglo-Saxon men in most of Eaton’s other books: Miss Numè of Japan, A Japanese Nightingale, The Wooing of Wisteria, The Love of Azalea, Tama, Miss Spring Morning, and SunnySan. And the “foreign” quality possessed by Nora and Marion helps them attract men—not only men who refuse to marry them, but also those who are interested in doing so. In Marion, Benevenuto, a foreigner himself, is willing to marry Marion. He sees Marion’s exotic

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and ambiguous appearance as a reflection of himself: “I like-a you, Miss Marion. You look like my countrywomen” (186).“Like-a” quickly turns to “love-a” as Benevenuto declares, repeating the influence of her familiar form on his eyes and emotions, “Marion, I have love-a you from the first day I have look at you. You look-a like my countrywomen, Marion. We will getta married” (193). But Marion does not marry Benevenuto, for whom marriage to her would be complementary, as she appears to him as a physical match. Nor does she does she marry Jimmy or Reggie, for whom marriage to her is detrimental, as she appears to them (and their families) as a potential barrier to their success. She marries the man who loves her neither because of nor in spite of her appearance. The man she marries calls her a “heathen” and laughs with delight at the thought of it—suggesting that by the book’s close she is not willing to play the mirror or the blank canvas, that she will take acceptance only on her own terms (263). This acceptance, however, comes only at the very end of the text. Before Marion can come to accept her own “heathenism,” she must encounter many more projections of fantasy on her body. Working with artists, Marion is constantly subject to the gaze of others, who search for clues to her race instead of creating art. One artist says, “Your papa’s face—it is a typical northern one—such as we see plenty in Scandinavia,” and then, “It is typical, while you—.” Here he breaks off to smile at Marion, examining her closely. He says, “‘You look like one little Indian girl that I meet when I live in the North. Her father, the people told me, was one big rich railway man of Canada, but he did not know that pretty little Indian girl, she was his daughter.’ He rubbed his hands, and nodded his head musingly, as he studied me,” Marion adds (73). Under the gaze of the artist, Marion, with her English father and foreign mother, is turned into a half-breed Indian, a figure whose fate Eaton takes up passionately in her later novel, His

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Marion as gypsy. Marion, between pages 200 and 201

Royal Nibs (1925). The half-breed Indian in His Royal Nibs is the product of the rich white father who has exploited an Indian woman for his sexual pleasure and then deserted her (just as the tragic mulatta in slave narratives is often the product of the white master who has raped the black woman he enslaves, and the purple-eyed half-caste is the product of the temporary marriage the white man has pursued with the Japanese woman in the Orientalist books of the day). As an artist’s model, Marion is first costumed in a Spanish scarf as the alluring femme fatale Carmen and again later as a gypsy, and we are told in Me that she is used as a model for an Oriental Studies class.

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Even before she strips to nothing—which she eventually does, once— Marion primarily wears costumes that turn her into figures that are eroticized, as Marion herself is. That she is made to wear “Oriental” costumes is both suggestive and unsurprising: since we know that Marion was based on a woman of mixed heritage, we can understand why she would be chosen for such modeling jobs. On the other hand, since Orientalism was all the rage, we can imagine that any model, actress, or dancer with an appearance that could in any way accommodate the style would have been fitted into it. One of the great dancers known for her vaudeville Oriental productions was Ruth St. Denis (1877–1968), to whom Eaton seems to be alluding with the enigmatic character Rose St. Denis, a colleague who gives Marion her introduction to the world of modeling. Ruth St. Denis was not French, despite her name. (Marion’s Rose, however, is, an alteration that allows Eaton to suggest a cultural connection between the “young French-Canadian girl,” as Hearst’s described Montreal-born Marion, and Rose St. Denis). In fact, St. Denis was born Ruthie Dennis into a family she describes as being “so near the pioneer stages of our American life” (St. Denis 2). St. Denis was discovered at a young age by Stanford White, architect of, among other famous sites, the Washington Square Arch in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She was then directed to his partner, James Lawrence Breese: “Breese asked me to come to his studio on West Sixteenth Street … [where he] inquired in a charming, caressing voice if I would pose in the nude. He made it all very artistic and plausible” (St. Denis 24–5). According to Dunlop, dozens of such photographs were made and copied, and White then passed these photographs around to his friends for private viewings (Dunlop 157). The historical St. Denis did not, however, remain a model for men’s pleasure, unlike her fictional counterpart. In 1898, Ruth St. Denis obtained a part in Zaza, a

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play by David Belasco about a music hall singer and actress.27 This auspicious beginning led to St. Denis becoming a famous dancer, and the founder of Adelphi University’s dance program in 1938, one of the first dance departments in the United States.

Ruth St. Denis in The Dance-Play, O-Mika, “Japanese Flower Hat Dance” (1913). O-Mika was based on Lafcadio Hearn’s “A Legend of Fugen-Bosatsu.” Ruth St. Denis and her husband opened “the best known and most influential dance school founded in Los Angeles” in 1915 and were known for their “oriental” productions such as Incense, The Cobras, Nautch, Yogi, and Radha (McLean 134). White Studio photographers; printed in Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer & Prophet, Being a History of Her Cycle of Oriental Dances by Ted Shawn, 1920, xxvi. Courtesy Princeton University Rare Books and Special Collections

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In Marion, Rose St. Denis is first mentioned as a model for the hands of the composite figure of Senator Chase’s wife, which was constructed, like the lily-white high-class American Girls, using as models African Americans, Irish women, the working class, and other persons who would have been excluded from the categories they represented (Marion 146). This alienation of parts from the whole, or workers from the product, is held up as the model’s true potential. One artist explains, “a model can make a fair living, isn’t that so, Miss St. Denis?” and then adds, “A perfect nude is not so easy as people seem to think … we are forced to use one model for the figure, another for the legs, another for the bust—and so on, before we get a perfect figure, and when we get through, as you may guess, it’s a patchwork affair at best” (151).28 Rose takes Marion under her wing and promises her new protégée, “Soon you will get ze work—especially eef you pose in ze nude” (153). This moment forces Marion to recognize her own objectification as well as bringing her to the brink of Dreiser’s “cosmopolitan standard of virtue.” Her body, her image—are not her own. They belong to her viewers. On a stage or a pedestal, Marion stands revealed to her spectators. Although they cannot determine her racial heritage, they study her intensely, leaving her feeling exposed and vulnerable. Her exposure, which is quite literal when she models nude, is highlighted by Hutt’s illustration: the picture of Marion posing for a crowd shows a sea of faces turned up toward her, allowing readers to see the scrutiny she is subjected to as well as the same combination of shame and sexual prowess that she derives from being racially ambiguous. Illustrations such as these have an interesting effect on the reader. Relationships between image and text have been the subject of much academic discourse with the recent popularity of graphic novels, although, of course, similar issues abounded in illustrated novels in

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Marion ends her nude posing for the crowd. Marion, between pages 220 and 221

previous centuries. In “Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray,” Judith L. Fisher divides nineteenthcentury book illustration into two periods, neatly split by the midcentury point. For the early part of the century, Fisher writes of the artists’ attempts to create “speaking” pictures, suggesting a dialogue between image and text; for the latter half, she writes that the image was increasingly subordinated to the text. “Once an illustration simply reinforces the text,” writes Fisher, “it can easily dwindle into mere decoration” (60). While it might be easy to regard Marion’s post-

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nineteenth-century illustrations as “mere decoration,” a dialogue between image and text necessarily emerges in Marion when we come to the question of race. Hutt’s illustrations of Marion show no indications of mixed race, his Marion appearing as nearly identical to his other idealized heroines. Thus we cannot help but find that the illustrator plays a role in erasing the racial heritage of the (narrated) model. The only racialized image Hutt provides depicts not Marion but her Italian suitor; the contrast between the slightly demoniclooking ethnic Benevenuto and the angelic-looking white Marion is evident (the illustration can be found between pages 194 and 195). If we allow the images to overshadow the text, Hutt’s white Marion becomes the readers’ Marion, and readers can forget Eaton’s references to Marion’s difference.29 Yet the very discussion of how artists created their images, which occurs throughout the text, makes it impossible for readers to take Hutt’s Marion at face value. When the text ends as a Jane Austen comedy might, with Marion wedding a white man and living happily ever after, the passing narrative reaches its final erasure of a non-white race (reminiscent of Johnson’s Ex-Coloured Man who, at the end of his tale, marries a white woman, has a fair, “golden-headed” child, and calls himself “an ordinarily successful white man who has made a little money” [Johnson 209, 211]). Marion tells us of Bonnat, “Somehow he made me think of my father, in coloring and the northern type of face” (261). Marion’s marriage to Bonnat, then, represents not only her victory in love but also in overcoming the racial barrier that had prevented earlier attempts at marriage. Having crossed the colour line by crossing the borderline away from her family, elided her mother in her verbal construction of her family, and then married a man who resembled her father, Marion succeeds in eliminating her mother and therefore her mother’s racial legacy from her family tree and thus

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“One Way to a Woman’s Heart.” Originally published by the Curtis Publishing Company, 1906. Included in The Henry Hutt Picture Book, 1908. The image was used for the cover of the 10 February 1906 issue (Valentine’s Day issue) of the Saturday Evening Post. This Hutt Girl resembles many others (including Marion).

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Marion and Reggie. Marion, between pages 52 and 53

herself. Like an artist of American Girlhood, rather than an artist’s model, Marion, in her final act of marriage, creates her first truly successful piece of art: a composite whitewashed family out of her father and husband. But rather than coming down, definitively, on a white identity for Marion, the text notes the specific church she gets married in—the “Little Church around the Corner.” At the centre of Bohemian New York, the Church of the Transfiguration, the official name of the “Little Church around the Corner,” has a long history of anti-racism; it was

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built in 1848 to “embrace all races and classes” and famously gave refuge to blacks during the 1863 Civil War draft riots. Hence, even at its conclusion, the book is still offering us a double-play on the racial identity of the character. Marion can be at once different, foreign, and exotic and simultaneously a typical, white, Anglo-Saxon woman— giving readers a real representation of the experience of being racially mixed. This fluid, ambiguous, and ambivalent representation is all the more powerful because Eaton’s contemporaries, even those, like her sister Edith, who wrote in support of a non-white race, ultimately recapitulated racist ideology. The secrets must out in the stories of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen because the whiteness of their characters was only a disguise for their essential blackness. In “The Persecution and Oppression of Me,” the writer who calls herself “A Half Chinese” tells a series of stories in which she holds her tongue as long as she can and then declares herself Chinese (although she is, of course, also white) in order to punish her listener (421). When a woman on a train wants to mill about and not be burdened by her daughter, she repeatedly leaves her daughter in the care of the author, without asking permission. As revenge—knowing the prejudices of the people of Massachusetts, the woman with the daughter included— the author announces that she is getting off the train to visit with Chinese friends, and then adds (to the horror of her interlocutor): “You know I’m Chinese myself ” (422). “Well, I am Chinese!” she announces to a teacher who has told her: “tho I despise and have the utmost contempt for the negroes, yet I hate worse the Chinese, who have such horrible ways” (423). Similarly, in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Edith tells a story in which her employer says, “I cannot reconcile myself to the thought that the Chinese are humans like ourselves,” and, like the teacher in “The Persecution,” a

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town clerk compares the Chinese to blacks, stating, “A Chinaman is, in my eyes, more repulsive than a nigger.” Edith relates, “A miserable, cowardly feeling keeps me silent. I am in a Middle West town. If I declare what I am, every person in the place will hear about it the next day” (E. Eaton [Far], “Leaves” 224, my emphasis). She does, finally, declare what she is. She tells him, boldly and blatantly, “The Chinese people may have no souls, no expression on their faces, be altogether beyond the pale of civilization, but whatever they are, I want you to understand that I am—I am a Chinese” (225). Such a confession would not be found on the pages of Marion. Although it is easy to claim that Winnifred Eaton’s resistance to confessing her family’s “race secret” was due to her fear of rejection and loss of success following such a revelation—and certainly some of her critics would agree with this logic—Eaton’s resistance is actually not to truth but to classification. By employing the model, a figure of scrutiny, projection, and liminality, a composite as well as the constituent material for a composite, Eaton involves readers in the experiences of both the figure and her examiners, ultimately offering a construction of racial ambiguity that is far more sophisticated and complex than the racial essentialism her sister and other contemporaries relied on.

Acknowledgments I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who have supported, fostered, and encouraged this project. Winnifred and Edith Eaton were first introduced to me in the 1990s by my dissertation director, Cyrus R.K. Patell, a trailblazer in his research and teaching. He was my White Rabbit. After that inviting glimpse into the world of the

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Eatons, I disappeared down the rabbit hole, where, behind the door of an online antique bookshop here, another there, I managed to find, buy, and read all the published work of the two sisters. By then, Annette White-Parks had written Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography and published Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings with Amy Ling; Diana Birchall (Winnifred’s granddaughter) was coming out with a biography of her grandmother, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton, which essentially bore the words read me to an Eaton-addict as myself; Dominika Ferens was writing Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances; and Jean Lee Cole was writing The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. As my delving into the Winnying world continued, I discovered that it was growing. Linda Trinh Moser republished Me: A Book of Remembrance, Eve Oishi republished Miss Numè of Japan, Samina Najmi republished The Heart of Hyacinth, Maureen Honey and Jean Lee Cole republished A Japanese Nightingale, and Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney (Winnifred’s granddaughter) published “A Half Caste” and Other Writings. Martha Cutter, Dominika Ferens, and Mary Chapman started digging up scores of writings by Edith Eaton from Canada, the US, and Jamaica, and many other scholars also began work on the works and lives of these fascinating sisters. Diana Birchall, I should add, not only wrote the definitive Winnifred Eaton biography but has also been an amazing across-the-continent colleague since the turn of the twenty-first century. She has provided encouragement, contacts, ideas, and pictures, as well as some wonderful, thought-provoking, back-and-forth correspondence. Dominika Ferens has sent me clippings; Jean Lee Cole has put up an excellent website for Winnifred Eaton scholars; and Mary Chapman has shared her findings and thoughts with me, and I look forward to seeing her

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anthologies of Edith Eaton’s Canadian and American writings come out. Overall, I have truly valued being a part of the Eaton scholarly community. The seed of my introduction comes from an article I published in MELUS, and I want to thank the readers of that manuscript, whom I now know to be Jean Lee Cole and Dominika Ferens, as well as MELUS’s always excellent, intellectually rigorous editor, Martha Cutter. I have also presented selections, in various forms, at the ala, mla, melus, and acql, and I want to thank my fellow panelists as well as the participants who asked great questions that helped me rethink Marion. I am grateful for financial, academic, and editorial help I received along the way. The nemla Summer Fellowship funded my trip to the Winnifred Eaton Reeve fonds in Calgary. Princeton University’s Writing Program is providing me with an academic home, as the University of Alberta’s English and Film Studies Department did previously. The University of Alberta also funded my visit to the New York Public Library to research the Jessie Tarbox Beals collection— an excellent photographic exploration of the life of a Canadian in Bohemian New York at the fin-de-siècle. Jonathan Crago at McGillQueen’s University Press, thankfully, saw the value in this publication; the reviewers offered insightful and interesting suggestions; Joan McGilvray reigned in my monstrous sentences; and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences supported the publication with the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program (aspp). To the Skinazis, the family who raised me, and the Ludvigs, the family who inherited me through marriage, I owe everything. Thank you for your love and sustenance. And to my boys—Elliot, my beloved partner for life and most critical and generous editor, and our three smart and beautiful children, Lucas, Jasper, and Morien—thank you

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for giving me the time, the energy, the encouragement, and the motivation to complete this project. Thank you for schlepping with me to Philadelphia so I could look at The Henry Hutt Picture Book, leaving me behind in New York so I could study the collections in the New York Public Library, and for taking care of yourselves when I disappeared to Calgary for what must have seemed like an eternity. Sometimes you look at the subject you’ve been studying for years and begin to see yourself in that subject. A hundred years and a few hundred biographical details separate me from Winnifred Eaton. Yet when I (like her, a Canadian in the United States) put one child on the bus to first grade, a second in his pre-school classroom, and a third down for a nap, and I try to steal a few minutes to write a word or two about Winny, I can imagine that this was how she once stole time to create for her readers a Japan overflowing with wisteria or a model’s life, with its thrills and perils. I’m not quite as prolific as she was in producing “a book and a baby a year.” But I’ve done a pretty good job of producing babies. And in this publication I’ve produced, from the rabbit’s hole, one of Eaton’s most fascinating works—a work that was at risk of “going out altogether, like a candle,” as Alice feared she might as she shrunk down for the first time in her adventures in Wonderland. Marion is remarkable for its ability to change the way we think about the fluidity of identity and how context truly shapes meaning. It is a significant work with much to teach readers about Canada, the United States, immigration, the treatment of “working girls,” and, implicitly, the experience of being Asian American at the turn of the twentieth century. I am happy to put Marion back into the world of literary and cultural studies, where it belongs.

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Notes 1 I have contextualized Me and Marion within turn-of-the-century crossborder Canadian-American narratives in my MELUS article “‘As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed’: Winnifred Eaton’s Revision of North American Identity.” Parts of this introduction have been drawn from the article. 2 As Donald Pizer writes in the Norton Critical Edition of Sister Carrie, “Dreiser’s controversy with Doubleday, Page and Company over the publication of Sister Carrie is one of the most frequently noted events in American literary history” (443). Pizer provides the letters of Dreiser, his friend Arthur Henry, the writer Frank Norris, and the publishers that prove how difficult it was for Dreiser to publish his book, even after the manuscript had been accepted by Doubleday, Page for publication. Henry quotes Norris as saying “Doubleday … thinks the story immoral and badly written. He don’t make any of the objections to it that might be made—he simply don’t think the story ought to be published by anybody first of all because it is immoral” (448). Although Me and Marion were published some years later, general ideas of morality had not changed sufficiently to render such stories “acceptable” and, worse still, they were sold as non-fiction. 3 Hutt (1875–1950) was not as famous as Gibson, but he was considered important in the world of fashion. The Henry Hutt Picture Book was a popular gift book in 1908, and Hutt designed covers for Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Women’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Harpers Weekly between 1898–1910. For more on American Girlhood representations, see Kitch’s The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. 4 Also in 1916, for example, Hutt illustrated two chapters from Robert W. Chambers’s serialized Barbarians in Hearst’s: “In Finistère,” which was

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published just before Marion and “Carillonette,” which was published just after it. 5 In the same year that it published Me, the Century Magazine also published works by Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, Agnes C. Laut, Jean Webster, A.A. Milne, Alfred Noyes, and Edith Wharton, among other wellknown writers. 6 The Long Day, allegedly a real memoir, was also published anonymously, and its harsh realities of the lives of working girls are only slightly softened by the fact that the narrator, Rose Fortune, as she calls herself, manages to pull herself out of the dark factories and into the clean and bright world of stenography. Alluding to, and adding a realistic and secular spin on Susan Warner’s nineteenth-century bestseller, Richardson begins her tale of a working girl’s life at the turn of the twentieth century by saying she had come to New York “to live and to toil—out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and stress of the wide, wide, workaday world” (Richardson 5). The similarities between Me and The Long Day naturally led some readers to believe, initially, that Me had been written by Richardson. 7 The hypothesis may have arisen because Webster, who wrote the Introduction to Me, was the only real author named in the book. Yet there is a clear sense of distance between the writer of the introduction and the content of the book. In the introduction, Webster describes Me in tones of wonder and amazement, calling the book “one of the most astounding literary feats I have ever known,” and telling readers how impressed she was by the “amazing celerity” with which it was written (Webster, Century 801). She lauds the book as “an intensely interesting human document” and “sociological study” and gives readers one clue to the author’s identity by saying that she has known the author—an accomplished writer of books with a wide circulation—for a number of years (801). Because Webster was neither a megalomaniac nor a liar, and because, had she

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written the work, her image would have likely guaranteed the magazine greater publicity (and therefore publishing anonymously would have been counter-productive), the hypothesis that Webster was the author of Me soon petered out. Webster died during the serialization of Marion, so the hypothesis was never revived. 8 In her book-length study of Winnifred Eaton and her sister Edith, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances, Dominika Ferens astutely observes the complicated way that whiteness is represented in Eaton’s work. Of the characters in Marion, Ferens notes that “the ‘white’ characters represent a full spectrum of color, from Marion, whom a painter likens to a half-caste Indian girl, through the Jewish Cohen family and the ‘small and dark’ (32) Italian suitor named Benevenuto whom Marion rejects, to Paul Bonnat, who ‘looks like a Viking’ and wins her heart (261)” (Ferens 142). Ferens suggests that the characters that inhabit Eaton’s autobiographical fiction might have helped readers rethink whiteness. 9 There were many years during which academics were strongly inclined toward Edith. Solberg’s bias was soon apparent: in his 1981 article based on his conference paper that was published in MELUS, the title of “First Chinese-American Fictionist” was used only for Edith and, unlike Japanese scholars (who thought, to be fair, that they were writing about one of their own), Solberg reserved his enthusiasm—and written scholarship— for Edith. Amy Ling’s article in American Literary Realism calling Edith a “Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist” followed in 1983, and by the 1990s increased awareness of Edith Eaton’s work led to her general acceptance as the grandmother of Asian American fiction. Edith’s name shows up in Fae Myenne Ng’s 1994 novel Bone and her stories suddenly found prominent placement in anthologies. Jean Lee Cole cites a number of anthologies that have included Edith’s stories, such as Growing Up Asian American (1993) and The Heath Anthology of American Literature

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(1998), but notes that the only “recent anthology that includes Winnifred Eaton’s work is Blackwell Publishing’s Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Karen Kilcup (1997), an odd place for her since she published the vast majority of her writings (including the story in the anthology) in the twentieth century” (160n). Edith’s favoured position among academics can be seen in the scholarship of Solberg, Annette White-Parks (who published a biography of Edith Eaton in 1995, and, with Ling, an anthology of her works, titled Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings after Edith’s 1912 collection, in the same year), Xiao-Huang Yin, Frank Chin (and the editors of Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian American Writers), and other writers, critics, and anthologists of the 1980s and early 1990s who rediscovered or reminded us of these literary pioneers. Some still see the divide between the “good” (authentic) and the “bad” sister (or “poseur” as Ling calls Winnifred, since in many of her fictions, she wrote about a Japan of the imagination). In A History of American Literature, published in 2004, Richard Gray asserts that Winnifred “explores the situation of the emigrant with verve and sly wit … But neither the tales nor the novels ever really challenge racial stereotypes” (333). Apparently knowing only some of her work, Gray wrongly claims that in Winnifred’s stories, interracial romance “occurs between English or American men and Japanese women, never the reverse” (333). On the contrary, he sees Edith as “a tireless campaigner for social and racial justice” (333). 10 Recent republications include Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915/1997), Miss Numè of Japan (1899/1999), The Heart of Hyacinth (1904/2000), A Japanese Nightingale (1901/2002), “A Half Caste” and Other Writings (1898–1923/2003), and A Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914/2006). In 2008, Dodo Press began publishing individual stories by Eaton as small novellas, and in 2008 and 2009 the publishers Kessinger and BiblioBazaar made copies of Eaton’s books, such as Me and Tama (1910), available on demand. Low-quality editions of a number of other books have

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been produced by General Publishing llc; Nabu Press, dedicated to preserving pre-1923 texts, came out with The Honorable Miss Moonlight (1912) in 2010; and Amazon.com is rapidly turning Eaton’s novels into Kindle books. Diana Birchall’s seminal biography of her grandmother, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (2001), offers the fullest account of the author to date, and Jean Lee Cole’s The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton (2002) and Dominika Ferens’s Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002) both provide scholars with rigorous literary analyses of Eaton’s works. Every year at the MELUS (The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature) conference and the Modern Language Association (mla) convention, as well as regional mlas, Eaton’s books are discussed in well-attended panels; anthologies of American literature and critical works on Asian American and Canadian literature almost all include selections/discussions of Edith and Winnifred Eaton’s writings. At Mt. Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, students and faculty put together a “Winnifred Eaton Symposium” in March 2007. This conference was only one part of their Winnifred Eaton Project—a series of events on campus, which included a talk by guest speaker Jean Lee Cole and the official launch of the Winnifred Eaton Book Exhibit at the Ralph Pickard Bell Library. In April 2010 the Nineteenth Century Women Writers Reading Group, an international group of scholars from far-ranging universities, hosted their first conference devoted to Chinese American women writers at American University in Washington, dc. The meeting focused “on the works of the first major Chinese American women authors, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) and Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton)” (personal correspondence from Mary Chapman). Many academic journals, among them MELUS, Canadian Literature, Legacy, Essays on Canadian Writing, Arizona Quarterly, Feminist Studies in English Literature, Quarterly Review of Film and

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Video, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, have published articles focusing on the Eatons’ writing. A number of dissertations have also been written on the Eatons’ works in the last dozen years. 11 A nice comparison can be found between Miss Numè of Japan and the John Luther Long story “Glory” published in Fly Leaf two years before Long achieved fame with Madame Butterfly (Fly Leaf was run by Eaton’s brother-in-law Walter Blackburn Harte, the husband of her sister Grace). Unusually, “Glory” involves a relationship between a Japanese man and a white woman. Both Eaton’s and Long’s stories are tragic cautionary tales of cross-cultural love and adventure. Eaton’s, however, which might be seen as a response to Long’s, is a story of two cross-cultural relationships: one between a Japanese man and a white American woman, and a second between a white American man and a Japanese woman. Though Miss Numè of Japan, like “Glory,” demonstrates one unfortunate consequence of a cross-cultural relationship (the Japanese man who hoped to marry the white woman is spurned and commits suicide), the second relationship, that of the American man and Japanese woman, ends in love and happiness, mitigating the tragic outcome of the first and concluding the novel on a cheerful note. 12 Eaton also published a memoir of her youth in Montreal, emphasizing her roguishness as a child and her involvement with her brothers and local children in “The Hochelaga Gang,” a group that specialized in terrorizing the neighbourhood. Entitled “Memories,” the article was clearly written during her tenure in Calgary (undated clipping, Winnifred Eaton Reeve fonds 17.3). 13 In 1938, John Murray Gibbon titled his book Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation to differentiate Canada’s treatment of immigrant groups from the American notion of the “melting pot.” Although Gibbon probably popularized the term “mosaic” as a description of Canada’s diverse and discrete groups, he notes two earlier uses of the term:

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by the American writer Victoria Hayward in the 1922 book about her travels through Canada, Romantic Canada, and by the Canadian writer Kate Foster, who in 1926 made an extensive survey of Canadians called “Our Canadian Mosaic” (Gibbon ix). The melting pot, an American term popularized by Israel Zangwill in his 1908 play of the same name, was given literal expression by Henry Ford in 1916: he had his immigrant factory workers put on native dress, climb into a large pot, and emerge from the pot in American suits, carrying American flags. For a detailed discussion of Ford’s productions, see Sollors 89–91, and for a wonderful fictionalized version, see Middlesex. 14 According to William Osler’s 1892 medical textbook Principles and Practice in Medicine, “In Montreal, vaccination, to which many of the French Canadians were opposed, had been neglected, so that a large unprotected population grew up in the city. On February 28, 1885, a Pullman-car conductor, who had travelled from Chicago, where the disease had been slightly prevalent, was admitted into the Hôtel-Dieu, the civic small-pox hospital being at the time closed. Isolation was not carried out, and on the 1st of April a servant in the hospital died of small-pox. Following her decease, with a negligence absolutely criminal, the authorities of the hospital dismissed all patients presenting no symptoms of contagion, who could go home. The disease spread like fire in dry grass, and within nine months there died in the city, of small-pox, 3,164 persons” (57). 15 There is no irony in this use of classic American rhetoric—quite the opposite of Edith Eaton’s use of it for “In the Land of the Free,” a story that indicts heartless immigration officials, money-hungry American lawyers, and white missionaries who destroy innocent, newly arrived Chinese families. 16 Even in reverse, the border-crossing from the United States was fraught with perils. In “The Land of the Free” (distinct from “In the Land of the Free,” cited above), Edith Eaton describes the welcome Chinese immi-

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grants coming from the United States to Canada might receive: her character Goon is “sent through in bond like a box of traps and the moment he touched the free soil of Canada he was pounced upon by customs officer, A. Pare, who demanded in the name of the Queen of his marvellously free country, $50 or his immediate departure from the country” (E. Eaton [Far], Spring 179). In his discussion of blepharoplasty, David Palumbo-Liu quotes an essay by D. R. Millard, an army surgeon in Korea in 1955, in which the doctor happily reports that “After cartilage to nose and plastic to eyelids the [Korean] interpreter [he had operated on] was mistaken for Mexican or Italian” (Millard 334 qtd. in Palumbo-Liu 100). Palumbo-Liu notes that the interpreter has not been surgically transformed into an American but rather, “he is situated in the terrain of a positive indecideability, a flexible, albeit still ethnic, identity, that benefits from its potential confusion with other, presumably more ‘assimilable’ ethnic types still in that liminal space of pre-Americanization, yet closer than the racially marked Oriental” (101). The “reinscription of America’s Lady Liberty” is likely an anachronistic ascription, as the Statue of Liberty was only dedicated in 1886 and Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus” was not added to it until 1903. Similarly, in the 2006 memoir Cockeyed, Ryan Knighton, secretly going blind, uses his Canadianness (clearly an unknown and, to some extent, unknowable concept) in Korea as an excuse for the awkwardness actually caused by the fact that he could not see: “Certainly I could pass for sighted a few hours a day. Besides, I was born and raised in a log cabin. Among my kids, I could move as slowly and strangely as I needed. They would come to know it as Canadian, that’s all” (133). Noting that the magazine bylines for the cooking articles appeared solely under Sara Bosse’s name, Birchall speculates, “The reason [Eaton’s] name did not appear is obvious: the subject was Chinese cooking, and Japanese

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22 23 24

25

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Onoto Watanna could not be suspected of knowing about things Chinese” (Birchall 107). According to the preface of a recent edition of the cookbook, written by Chinese food expert Jacqueline M. Newman, Chinese Japanese Cook Book is the “first of a multi-cultural Asian genre” (iv). Newman notes that only three Chinese cookbooks preceded it. One English cookbook with Japanese recipes is known to have been published in the United States before this one (iv). See Ouyang for a discussion of this scene and many other moments of raciocultural fluidity throughout the novel. Hagans’s article offers the details of the recent discovery of the model behind these famous works of Saint-Gaudens. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, known for painting “unclean” women “on the other side,” famously claimed: “A professional model is like a stuffed owl. These girls [referring to women in a brothel] are alive.” Tsiang spells out the differences between being black and being Chinese in the South at this time: “Negroes are not allowed to ride in the same streetcar with whites, but Chinese are. Black children are not allowed to go to school with white children, but Chinese children are. If a conductor sees a Chinese in the black men’s section, the Chinese is put with the white men” (33). David Roediger discusses this concept at length in Towards an Abolition of Whiteness. St. Denis worked with Belasco for seven years, from 1898–1905, during which time Eaton was watching his work very closely. In 1902, Eaton accused him of appropriating ideas from A Japanese Nightingale and The Wooing of Wisteria for his Japanese drama The Darling of the Gods. Belasco sued Eaton for libel, demanding $20,000 in damages (“Order for Author’s Arrest”). This legal drama is not mentioned in Marion, which focuses instead on the model’s role in American men’s fantasies about women

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and Orientalism—a role that Ruth St. Denis took up with fervour in her long dance career. 28 This idea of the composite has intensified in the computer age. Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly films do an excellent job of showing the effects of the enhanced and composite women in advertising. She points out the cover of an issue of Esquire in 1990 that featured Michelle Pfeiffer with the caption “What Michelle Pfeiffer needs is … Absolutely Nothing,” and follows up with the receipt sent by the digital enhancing company that modified Pfeiffer’s image. Even more provocative is the cover of the magazine Mirabella in 1994, which featured a mystery woman who turned out not to be an actual woman at all. This “cover model,” whom the magazine touted as an “an extraordinary image of great American beauty,” asked the question, “Who Is the Face of America?’” Among the hints offered by the magazine were the following: We asked the distinguished photographer Hiro to come up with a cover personifying today’s all-American beauty. We thought it should be someone who represents the diversity of this country. We know that Hiro called in models—not famous faces, but beautiful faces, of all ethnicities. And, after an extensive search and painstaking work, he did present us with an extraordinary image of great American beauty. But who is she? Hiro’s not telling. He will say only that she has never been photographed before and that she’s not with any modeling agency. And, she’s impossible to reach. He hints that she’s something of a split personality. And he says, with a smile, that it wasn’t easy getting her together. Maybe her identity has something to do with the microchip floating through space, next to that gorgeous face. America is a melting pot. And true American beauty is a combination of elements from all over the world. Is our cover model representative of the melting pot? All we’re sure of is that her looks could melt just about anything. (Mirabella)

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Six different models—and a computer—were used to create the figure. Like the figures in Marion and the models for American Girlhood images, the composite images are meant to be the definitive American beauty. Because America was and is so diverse, there has been a strong, and consistent, desire to create something uniform out of the diversity. Although Mirabella followed Time in its creation of a computerized image of a composite American woman (reproductions of this cover of Time and indepth analyses can be found in Palumbo-Liu’s Asian/American and Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington), it is interesting to note a key difference between their results: Time’s 1993 special issue on “The New Face of America” (subtitled “How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society”) produced a racially ambiguous figure described as a “symbol of the future multiethnic face of America” (Berlant calls this “Frankenstein” both “posthistorical” and “postwhite”), whereas Mirabella’s figure, made up of ethnic and racially diverse models, appears white (Berlant 201). 29 A number of critics have read Marion as the story of a white woman, including Carol Spaulding, who reads the narrators of The Diary of Delia, Me, and Marion as white women (198).

Bibliography Archives Reeve, Winnifred Eaton. Fonds. Special Collections, University of Calgary Library, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Works Cited Ando, Yoshiro. “Onoto Watanna to iu Sakka.” Eigo Seinen (The Rising Generation) 116 (1970): 596–7. Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. New York: Penguin, 1997.

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Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Birth of a Nation, The. Dir. D.W. Griffith. Perf. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Henry B. Walthall. David W. Griffith Corp., 1915. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, The, April–August 1915. Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Doyle, James. The Fin de Siècle Spirit: Walter Blackburn Harte and the American/Canadian Literary Milieu of the 1890s. Toronto: ecw Press, 1995. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. 1900. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Dunlop, M.H. Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Eaton, Edith. “Fire Fly’s Christmas Budget.” Gall’s News Letter 24 December 1896. —“The Girl of the Period: A Veracious Chronicle of Opinion.” Gall’s News Letter 8 February 1897. —“Robin.” Dominion Illustrated 22 June 1889, 394–5. —[Far, Sui Sin, pseud.]. “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.” Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Eds Amy Ling and Annette WhiteParks, 218–30. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. —Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Eds Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Eaton, Winnifred. Cattle. New York: A.L. Burt, 1924. —Me: A Book of Remembrance. 1915. Reprinted with afterword and notes by Linda Trinh Moser. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

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—[Herself and The Author of Me, pseud.]. Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model. New York: W.J. Watt, 1916. —[Watanna, Onoto, pseud.]. Daughters of Nijo: A Romance of Japan. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1904. —The Diary of Delia: Being a Veracious Chronicle of the Kitchen with Some Side-Lights on the Parlour. New York: Doubleday, 1907. —“A Half-Caste” and Other Writings. Eds Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. —The Heart of Hyacinth. 1903. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. —The Honorable Miss Moonlight. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912. —A Japanese Blossom. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906. —A Japanese Nightingale. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1901. —The Love of Azalea. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904. —Miss Numè of Japan. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1899. —Sunny-San. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1922. —Tama. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910. —The Wooing of Wisteria. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902. —with Sara Bosse. Chinese-Japanese Cook Book. Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1914. —See also Reeve, Winifred Eaton. Eugenides, Jeffrey Middlesex. New York: Picador, 2002. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Fisher, Judith L. “Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Eds Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, 60-84. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Gibbon, John Murray. Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1938.

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Ginsberg, Elaine K., ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Hagans, William E. “Saint-Gaudens, Zorn, and the Goddesslike Miss Anderson.” American Art 16.2 (2002): 66–89. Half Chinese, A. “The Persecution and Oppression of Me.” The Independent 71.3273 (24 August 1991): 421–6. Hearst’s April-November, 1916. Howells, William Dean. “A Psychological Counter Current in Recent Fiction.” North American Review 173 (1901): 872–88. Hutt, Henry. The Henry Hutt Picture Book. New York: The Century Co., 1908. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. New York: Vintage, 1989. Kallen, Horace. “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot.” The Nation 18. 25 (February 1915): 190–4, 217–20. Kang, Nancy. “‘As if I had entered a Paradise’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History.” African American Review 39.3 (2005): 431–57. Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women. By Jean Kilbourne. Dir. Sut Jhally. 1999. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey. 1987. Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1990. Knighton, Ryan. Cockeyed: A Memoir. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Lee, Katherine Hyunmi. “The Poetics of Liminality and Mis-Indentification: Winnifred Eaton’s Me and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37.1 (2004): 17–33. Ling, Amy. “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist.” American Literary Realism 16.2 (1983): 287–98. Liu, Mary Ting Yi. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Long, John Luther. “Glory.” Madame Butterfly, Purple Eyes, etc., 205–24. New York: Garrett Press, 1969.

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—Madame Butterfly. 1897. Reprint, New York: Seconda Donna, 1997. McLean, Adrienne L. “The Thousand Ways There Are to Move: Camp and Oriental Dance in the Hollywood Musicals of Jack Cole.” Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. Eds. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, 130–57. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Mirabella, September 1994. Moser, Linda Trinh. “Afterword.” Me: A Book of Remembrance, 357–72. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Mori, Toshio. The Chauvinist and Other Stories. Los Angeles: The Regents of the University of California, 1979. Mount, Nick. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. New York Times. “Order for Author’s Arrest: David Belasco Brings Suit Against Onoto Watanna, Who Charges That He Appropriated Her Ideas.” New York Times 3 December 1902, 1. —“Vexes Son of St. Gaudens: Says He Can’t See Why There’s Any Fuss over Irish Model for Coins.” The New York Times, 21 September 1907. —“Is Onoto Watanna Author of the Anonymous Novel ‘Me’?” New York Times 10 October 1915. Old San Francisco. Dir. Alan Crosland. Perf. Dolores Costello and Warner Oland. Warner Bros., 1927. Osler, William. The Principles and Practice of Medicine. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1892. Ouyang, Huining. “Ambivalent Passages: Racial and Cultural Crossings in Onoto Watanna’s The Heart of Hyacinth.” MELUS 42.1 (2009): 211–29. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Park, Robert E. Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary Man. New York: The Free Press, 1950. Patterson, Martha H., ed. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

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Reeve, Winnifred Eaton. His Royal Nibs. New York: W.J. Wyatt and Co., 1925. Richardson, Dorothy. The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl, As Told by Herself. 1905. Reprint, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Roediger, David R. Towards an Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London: Verso, 1994. Shawn, Ted. Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer and Prophet, Being a History of Her Cycle of Oriental Dances. San Francisco: J. Howell by J. H. Nash, 1920. Skinazi, Karen E.H. “‘As to her race, its secret is loudly revealed’: Winnifred Eaton’s Revision of North American Identity.” MELUS 32.2 (2007): 31–53. Slater, David. “The Fount of Inspiration: Minnie Clark, the Art Workers’ Club for Women, and Performances of American Girlhood.” Winterthur Portfolio 39.4 (2004): 229–58. Sohn, Stephen Hong, Paul Lai, and Donald C. Goellnicht. “Theorizing Asian American Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010): 1–18. Solberg, S. E. “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: The First Chinese-American Fictionist.” MELUS 8.1 (1981): 27–39. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Spaulding, Carol Vivian. Blue Eyed Eurasianism in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, and Diana Chang. Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1996. St. Denis, Ruth. Ruth St. Denis: An Unfinished Life. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sibyl.” Atlantic Monthly 11 (1863): 473–81. —Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986. Takeda, Katsuhiko. “Onoto Watanna: A Forgotten Writer.” Orient/West 9.1 (1964): 77–81. Time, 18 November 1993.

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Tsiang, H. T. And China Has Hands. 1937. Forest Hills: Ironweed Press, 2003. Ward, Jenifer K.“Spectacle.” Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary History. Ed. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, 381–2. New York: Routledge, 2009. Waters, Mary C. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Webster, Jean.“Introduction to ‘Me.’” The Century Magazine 89.6 (April 1915): 801. White-Parks, Annette. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Woman Writer, A. “Who Wrote ‘Me’?” St. Louis Mirror, 17 September 1915. Zangwill, Israel. The Melting-Pot: Drama in Four Parts. 1909. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914.

MARION THE STORY OF AN ARTIST'S MODEL

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Herself and the Author of "Me" Illustrations by HENRY HUTT

NEW YORK

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MARION THE STORY OF AN ARTISTS MODEL

I

"I Nmore-they dat familee dere are eleven cheeldren, and come 1 See dat leetle one? She is tres jolie I Oui, tres jolie, n'est-ce pas? De father he come from Eengland about ten year ago. He was joost young man, mebbe twenty-seven or twenty-eight year 01', and he have one leetle foreign wife and six leetle cheeldren. They were all so cold. They were not use to dis climate of Canada. My wife and I, we keep de leetle 'otel at Hochelaga, and my wife she take all dose leetle ones and she warm dem before the beeg hall stove, and she make for dem the good French pea-soup." Mama had sent me to the corner grocer to buy some things. Monsieur Thebeau, the gro'cer, was talking, and to a stranger. I felt ashamed and humiliated to hear our family thus discussed. Why should we always be pointed out in this way

2

MARION

and made to feel conspicuous and freaky? It was horrid that the size of our family and my mother's nationality should be told to everyone by that corner grocer. I glared haughtily at Monsieur Thebeau, but he went garrulously on, regardless of my discomfiture. "De eldest-a boy, monsieur-he was joost nine year old, and my wife she call him. 'Le petit pere.' His mother she send him out to walk wiz all hees leetle sisters, and she say to him: 'Charles, you are one beeg boy, almost one man, and you must take care you leetle sisters; so, when de wind she blow too hard, you will walk you on de side of dat wind, and put yourself betweeR it and your sisters.' 'Yes, mama,' il dit. And we, my wife and I, we look out de window, and me? I am laugh, and my wife, she cry-she have lost her only bebby, monsieur-to see dat leede boy walk him in front of h.is leede sisters, open hees coat, comme~a, monsieur, and spread it wiz nees hands, to make one sh.ield to keep de wind from his sisters. It The man to whom Monsieur Thebeau had been speaking, had turned around, and was regarding me curiously. I felt abashed and angry under his compelling glance. Then he smiled, and nodding his head, he said: "You are right. She is pretty-quite remarkably pretty t"

MARION

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I forgot everything else. With my little light head and heart awhirl, I picked up my packages and ran out of the store. It was the first time I had been called pretty, and I was just twelve years old. I felt exhilarated and utterly charmed. When I reached home, I deposited the groceries on a table in the kitchen and ran up to my room. Standing on a chair, I was able to see my face in the oval mirror that topped a very high and scratched old chiffonier. I gazed long and eagerly at the face I had often heard Monsieur Thebeau say was "tres jolie," which French words I now learned must mean: "Pretty-quite remarkably pretty 1" as had said that Englishman in the store. Was I really pretty then? Surely the face reflected there was too fat and too red. My 1 my cheeks were as red as apples. I pushed back the offending fat with my two hands, and I opened my eyes wide and blinked them at myself in the glass. Oh 1 if only my hair were gold 1 I twisted and turned about, and then I made grimaces at my own face. Suddenly I was thrilled with a great ideaone that for the moment routed my previous ambition to some day be an artist, as was my father. I would be an actress! If I were pretty, and both that Frenchman and Englishman had said so, why should I not be famous? I slipped into mama's room, found a long skirt,

MARION and put it on me; also a feather which I stuck in my hair. Then, fearing detection, I ran out on tiptoe to the barn. There, marching up and down, I recited poems. I was pausing, to bow elaborately to the admiring audience, which, in my imagination, was cheering me with wild applause, when I heard mama's voice calling to me shrilly: "Marion! Marion I Where in the world is that girl ?" "Coming, mama." I divested myself hastily of skirt and feather, and left the barn on a run for the house. Here mama thrust our latest baby upon me, with instructions to keep him quiet while she got dinner. I took that baby in my arms, but I was still in that charmed world of dreams, and in my hand I clasped a French novel, which I had filched from my brother Charles' room. Charles at this time was twenty years of age, and engaged to be married to a girl we did not like. I tried to read, but that baby would not keep still a minute. He wriggled about in my lap and reached a grimy hand after my book. Irritated and impatient, I shook him, jumped him up and down, and then, as he still persisted, I pinched him upon the leg. He simply yelled. Mama's voice screamed at me above the baby's: "If you can't take better care of that baby, and keep him quiet, you shall not be allowed to paint

MARION

5 with your father this afternoon, but shall sit right here and sew," a punishment that made me put down the book, and amuse the baby by letting him pull my hair, which seemed to make him supremely happy, to judge from his chuckles and shouts of delight. After dinner, which we had at noon, I received the cherished permission, and ran along to papa's room. Dear papa, whose gentle, sensitive hands are now at rest! I can see him sitting at his easel, with his blue eyes fixed absently upon the canvas before him. Papa, with the heart and soul of a great artist, "painting, painting," as he would say, with a grim smile, "pot-boilers to feed my hungry children." I pulled out my paints and table, and began to work. From time to time I spoke to papa. "Say, papa, what do I use for these pink roses?" "Try rose madder, white and emerald greena little naples yellow," answered papa patiently. "Papa, what shall I use for the leaves?" "Oh, try making your greens with blues and yellows." From time to time I bothered him. By and by, I tired of the work, and getting up with a clatter, I went over and watched him. He was painting cool green waves dashing over jagged rocks, from a little sketch he had taken down at Lachine last summer.

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"Tell me, papa," I said after a moment, "if I keep on learning, do you think I will ever be able to earn my living as an artist?" "Who? What-you? Oh 1" Absently papa blew the smoke about his head, gazed at me, but did not seem to see me. He seemed to be talking rather to himself, not bitterly, but just sadly: "Better be a dressmaker or a plumber or a butcher or a policeman. There is no money in art 1"

II

N EXT to our garden,

separated only by a wooden fence, through which we children used to peep, was the opulent and well-kept garden of Monsieur Prefontaine, who was a very important man, once Mayor of Hochelaga, the French quarter of Montreal, in which we lived. Madame Prefontaine, moreover, was an object of unfailing interest and absorbing wonder to us children. She was an enormously fat woman, and had once taken a trip to New York City, to look for a wayward sister. There she had been offered a job as a fat woman for a big circus. Madame Prefontaine used to say to the neighbors, who always listened to her with great respect: "Mon dieu! That New York-it is one beeg hell! N ever do I feel so hot as in dat terrible city I I feel de grease it run all out of me I Mebbe, eef I stay at dat New York, I may be one beeg meelionaire-oui I But, non I Me? I prefer my leetle home, so cool and quiet in Hochelaga than be meelionaire in dat N ew York, dat is like purgatory." We had an old straggly garden. Everything 7

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about it looked "seedy" and uncareo for and wild, for we could not afford a gardener. My sisters and I found small consolation in papa's stout assertion that it looked picturesque, with its gnarled old apple trees and shrubs in their natural wild state. I was sensitive about that garden. It was awfully poor-looking in comparison with our neighbors' nicely kept places. It was just like our family, I sometimes treacherously thought-unkempt and wild and "heathenish." A neighbor once called us that. I stuck out my tongue at her when she said it. Being just next to the fine garden of Monsieur Prefontaine, it appeared the more ragged and beggarly, that garden of ours. Mama would send us children to pick the maggots off the currant bushes and the bugs off the potato plants and, to encourage us, she would give us one cent for every pint of bugs or maggots we showed her. I hated the bugs and maggots, but it was fascinating to dig up the potatoes. To see the vegetables actually under the earth seemed almost like a miracle, and I would pretend the gnomes and fairies put them there, and hid inside the potatoes. I once told this to my little brothers and sisters, and Nora, who was just a little tot, wouldn't eat a potato again for weeks, for fear she might bite on a fairy. Most of all, I loved to pick strawberries, and it was a matter of real grief and humiliation to me that our own straw-

MARION

9 berries were so dried-up looking and small, as compared with the big, luscious berries I knew were in the garden of Monsieur Prefontaine. On that day, I had been picking strawberries for some time, and the sun was hot and my basket only half full. I kept thinking of the berries in the garden adjoining, and the more I thought of them, the more I wished I had some of them. It was very quiet in our garden. Not a sound was anywhere, except the breezes, making all kinds of mysterious whispers among the leaves. For some time, my eye had become fixed, fascinated, upon a loose board, with a hole in it near the ground. I looked and looked at that hole, and I thought to myself: "It is just about big enough for me to crawl through." Hardly had that thought occurred to me, when down on .hands and knees I dropped, and into the garden of the great Monsieur Prefontaine I crawled. The strawberry beds were right by the fence. Greedily I fell upon them. Oh, the exquisite joy of eating forbidden fruit! The fearful thrills that even as I ate ran up and down my spine, as I glanced about me on all sides. There was even a wicked feeling of fierce joy in acknowledging to myself that I was a thief. "Thou shalt not steal!" I repeated the commandment that I had broken even while my mouth was full, and then, all of a sudden, I heard a voice,

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one that had inspired me always with feelings of respect and awe and fear. "How you get in here ?" Monsieur Prefontaine was towering sternly above me. He was a big man, bearded, and with a face of preternatural importance and sternness. I got up. My legs were shaky, and the world was whirling about me. I thought of the jail, where thieves were taken, and a great terror seized me. Monsieur Prefontaine had been the Mayor of Hochelaga. He could have me put in prison for all the rest of my life. We would all be disgraced. "Well ? Well? How you get in here?" demandedMonsieur Prefontain~ "M'sieu, I-I-crawled in!" I stammered, indicating the hole in the fence. "Bien! Crawl out, madame!" "Madame" to me, who was but twelve years old! "Crawl out/" commanded Monsieur, pointing to the hole, and feeling like a worm, ignominiously, under the awful eye of that ex-mayor of Hochelaga, on hands and knees and stomach, I crawled out. Once on our side, I felt not the shame of being a thief so much as the degradation of crawling out with that man looking. Feeling like a desp,erate criminal, I swaggered

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II

up to the house, swinging my half-filled basket of strawberries. As I came up the path, Ellen, a sister just two years older than I, put her head out of an upper window and called down to me: "Marion, there's a beggar boy coming in at the gate. Give him some Df that stale bread mama left on the kitchen table to make a pudding with." The boy was about thirteen, and he was a very dirty boy, with hardly any clothes on him. As I looked at him, I was thrilled with a most beautiful inspiration. I could regenerate myself by doing an act of lovely charity. "Wait a minute, boy." Disregarding the stale bread, I cut a big slice of fresh, sweet-smelling bread that Sung Sung, our one very old Chinese servant, had made that day. Heaping it thick with brown sugar, I handed it to the boy. "There, beggar boy," I said generously, "you can eat it all." He took it with both hands, greedily, and now as I looked at him another, a fiendish, impulse seized me. Big boys had often hit me, and although I had always fought back as valiantly and savagely as my puny fists would let me, I had always been worsted, and had been made to realize the weakness of my sex and age. N ow as I looked at that beggar boy, I realized that here was my ,chance to hit a big boy. He was smiling at me

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gratefully across that slice of sugared bread, and I leaned over and suddenly pinched him hard on each of his cheeks. His eyes bulged with amazement, and I still remember his expression of surprise and pained fear. I made a horrible grimace at him and then ran out of the room.

III

T HERE was a long, bleak period, when we knew acutely the meaning of what papa wearily termed "Hard Times." Even in "Good Times" there are few people who buy paintings, and no one wants them in Hard Times. Then descended upon Montreal a veritable plague. A terrible epidemic of smallpox broke out in the city. The French and not the English Canadians were the ones chiefly afHicted, and my father set this down to the fact that the French Canadians resisted vaccination. In fact, there were anti-vaccination riots all over the French quarter, where we lived. And now my father, in this desperate crisis, proved the truth of the old adage that "Blood will tell." Ours was the only house on our block, or for that matter the surrounding blocks, where the hideous, yellow sign, "PICOTTE" (smallpox) , was not conspicuously nailed upon the front door, and this despite the fact that we were a large family of children. Papa hung sheets all over the house, completely saturated with disinfectants. 13

MARION Every one of us children was vaccinated, and we were not allowed to leave the premises. Papa himself went upon all the messages. even doing the marketing. He was not "absent-mindedu in those days. nor in the grueling days of dire poverty that followed the plague. Child as I was. I vividly recall the terrors of that period. going to bed hungry, my mother crying in the night and my father walking up and down, up and down. Sometimes it seemed to me as if papa walked up and down all night long. My brother Charles, who had been for some time our main support. had married (the girl we did not like) and although he had fervently promised to continue to contribute to the family's support, his wife took precious care that the contribution should be of the smallest, and she kept my brother, as much as she could, from coming to see us. A day came when, with my mother and it seemed all of my brothers and sisters, I stood on a wharf waving to papa on a great ship. There he stood, by the railing, looking so young and good. Papa was going to England to try to induce grandpa-that grandfather we had never seen-to help us. We clung about mama's skirts, poor little mama, who was half distraught and we all kept waving to papa, with our

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15

hats and hands and handkerchiefs and calling out: "Good-bye, papa I Come back! Come back soon I" until the boat was only a dim, shadowy outline. The dreadful thought came to me that perhaps we would never see papa again I Suppose his people, who were rich and grand, should induce our father never to return to us 1 I had kept back my tears. Mama had told us that none of us must let papa see us cry, as it might "unman" him, and she herself had heroically set the example of restraining her grief until after his departure. N ow, however, the strain was loosened. I fancied I read in my brothers' and sisters' faces-we were all imaginative and sensitive and excitable-my own fears. Simultaneously we all began to cry. Never will I forget that return home, all of us children crying and sobbing, and mama now weeping as unconcealedly as any of us, and the French people stopping us on the way to console or commiserate with us; but although they repeated over and over: "Pauvre petites enfants I Pauvre petite mere I" I saw their significant glances, and I knew that in their minds was the same treacherous thought of my father. But papa did return I He could have stayed in

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England, and, as my sister Ada extravagantly put it, "lived in the lap of luxury," but he came back to his noisy, ragged little "heathens," and the "painting, painting of pot-boilers to feed my hungry children."

IV

"M ONSIEUR DE ST. VIDAL is ringing the doorbell," called Ellen, "why don't you open the door, Marion? I believe he has a birth. day present for you in his hand." It was my sixteenth birthday, and Monsieur de St. Vidal was my first beau! He was a relative of our neighbors, the Prefontaines, and I liked him pretty well. I think I chiefly liked to be taken about in his stylish little dogcart. I felt sure all the other girls envied me. "You go, Ellen, while I change my dress." I was anxious to appear at my best before St. Vidal. It was very exciting, this having a beau. I would have enjoyed it much more, however, but for the interfering inquisitiveness of my sisters, Ada and Ellen, who never failed to ask me each time I had been out with him, whether he had "proposed" yet or not. Ellen was running up the stairs, and now she burst into our room excitedly, with a package in her hand. "Look, Marion! Here's your present. He wouldn't stop-just left it, and he said, with such 17

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a Frenchy bow-whew 1 I don't like the French 1 -'Pour Mamselle Marion, avec mes compliments 1'" and Ellen mimicked St. Vidal's best French manner and voice. I opened the package. Oh, such a lovely box of paints-a perfect treasure I "Just exactly what I wanted I" I cried excitedly, looking at the little tubes, all shiny and clean, and the new brushes and palette. Ada was sitting reading by the window, and now she looked up and said: "Oh, did that French wine merchant give that to Marion?" She cast a disparaging glance at the box, and then, addressing Ellen, she continued: "Marion is disgustingly old for sixteen, but, of course, if he gives her presents" (he had never given me anything but candy before) "he will propose to her, I suppose. Mama married at sixteen, and I suppose some people-" Ada gave me another look that was anything but approving"are in a hurry to get married. I shall never marry till I am twenty-five I" Ada was twenty. This time, Ellen, who was eighteen, got the condemning look. tHen was engaged to be married to an American editor, who wrote to her every day in the week and sometimes telegraphed. They were awfully in love with each other. Ellen said now:

MARION "Oh, he'll propose all right. Wallace came around a whole lot, you know, before he actually popped." "Well, maybe so," said Ada, "but I think we ought to know that French wine merchant's intentions pretty soon. I'll ask him if you like," she volunteered. "No, no, don't you dare I" I protested. "Well," said Ada, "if he doesn't propose to you soon, you ought to stop going out with him. It's bad form." I wished my sisters wouldn't interfere in my affairs. They nagged me everlastingly about St. Vidal, and it made me conscious when I was with him. They acted like self-appointed monitors. The minute I would get in, they would begin: "Well, did he propose?" and I would feel ashamed to be obliged to admit, each time, that he had not. Ada had even made some suggestions of how I might "bring him to the point." She said men had to be led along like sheep. Ellen, however, had warmly vetoed those suggestions, declaring stoutly that Wallace, her sweetheart, had needed no prodding. In fact, he had most eloquently and urgently pleaded his own suit, without Ellen "putting out a finger" to help him, so she said. That evening St. Vidal called and took me to the rink, and I enjoyed myself hugely. He was a

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graceful skater, and so was I, and I felt sure that everyone's eye was upon us. I was very proud of my "beau," and I secretly wished that he was blond. I did prefer the English type. However, conscious of what was expected of me by my sisters, I smiled my sweetest on St. Vidal, and by the time we started for home, I realized, with a thrill of anticipation, that he was in an especially tender mood. He helped me along the street carefully and gallantly. It was a clear, frosty night, and the snow was piled up as high as our heads on each side of the sidewalks. Suddenly St. Vidal stopped, and drawing my hand through his arm, he began, with his walking stick, to write upon the snow: "Madame Marion de St. Vida-" Before he got to the "1," I was seized with panic. I jerked my hand from his arm, took to my heels and ran all the way home. N ow it had come-that proposal, and I did not want it. It filled me with embarrassment and fright. When I got home, I burst into Ada's room, and gasped: "It's done I He did propose I B-but I saidI said-" I hadn't said anything at all. "Well?" demanded Ada. "Why, I'm not going to, that's all," I said. Ada returned to the plaiting of her hair. Then she said sceptically:

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21

"Hm, that's very queer. Are you sure he proposed, because I heard he was all the time engaged to a girl in Cote des N eiges." "Oh, Ada," I cried, "do you suppose he's a bigamist? I think I'm fortunate t() have escaped from his snare !" The next day Madame Prefontaine told mama that St. Vidal had said he couldn't imagine what in the world I had run away suddenly from him like that for, and he said: "Maybe she had a stomach ache."

v "ELLEN, don't you wish something would happen?" Ellen and I were walking up and down the street near the English church. "Life is so very dull and monotonous," I went on. "My! I would be glad if something real bad happened-some sort of tragedy. Even that is better than this deadness." Ellen looked at me, and seemed to hesitate. "Yes, it's awful to be so poor as we are," she answered, "but what I would like is not so much money as fame, and, of course, love. That usually goes with fame." Ellen's fiance was going to be famous some day. He was in New York, and had written a wonderful play. As soon as it was accepted, he and Ellen were to be married. "Well, I tell you what I'd like above everything else on earth," said I sweepingly. "I would love to be a great actress, and break everybody's 22

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heart. It must be perfectly thrilling to be notori. ous, and we certainly are miserable girls I" We were chewing away with great relish the contents of a bag of candy. "Anyhow," said Ellen, "you seem to be enjoying that candy," and we both giggled. Two men were coming out of the side door of the church. .Attracted by our laughter, they came over directly to us. One of them we knew well. He was Jimmy McAlpin, the son of a fine old Scotch, very rich, lady, who had always taken an especial interest in our family. Jimmy, though he took up the collection in church, had been, so I heard the neighbors whisper to mama, once very dissipated. He had known us since we were little girls, and always teased us a lot. He would come up behind me on the street and pull my long plait of hair, saying: "Oh, pull the string, gentlemen and ladies, and the figure moves 1" N ow he came smilingly up to us, followed by his friend, a big, stout man, with a military carriage and gray mustache. I recognized him, too, though we did not know him. He was a very rich and important citizen of our Montreal. Of him also I had heard bad things. People said he was "fast." That was a word they always whispered in Montreal, and shook their heads over, but whenever I heard it, its very mystery and bad·

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ness somehow thrilled me. Ada said there was a depraved and low streak in me, and I guiltily admitted to myself that she was right. "What are you girls laughing about t" asked Jimmy, a question that merely brought forth a fresh accession of giggles. Colonel Stevens was staring at me, and he had thrust into his right eye a shining monocle. I thought him very grand and distinguished-looking, much superior to St. Vidal. Anyway we were tired of the French, having them on all sides of us, and, as I have said, I admired the blond type of men. Colonel Stevens was not exactly blond, for his hair was gray (he was bald on top, though his hat covered that), but he was typically British, and somehow the Englishmen always appeared to me much superior to our little French Canucks, as we called them. Said the Colonel, pulling at his mustache: "A laughing young girl in a pink cotton frock is the sweetest thing on earth." I had on a pink cotton frock, and I was laughing. I thought of what I had heard Madame Prefontaine say to mama-in a whisper: "He is one dangerous man-dat Colonel Steven, and any woman seen wiz him will lose her reputation." "Will I lose mine?" I asked myself. I must say my heart beat, fascinated with the idea.

Looklllg at me he added: "May 1 send )'OU some roses just the color of your cheeks?"

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25

Something now was really happenmg, and I was excited and delighted. "Can't we take the ladies-" I nudged Ellen"some place for a little refreshment," said the Colonel. "No," said Ellen, "mama expects us home." "Too bad," murmured the Colonel, very much disappointed, "but how about some other night? To-morrow, shall we say?" Looking at me, he added: "May I send you some roses, just the color of your cheeks?" I nodded from behind Ellen's back. "Come on," said Ellen brusquely, "we'd better be getting home. You know you've got the dishes to do, Marion." She drew me along. I couldn't resist looking back, and there was that fascinating Colonel, standing stock-still in the street, still pulling at his mustache, and staring after me. He smiled all over, when I turned, and blew me an odd little kiss, like a kind of salute, only from his lips. That night, when Ellen and I were getting ready for bed, I said: "Isn't the Colonel thrillingly handsome though?" "Ugh! I should say not," said Ellen. uBe_ sides he's a married man, and a flirt." "Well, I guess he doesn't love his old wife," said 1.

MARION

"If she is old," said Ellen, "so is he-maybe older. Disgusting." All next day I waited for that box of roses, and late in the afternoQn, sure enough, it carne, and with it a note: "DEAR MISS MARION:

Will you and your charming sister take a little drive with me and a friend this evening? If so, meet us at eight o'clock, corner of St. James and St. Denis streets. My friend has seen your sister in Judge Laflamme's office" (Ellen worked there) "and he is very anxious to know her. As for me, I am thinking only of when I shall see my lovely rose again. I am counting the hours I Devotedly, FRED STEVENS."

The letter was written on the stationery of the fashionable St. James Club. N ow I was positive that Colonel Stevens had fallen in love with me. I thought 'of his suffering because he could not marry me. In many of the French novels I had read men ran away from their wives, and, I thought: "Maybe the Colonel will want me to elope with him, and if I won't, perhaps, he will kill himself," and I began to feel very sorry to think of such a fine-looking soldierly man as Colonel Stevens killing himself just because of me.

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27

When I showed Ellen the letter, after she got home from work, to my surprise and delight, she said: "All right, let's go. A little ride will refresh us, and I've had a hard week of it, but better not let mama know where we're going. We'll slip out after supper, when she's getting the babies to sleep." Reaching the corner of St. James and St. Denis Streets that evening, we saw a beautiful closed carriage, with a coat of arms on the door, and a coachman in livery jumped down and opened the door for us. We stepped in. With the Colonel was a middle-aged man, with a dry, yellowish face and a very black-it looked dyed-mustache. "Mr. Mercier," said the Colonel, introducing us. "Oh," exclaimed Ellen, "are you the Premier?" "Non, non, non," laughed Mr. Mercier, and turning about in the seat, he began to look at Ellen and to smile at her, until the ends of his waxed mustache seemed to jump up and scratch his nose. Colonel Stevens had put his arm just at the back of me, and as it slipped down from the carriage seat to my waist, I sat forward on the edge of the seat. I didn't want to hurt his feelings by telling him to take his arm down, and still I didn't want him to put it around me. Suddenly Ellen said:

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"Marion, let's get out of this carriage. That beast there put his arm around me, and he pinched me, too." She indicated Mercier. She was standing up in the carriage, clutching at the strap, and she began to tap upon the window, to attract the attention of the coachman. Mr. Mercier was cursing softly in French. "Petite foUe I" he said, "I am not meaning to hurt you-joost a little loving. Dat is all." "You ugly old man," said Ellen, "do you think I want you to love me? Let me get out I" "Oh, now, Miss Ellen," said the Colonel, "that is too rude. Mr. Mercier is a gentleman. See how sweet and loving your little sister is." "No, no," I cried, "I am not sweet and loving. He had no business to touch my sister." Mr. Mercier turned to the Colonel. "For these children did you ask me to waste my time?" and putting his head out of the carriage, he simply roared: "Rue Saint Denis 1 Sacre I" They set us down at the corner of our street. When we got in a friend of papa's was singing to marna and Ada in the parlor: !lIn the gloaming, oh, my darling, When the lights are dim and low." He was one of many Englishmen, younger sons

MARION of aristocrats, who, not much good in England, were often sent to Canada. They liked to hang around papa, whose family most of them knew. This young man was a thin, harmless sort of fellow, soft-spoken and rather silly, Ellen and I thought; but he could play and sing in a pretty, sentimental way and mama and Ada would listen by the hour to him. He liked Ada, but Ada pretended she had only an indifferent interest in him. His father was the Earl of Albemarle, and Ellen and I used to make Ada furious by calling her "Countess," and bowing mockingly before her. Walking on tiptoe, Ellen and I slipped by the parlor door, and up to our own room. That night, after we were in bed, I said to Ellen: "You know, I think Colonel Stevens is in love with me. Maybe he will want me to elope with him. Would you if you were me?" "Don't be silly. Go to sleep," was Ellen's cross response. She regretted very much taking that ride, and she said she only did it because she got so tired at the office all day, and thought a little ride would be nice. She had -no idea, she said, that those "two old fools" would act like that. I was not going to let Ellen go to sleep so easily, however. "Listen to this," I said, poking her to keep her awake. "This is Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Ellen, and

MARION 3° they call her the Poet of Passion." Ellen groaned, but she had to listen: "Just for one kiss that thy lips had given Just for one hour of bliss with thee, I would gladly barter my hopes of heaven, And forfeit the joys of eternity; For I know in the way that sins are reckoned That this is a sin of the deepest dye, But I also know if an angel beckoned, Looking down from his home on high, And you adown by the gates Infernal Should lift to me your loving smile, I would turn my back on the things Eternal, Just to lie on your breast awhile." "Ugh!" said Ellen, "I would scorn to lie on Colonel Stevens' old fat breast."

VI. WALLACE, Ellen's sweetheart, had not sold his play, but he expected to any day. He was, however, impatient to be married-they had now been engaged over a year-and he wrote Ellen that he could not wait, anyway more than two or three months longer. Meanwhile Ellen secured a better position. The new positiOn was at a much greater distance from our house, and as she had to be at the office early, she decided to take a room farther down town. Papa at first did not want her to leave home, but Ellen pointed out that Hochelaga was too far away from her office, and then she addcrd, to my delight, that she'd take me along with her. I could make her trousseau and cook for us both, and it wouldn't cost any more for two than for one. Mama thought we were old enough to take care of ourselves. "For," said she, "when I was Ellen's age I was married and had two children. Besides," she added, "we are crowded for room, in the house, and it will only be for a month or two." So Ellen secured a little room down town. I 31

MARION 32 thought the house was very grand, for there was thick carpet on all the floors and plush furniture in the parlor. We were unpacking our trunk, soon after we arrived, when there was a knock at our door, and in came Mrs. Cohen, our landlady and a big fat man. Mrs. Cohen pointed at us with a pudgy finger: "There they are I" she explained. "Ain't they smart? Look at that one," pointing to Ellen, "she is smart like a lawyer, and the sister," pointing to me, "she is come to work and sew like she was the wife, see." She turned about then and yelled at the top of her voice: "Sarah 1 Sarah 1 Where is that lazy Sarah? Come 1 Directly I" A young, thin girl with a clear skin and enormous black eyes came slowly up the stairs and into the room. "See, Sarah," cried Mrs. Cohen, "there is two girls that is more smart than you. That one, she is just the same age as you, and she makes good money, yes. She makes twelve dollar a week. You cannot do that. Oh, no!" Sarah looked at us sullenly, and to our greeting: "How do you do?" she returned: "How's yourself?" Then turning savagely on her father and stepmother, she snarled:

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33 "And if I can't make money, whose fault is it? I have to work more hard than a servant even, with all those children of yours I" "Sarah, Sarah 1 be more careful of your speech I" cried her mother. "Did not the Goa above give to you those six little brothers? You should thank Him for His kindness." She started down the stairs, followed by her husband. Sarah, however, stayed in the room, and now she smiled at us in a friendly way. "Say, Miss- What's your names?" "Ellen and Marion." "Well, say, my stepmother is the limit. Gosh r I wish we were not Jews. Nobody likes us." "You ought not to say that," said Ellen, severely, "the Jews were God's chosen people, remember." "Gosh!" said Sarah, "I wish He didn't choose me." That evening, Sarah thrust her face in at our ~oor, and called in a loud whisper: "Say, giflls, do youse want to see two old fools? Come on then." She led us, all tiptoeing, into a room next to one occupied by a little English old maid named Miss Dick, who gave music lessons for twenty-five cents a lesson, and who always spoke in a sort of hissing whisper, so that a little spit came from her lips. Mrs. Cohen called it the "watering can."

MARION "Kneel down there," said Sarah, pointing to a crack in the wall. I peeped through, and this is what I saw: Seated in the armchair was a funny little old man-I think he was German-with a dried, wrinkled face. Perched on the arm of the chair was Miss Dick. They were billing and cooing like turtle doves, and she was saying: "Am I your little Dicky-birdie?" and he was looking proud and pleased. Ellen and I burst into fits of laughter, but Sarah pulled us away, and we covered our mouths and stifled back the laughter. When we got to our room, Sarah told us that the old man, Schneider, had come to her father and mother and asked them. to find him a wife. Her mother agreed to do so for the payment of ten dollars. She had spoken to Miss Dick, and the latter had also agreed to pay ten dollars. About a week after we had been there, Miss Dick and Mr. Schneider were married. They had packed up all Miss Dick's things and were going down the stairs with bags in their hands, when Mrs. Cohen ran out into the hall. "Now please, like a lady and gentleman, pay me the ten dollars each as we made the bargain, for I make you acquainted to get married." "Ten dollars!" screamed Miss Dick. "Yes, you make the bargain with me." "I made no such bargain," cried the bride

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shrilly. "We met and loved at first sight." Turning to Schneider, who was twirling his thumbs, she said: "Protect me, dearie." He said: "I say nutting. I say nutting." "Will you pay that debt?" demanded Mrs. Cohen and then, as Miss Dick did not answer, she pointed dramatically to my sister Ellen, who was standing with me laughing at the head of the stairs. "You see that lady. She is just the same as a lawyer, and she say you should pay. Pay for your man like a lady, that smart lady up there say you should." "Oh, oh I you old Shylock I" screamed Miss Dick hissingly. Mrs. Cohen was obliged to wipe her face and,backing away, she cried: "Don't you Shylock me with your watering can." Ellen and I were doubled up with laughter, and Mrs. Cohen seized hold of a broom, and literally swept bride and groom from the house, shouting at them all sorts of epithets and curses.

VII WE had been at Cohen's less than a month, when Wallace wrote he could wait no longer. He had not sold his play, but he had a very good position now as associate editor of a big magazine, and he said he was making ample money to support a wife. So he was coming for his little Ellen at once. 'rVe were terribly excited, particularly as Wallace followed up the letter with a telegram to expect him next day, and sure enough the next day he arrived. He did not want any "fussy" wedding. Only papa and I were to be present. Wallace did not even want us, but Ellen insisted. She looked sweet in her little dress (I had made it), and although I knew Wallace was good and a genius and adored my sister, I felt broken-hearted at the thought of losing her, and it was all I could do to keep from crying at the ceremony. As the train pulled out, I felt so utterly desolate that I stretched out my arms to it and cried out aloud: "Ellen, Ellen, please don't go. Take me, too." 36

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I never realized till then how much I loved my sister. Dear little Ellen, with her love of all that was best in life, her sense of humor, her large, generous heart, and her absolute purity. If only she had stayed by my side I am sure her influence would have kept me from all the mistakes and troubles that followed in my life, if only by her disgust and contempt of all that was dishonorable and unclean. But Wallace had taken our Ellen, and I had lost my best friend, my sister and my chum. That night I cried myself to sleep. I thought of all the days Ellen and I played together. Even as little girls mama had given us our special house tasks together. We would peel potatoes and shell peas or sew together, and as we worked we would tell each other stories, which we invented as we went along. Our stories were long and continuous, and full of the most extravagant and unheard of adventures and impossible riches, heavenly beauty and bravery that was wildly reckless. There was one story Ellen continued for weeks. She called it: "The Princess who used Diamonds as Pebbles and made bonfires out of one-hundreddollar bills." I made up one called: "The Queen who Tamed Lions and Tigers with a Smile," and more of that kind. Mama would send Ellen and me upon messages sometimes quite a distance from our house, for we

MARION had English friends living at the other side of the town. The French quarter was cheaper to live in and that was why we lived in Hochelaga. Ellen and I used to walk sometimes three miles each way to Mrs. McAlpin's house on Sherbrooke Street. To vary the long walk we would hop along in turn, holding one another's legs by the foot, or we would walk backward, counting the cracks in the sidewalks that we stepped over. One day a young man stood still in the street to watch us curiously. Ellen was holding one of my feet and I was hopping along on the other. He came up to us and said: "Say, sissy, did you hurt your foot?" "No," I returned, "we're just playing Lame

Duck." It was strange now, as 1 lay awake, crying over the going of my sister, that all the queer little funny incidents of our childhood together came thronging to my mind. I vividly remembered a day when mama was sick and the doctor said she could have chicken broth. W ell, there was no one home to kill the chicken, for that was the time papa went to England. Ellen and I volunteered to kill one, for Sung Sung, our old servant, believed it would be unlucky to kill one with the master away-one of his everlasting superstitions. Ellen and I caught the chicken. Then I held it down on the block of wood, while Ellen was to

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chop the head off. Ellen raised the hatchet, but when it descended she lowered it very gently, and began to cut the head off slowly. Terrified, I let go. Ellen was trembling, and the chicken ran from us with its head bleeding and half off. "Qu'est-ce que c' est? Qu'est-ce que c' est? De little girl, she is afraid. See me, I am not scared of nutting." It was the French grocer boy. He took that unfortunate chicken, and placing its bleeding head between the door and jamb, he slammed the door quickly, and the head was broken. I never did like that boy, now I hated him. Ellen looked very serious and white. When we were plucking the feathers off later, she said: "Marion, do you know we are as guilty as Emile and if it were a human being, we could be held as accomplices." "No, no, Ellen," I insisted. "I did not kill it. I am not guilty. I wouldn't be a murderer like Emile for anything in the world." "You're just as bad," said Ellen severely, "perhaps worse, because to-night you'll probably eat part of your victim." I shuddered at the thought, and I did not eat any chicken that night. When I was packing my things, preparatory to leaving Mrs. Cohen's next morning, for I was to return home, now that Ellen was married, Mrs.

MARION Cohen came in with a large piece of cake in her hand. She was very sorry for me because I had lost my sister. "There," she said, "that will make you feel better. Taste it. It is good." I could not eat their cake, because she used goose grease instead of butter, but I didn't want to hurt her feelings and I pretended to take a bite. When she was not looking I stuffed it into the wastepaper basket. "Now never mind about your sister no more," she said kindly. "The sun will shine in your window some day." I was still sniffing and crying, and I said: "It looks as if it were going to rain to-day." "VeIl then," she said, "it vill not be dry."

VIII

I

WAS at an age-nearly eighteen now-when girls want and need chums and confidantes. I was bubbling over with impulses that needed an outlet, and only foolish young things like myself were capable of understanding me. With Ellen gone, I sought and found girl friends I believed to be congenial. My sister Ada, because of her superiority in age and character to me, would not condescend to chum with me. Nevertheless, she heartily disapproved of my choice in friends, and constantly reiterated that my tastes were low. Life was a serious matter to Ada, who had enormous ambitions, and had already been promised a position on our chief newspaper, to which she had con· tributed poems and stories. To Ada, I was a frivo1lous, silly young thing, who needed constantly to be squelched, and she undertook to do the squelching, unsparingly, herself. "Since we are obliged," said Ada, "to live in a neighborhood with people who are not our equals, I think it a good plan to keep to ourselves. That's the only way to be exclusive. Now, that 41

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Gertie Martin" (Gertie was my latest friend) "is a noisy American girl. She talks through her nose, and is always criticizing the Canadians and comparing them with the Yankees. As for that Lu Fraser" (another of my friends) "she can't even speak the Queen's English properly, and her uncle keeps a saloon." Though I stoutly defended my friends, Ada's nagging had an unconscious effect upon me, and for a time I saw very little of the girls. Then one evening, Gertie met me on the street, and told me that, through her influence, Mr. Davis (also an American) had decided to ask me to take a part in "Ten Nights in a Bar Room," which was to be given at a "Pop" by the Montreal Amateur Theatrical Club, of which he was the head. I was so excited and happy about this that I seized hold of Gertie and danced with her on the sidewalk, much to the disgust of my brother Charles, who was passing with his new wife. Mr. Davis taught elocution and dramatic art, and he was a man of tremendous importance in my eyes. He was always getting up concerts and entertainments, and no amateur affair in Montreal seemed right without his efficient aid. The series of "Pops" he was now giving were patronized by all the best people of the city and he had an imposing list of patrons and patronessess. Moreover the plays were to be produced in a real thea-

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tre, not merely a hall, and so they had somewhat the character of professional performances. To my supreme joy, I was given the part of the drunkard's wife, and there were two glorious weeks in which we rehearsed and Mr. Davis trained us. He said one day that I was the "best actress" of them all, and he added that although he charged twenty-five dollars a month to his regular pupils he would teach me for ten, and if I couldn't afford that, for five, and if there was no five to be had, then for nothing. I declared fervently that I would repay him some day, and he laughed, and said: "I'll remind you when that 'some day' comes." Well, the night arrived, and I was simply delirious with joy. I learned how to "make up," and I actually experienced stage fright when I first went on, but I soon forgot myself. When I was crawling on the floor across the stage, trying to get something to my drunken husband, a voice from the audience called out: "Oh, Mar-ri-on! Oh, Ma-ri-on! You're on the bum! You're on the bum!" It was my little brother Randle, who, with several small boys had got free seats away up in front, by telling the ticket man that his sister was playing the star part. I vowed mentally to box his ears good and hard when I got home. When the show was over, Mr. Davis came to

MARION 44 the dressing room, and said, right before all the girls: "Marion, come to my studio next week, and we'll start those lessons, and when we put on the next 'Pop,' which I believe will be 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' we will find a good part for you." "Oh, Mr. Davis," I cried, "are you going to make an actress of me ?" "We'll see ! We'll see!" he said, smiling. "It will depend on yourself, and if you are willing to study." "I'll sit up all night long and study," I assured him. "The worst thing you could do," he answered. "We want to save these peaches," and he pinched my cheek. Mr. Davis did lots of things that in other men would have been offensive. He always treated the girls as if they were children. People in Montreal thought him "sissified," but I am glad there are some men more like the gentler sex. So I began to take lessons in elocution, and dramatic art. Oh! but I was a happy girl in those days. It is true, Mr. Davis was very strict, and he would make me go over lines again and again before he was satisfied, but when I got them finally right and to suit him, he would rub his hands, blow his nose and say: "Fine! Fine! There's the real stuff in you."

And what with Nora er)'ing with s)'mp:l\hy and excitement.

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45 He once said that I was the only pupil he had who had an atom of promise in her. He declared Montreal peculiarly lacking in talent of that sort, though he said he had searched all over the place for even a "spark of fire." I, at least, loved the work, was deadly in earnest and, finally, so he said, I was pretty, and that was something. We studied "Camille," "The Marble Heart" and "Romeo and Juliet." All of my spare time at home, I spent memorizing and rehearsing. I would get a younger sister, Nora, who was ab. sorbedly interested, to act as a dummy. I would make her be Armand or Armand's father. "Now, Nora," I would say, "when I come to the word 'Her,' you must say: 'Camille! Camille' !" Then I would begin, addressing Nora as Armand: "You are not speaking to a cherished daughter of society, but a woman of the world, friendless and fearless. Loved by those whose vanity she gratifies, despised by those who ought to pity her -her-Her-" I would look at Nora and repeat: "Her-!" and Nora would wake up from her trance of admiration of me and say: "Camel! Carnell" "No, no I" I would yell, "That is-" (pointing to the right-Mr. Davis called that "Dramatic

MARION action") "your way! This way-" (pointing to the left) "is mine!" Then throwing myself on the dining-room sofa, I would sob and moan and cough (Camille had consumption, you may recall), and what with N ora crying with sympathy and excitement, and the baby generally waking up, there would be an awful noise in our house. I remember papa coming half-way down the stairs one day and calling out: "What in the devil is the matter with that Marion? Has she taken leave of her senses?" Mama answered from the kitchen: "N 0, papa, she's learning elocution and dra. matic art from Mr. Davis; but I'm sure she's not suited to be an actress, for she lisps and her nose is too short. But do make her stop, or the neighbors will think we are quarreling." "Stop this minute!" ordered papa, "and don't let me hear any more such nonsense." I betook myself to the barn.

IX

T HE snow was crisp and the air as cold as ice.

We were playing the last performance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." We had been playing it for two weeks, and I had been given two different parts, Marie Claire, in which, to my joy, I wore a gold wig and a lace tea-gown-which I made from an old pair of lace curtains and a lavender silk dress mama had had when they were rich and she dressed for dinner-and Cassy. I did love that part where Cassy says: "Simon Legree, you are afraid of me, and you have reason to be, for I have got the devil in me!" I used to hiss those words at him and glare until the audience clapped me for that. Ada saw me play Cassy one night, and she went home and told mama that I had "sworn like a common woman before all the people on the stage" and that I ought not to be allowed to disgrace the family. But little I cared for Ada in those days. I was learning to be an actress! On this last night, in fact, I experienced all the 47

MARION sensations of a successful star. Someone had passed up to me, over the footlights if you please, a real bouquet of flowers, and with these clasped to my breast, I had retired smiling and bowing from the stage. r 0 add to my bliss, Patty Chase, the girl who played Topsy, came running in to say that a gentleman friend of hers was "crazy" to meet me. He was the one who had sent me the flowers. He wanted to know if I wouldn't take supper with him and a friend and Patty that night. My I I felt like a regular professional actress. To think an unknown man had admired me from the front, and was actually seeking my acquaintance I I hesitated, however, because Patty was not the sort of girl I was accustomed to go out with. I liked Patty pretty well myself, but my brother Charles had one day come to the house especially to tell papa some things about her-he had seen me walking with Patty on the street-and papa had forbidden me to go out with her again. , As I hesitated, she said: "It isn't as if they are strangers, you know. One of them, Harry Bond, is my own fellow. You know who his folks are, and but for them we'd have been married long ago. Well, Harry's friend, the one who wants to meet you, is a swell, too, and he hasn't been out from England long. Harry says his folks are big nobs over there, and

"

.

, '."- y

Someone had llassed up to me over the footlights, if you l)lcase. a real bouquet of floll'ers.

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he is studying law here. His folks send him a remittance and I guess it's a pretty big one, for he's living at the Windsor, and I guess he can treat us fine. So come along. You'll not get such a chance again." "Patty," I said, "I'm afraid I dare not. Mama hates me to be out late, and, see, it's eleven already." "Why, the night's just beginning," cried Patty. There was a rap at the door, and Patty exclaimed: "Here they are now I" All the girls in the room were watching meenviously, I thought-and one of them made a catty remark about Patty, who had gone out in the hall, and was whispering to the men. I decided not to go, but when I came out of the room there they were all waiting for me and Patty exclaimed: "Here she is," and, dragging me along by the hand, she introduced me to the men. I found myself looking up into the face of a tall young man of about twenty-three. He had light curly hair and blue eyes. His features were fine and clear-cut, and, to my girlish eyes, he appeared extraordinarily handsome and distinguished, far more so even than Colonel Stevens, who had, up till then, been my ideal of manly perfection. Everything he wore had an elegance about

MARION 5° it from his evening suit and the rich fur-lined overcoat to his opera hat and gold-topped cane. I felt flattered and overwhelmingly impressed to think that such a fine personage should have singled me out for especial attention. What is more, he was looking at me with frank and undisguised admiration. Instead of letting go my hand, which he had taken when Patty introduced us, he held it while he asked me if he couldn't have the pleasure of taking me out to supper. As I hesitated, blushing and awfully thrilled by the hand pressing mine, Patty said: "She's scared. Her mother won't let her stay out late at night. She's never been out to supper before." Then she and Harry Bond burst out laughing, as if that were a good joke on me, but Mr. Bertie '(his name was the Honorable Reginald Bertiepronounced Bartie) did not laugh. On the contrary, he looked very sympathetic, and pressed my hand the closer. I thought to myself: "My! I must have looked lovely as Marie St. Claire. Wait till he sees me as Camille." "I'm not afraid," I contradicted Patty, "but mama will be worried. She sits up for me." This was not strictly true, but it sounded better than to say that Ada was the one who always sat up for anyone in the house who went out at night. She even used to sit up for my brother Charles

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before he was married, and I could just imagine the cross-questioning she would put me through when I got in late. Irritated as I used to be in those days at what I called Ada's interference in my affairs, I know now that she always had my best good at heart. Poor little delicate Ada! with her passionate devotion and loyalty to the family and her fierce, antagonistic atti. tude to all outside intrusion. She was morbidly sensitive. Mr. Bertie quieted my fears by dispatching a messenger boy to our house with a note saying that I had gone with a party of friends to see the Ice Palace. Even with Ada in the back of my mind, I was now, as Patty would say, "out for a good time," and when Mr. Bertie carefully tucked the fur robes of the sleigh about me, I felt warm, excited and recklessly happy. We drove over to the Square:-where the Ice Palace was erected. The Windsor Hotel was filled with American guests who were on the balconies watching the torchlight procession marching around the mountain. My brother Charles was one of the snow-shoers, and the men were all dressed in white and striped blanket overcoats with pointed capuchons (cowls) on their backs or heads, and moccasins on their feet. ; It was a beautiful sight, that procession, and

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looked like a snake of light, winding about old Mount Royal, and when the fireworks burst all about the monumental Ice Palace, inside of which people were dancing and singing, really it seemed to me like a scene in fairyland. I felt a sense of pride in our Montreal, and looking up at Mr. Bertie, to note the effect of so much beauty upon him, I found him watching me instead. The English, when they first come out to Canada, always assume an air of patronage toward the "Colonials," as they call us, just as if, while interested, they are also highly amused by our crudeness. Now l\tlr. Bertie said: "We've seen enough of this Ice Palace's hard, cold beauty. Suppose we go somewhere and get something warm inside us. Gad, I'm dry." Harry told the driver to take us to a place whose name I could not catch, and presently we drew up before a brilliantly lighted restaurant. Harry Bond jumped out, and Patty after him. I was about to follow when I felt a detaining hand upon my arm, and Bertie called out to Bond: "I've changed my mind, Bond. I'll be h~nged if I care to take Miss Ascough into that place." Bond was angry, and demanded to know why Bertie had told him to order supper for four. He said he had called the place up from the theatre. I thought that queer. How could they

found ,. um

wat,'·ling

me.

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have known I would go, since I had not decided till the last minute? uN ever mind," said Bertie. "I'll fix it up with you later. Go on in without us. It's all right." Harry and Patty laughed, and. arm-in-arm, they went into the restaurant. All the time Bertie had kept a hand on my arm. I was too surprised and disappointed to utter a word, and after he had again tucked the rug about me, he said gently: "I wouldn't take a sweet little girl like you into such a place, and that Patty isn't a fit person for you to associate with." I said: "You must think I'm awfully good." I was disappointed and hungry. "Yes, I do think so," he said gravely. "Well, I'm not," I declared. "Besides, I'm going to be an actress, and actresses can do lots of things other people get shocked about. Mr. Davis says they are privileged to be unconventional." "You, an actress I" he exclaimed. He said the word as if it were something disgraceful, like 'Ada might have said it. "Yes," I returned. "I'll die if I can't be one." UWhatever put such an idea in your head. You're just a refined, innocent, sweet, adorable

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little girl, far too sweet and pure and lovely to live such a dirty life." He was leaning over me in the sleigh, and holding my hand under the fur robe. I thought to myself: "Neither St. Vidal nor Colonel Stevens would make love as thrillingly as he can, and he's certainly the handsomest person I've ever seen." I felt his arm going about my waist, and his young face come close to mine. I knew he was going to kiss me, and I had never been kissed before. I became agitated and frightened. I twisted around and pulled away from him so that despite his efforts to reach my lips his mouth grazed, instead, my ear. Much as I really liked it, I said with as much hauteur as I could com· mand: "Sir, you have no right to do that. How dare you?" He drew baCK, and replied coldly: "I beg your pardon, I'm sure. I did not mean to offend you." He hadn't offended me at all, and I was debating how on earth I was to let him know he hadn't, and at the same time keep him at the "proper distance" as Ada would say, when we stopped in front of our house. He helped me out, and lifting his hat loftily, was bidding me good-bye when I said shyly:

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"M-Mr. Bertie, you-you d-didn't offend me." Instantly he moved up to me and eagerly seized my hand. His face looked radiant, and I did think him the most beautiful man I had ever seen. With a boyish chuckle, he said: "I'm coming to see you to-morrow night. May I?" I nodded, and then I said: "You mustn't mind our house. We're awfully poor people." I wanted to prepare him. He laughed boyishly at that and said: "Good heavens, that's nothing. So are most of my folks-poor as church mice. As far as that goes, I'm jolly poor myself. Haven't a red cent except what the governor sends out to me. I'm going to see you anyway, and not your house." He looked back at the driver whose head was all muffied up under his fur collar. Then he said: "Will you give me that kiss now?" I returned faintly: "I c-can't. I think Ada's watching from the window." He looked up quickly. "Who's Ada?" "My sister. She watches me like a hawk." "Don't blame her," he said softly, and then all of a sudden he asked:

MARION "Do you believe in love at first sight?" "Yes," I answered. "Do you?" "Well, I didn't-till to-night, but, by George, I do-now!"

x

I

AM not likely to forget that fi'rst call of Reginald Bertie upon me. I had thought about nothing else, and, in fact, had been preparing all day. I fixed over my best dress and curled my hair. I cleaned all of the lower floor of our house, and dusted the parlor and polished up the few bits of furniture, and tried to cover up the worn chairs and horsehair sofa. Everyone of the children had promised to "be good," and I had bribed them all to keep out of sight. Nevertheless, when the front doorbell rang that evening, to my horror, I heard the wild, noisy scampering of my two little brothers down the stairs, racing to see which should be the first to open the door j and trotting out from the din. ing-room right into the hall came Kathleen, aged three, and Violet, four and a half. They had been eating bread and molasses and had smeared it all over their faces and clothes, and they stood staring solemnly at Mr. Bertie as though they had never seen a man before. On the landing above, 57

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looking over the banister, and whispering and giggling, were Daisy, Lottie and Nellie. Oh, how ashamed I felt that he should see all those dirty, noisy children. He stood there by the door, staring about him, with a look of amazement and amusement on his face; and, as he paused, the baby crawled in on hands and knees. She had a meat bone in her hand, and she squatted right down at his feet, and while staring up at him, wide-eyed, she went right on loudly sucking on that awful bone. My face was burning, and I felt that I never could live down our family. Suddenly he burst out laughing. It was a boyish, infectious laugh, which was quickly caught up and mocked and echoed by those fiendish little brothers of mine. "Are there any more?" he demanded gaily. "My word I They are like little steps and stairs." I said: "How do you do, Mr. Bertie ?" He gave me a quizzical glance, and said in a low voice: "What's the matter with calling me 'Reggie?' " Nora had run down the stairs and now, to my intense relief, I could hear her coaxing the children to come away, and she would tell them a story. Nora was a wonderful story-teller, and the children would listen to her by the hour. So would all the neighbors' children. I had told her

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that if she kept the children out of sight I would give her a. piece of ribbon on which she had set her heart. So she was keeping her word, and presently I had the satisfaction of watching her go· off with the baby on one arm, Kathleen and Violet holding to her other hand and skirt, and the boys in the rear. Mr. Bertie, or "Reggie," as he said I was to call him, followed me into the "parlor." It was a room we seldom used in winter on account of the cold, but I had coaxed dear papa to help me clean out the fireplace-the only way it was heated -our Canadian houses did not have furnaces in those days-and the boys had brought me in some wood from the shed. So, at least, we had a cheerful fire crackling away in the grate, and although our furniture was old, it did not look so bad. Besides he didn't seem to notice anything except me, for as soon as we got inside he seized my hands and said: "Give you my word, I've been thinking about you ever since last night." Then he pulled me up toward him, and said: "I'm going to get that kiss to-night." Just then in came mama and Ada, and feeling awfully embarrassed and confused, I had to introduce him. Mama only stayed a moment, but Ada settled down with her crochet work by the lamp. She never worked in" .the parlor on

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other nights, but she sat there all of that evening, with her eye on Mr. Bertie and occasionally saying something brief and sarcastic. Mama said, as she was going out: "I'll send papa right down to see Mr. Bertie. He looks so much like papa's brother who died in India. Besides, papa always likes to meet anyone from home." Papa came in later, and he and Mr. Bertie found much to talk about. They had lived in the same places in England, and even found they knew some mutual friends and relatives. Papa's sisters were all famous sportswomen and hunters. One was the amateur tennis champion, and, of course, Mr. Bertie had heard of her. Then papa inquired what he was doing in Montreal, and Bertie said he was studying law, and hoped to pass his finals in about eight months. Then, he added that as soon as he could get together a fair practice, he expected to marry and settle down in Montreal. When he said that, he looked directly at me, and I blushed foolishly, and Ada coughed significantly and sceptically. I really didn't get a chance to talk to him all evening, and even when he was going I could hardly say good-bye to him for mama came back with Daisy and Nellie, the two girls next to me, and what with Ada and papa there besides and

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everybody wishing him good-bye and mama inviting him to call again, I found myself almost in the background. He smiled, however, at me over mama's head, and he said, while shaking hands with her: "I'll be delighted. May I come-er-to-morrow night?" I saw Ada glance at mama, and I knew what was in their minds. Were they to be forced to go through this all again? The dressing up, the suppressing of the children, the using of the unused parlor, the burning of our fuel in the fireplace, etc. Papa, however, said warmly: "By all means. I've some pretty good sketch~s of Macclesfield I'd like to show you." "That will be charming," said my caller and, with a smile and bow that in.eluded us all, he was gone. r did not get that kiss after all, and I may as well confess I was disappointed.

XI

THE winter was passing into spring and Reggie had been a regular visitor at our house every night. The family had become used, or as Ada put it "resigned," to him. Though she regarded him with suspicion and thought papa ought to ask his "intentions," she knew that I was deeply in love with him. She had wrung this admission from me and she expressed herself as being sorry for me. Because of Reggie s dislike for everything connected with the stage, I had stopped my elocution lessons and I was making some money at my painting. We had had a fine carnival that winter, and I did a lot of work for an art store, painting snow scenes and sports on diminutive toboggans, as souvenirs of Canada. These American visitors bought and I had, for a time, all the work I could do. This work and, of course, Reggie's strenuous obj ections kept my mind from my former infatuation. Then, one night, he took me to see Julia Marlowe in "Romeo and Juliet." All myoid passion 62

MARION and desire to act swept over me, and I nearly wept to think of having to give it up. When we were going home, I told Reggie how I felt, and this is what he said: "Marion, which would you prefer to be, an actress or my wife?" We had come to a standstill in the street. Everything was quiet and still, and the balmy sweetness of the Spring night se~med to enwrap even this ugly quarter of the city in a certain charm and beauty. I felt a sweet thrilling sense of deep tenderness and yearning toward Reggie, and also a feeling of gratitude and humility. It seemed to me that he was stooping down from a very great height to poor, insignificant me. More than ever he seemed a wonderful and beautiful hero in my young eyes. "Well, dear?" he prompted, and I answered with a soft question: "Reggie, do you really love me?" "My word, darling," was his reply. "I fell in love with you that first night." "But perhaps that was because I-I looked so nice as Marie Claire," I suggested tremulously. I wanted to be, oh, so sure of Reggie. "You little goose," he laughed. "It was because you were you. Give me that kiss now. It's been a long time coming." I had known him three months, but not till that

MARION night had we had an opportunity for "that kiss," and it was sweet, and I the very happiest girl in the world. "Now we must hurry home," said Reggie, "as I want to speak to your father, as that's the proper thing to do, you know." "Let's not tell papa yet," I said. "I hate the proper thing, Reggie. Why do you always want to be 'proper.' " Reggie looked at me, surprised. "Why, dear girl, it's the proper thing to beer-proper, don't you know." There was something so stolidly English about Reggie and his reply. It made me laugh, and I slipped my hand through his arm and we went happily down the street. Just for fun-I always liked to shock Reggie, he took everything so seri. ously-I said: "Don't be too cocksure I'll marry you. I still would love to be an actress." "My word, Marion," said he. "Whatever put such a notion in your head? I wish you'd forget all about the rotten stage. Actresses are an immoral lot." "Can't one be immoral without being an actress?" I asked meekly. "We won't discuss that," said Reggie, a bit testily. "Let's drop the dirty subject." When he was going that night, and after he

MARION had kissed me good-bye several times in the dark hall, he said-but as if speaking to himself: "Gad I but the governor's going to be purple over this." The "governor" was his father.

XII "The The The And

summer days are coming blossoms deck the bough, bees are gaily humming the birds are singing now."

I

WAS singing and thumping on our old cracked piano. Ada said: "For heaven's sakes, Marion, stop that noise, and listen to this advertisement." I had been looking in the papers for some time in the hope of getting some permanent work to do. I was not making much money at my fancy painting, and papa's business was very bad. Ada was working on the "Star," and was helping the family considerably. She was the most unselfish of girls, and used to bring everything she earned to mama. She fretted all the time about the family and especially mama, to whom she was devoted. Poor little soul, it did seem as if she carried the whole weight of our troubles on her little shoulders. I had been engaged to Reggie now a year. He had failed in his law examinations, and that meant 66

MARION another year of waiting, for, as he said, it would be impossible to marry until he passed. He had decided to go to England this summer, to see if the "governor" wouldn't "cough up" some more cash, and he said he would then tell his family about our engagement. He had not told them that yet. He had expected to after passing his examinations, but having failed in these, he had to put it off, he explained to me. Ada used to say of Reggie that he was a "monument of selfishness and egotism," and that he spent more on himself for his clothes and expensive rooms and other luxuries than papa did on our whole family. She repeatedly declared that he was quite able to support a wife, and that his only reason for putting off our marriage was because he hated to give up any of the luxuries to which he was accustomed. In fact, Ada had taken a dislike to my Reggie, and she even declared that St. Vidal against whom she had been merely prejudiced because he was a French wine-merchant, would have been more desirable. Anyway, :Ada insisted that it was about time for me to do something toward the support of our family. Here I was nineteen years old and scarcely earning enough to pay for my own board and clothes. "Read that."

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She handed me the "Star," and pointed to the advertisement: WANTED: A young lady who has talent to work for an artist. Apply to Count von Hatzfeldt, Chateau de Ramezay, rue Notre Dame. "Why," I exclaimed, "that must be the old seigniory near the Notre Dame Cathedral." "Of course, it is," said Ada. "I was reading in the papers that they are going to make it into a museum of historical and antique things. It used to be the home of the first Canadian governors, and there are big cannons down in the cellars that they used. If I were you, I'd go right over there now and get that work. There won't be many applicants, for only a few girls can paint." I was as eager as Ada, and immediately set out for the Chateau de Ramezay. It was a long ride, for we only had horse-cars in those days, and the Chateau was on the other end of the city. I liked the ride, however, and looked out of the window all of the way. We passed through the most interesting and historical part of our city, and when we came to the dismal, mottled, old stone jail, I could not help shuddering as I looked up at it, and recalled what my brother Charles used to tell me about it when I was a little girl. He said it was mottled because

MARION the house had small-pox. If we did this or that, we would be thrown into that small-pox jail and given black bread and mice to eat, and when we came out we would be horribly pock-marked. He said all the anti-vaccination rioters had been locked up in there, and they were pitted with marks. As my car went by it, I could see the poor prisoners looking out of the barred windows and a great feeling of fear and pity for the sorrows of the world swept over me, so that my eyes be. came blinded with tears. A covered van was going in at the gate. ~ woman next to me said: "There's the Black Maria. Look 1 There's a young girl in it!" My heart went out to that young girl, and I wondered vaguely what she could have done that would make them shut her up in that loathsome "pock-marked" jail. When we reached the French hospital, "Hotel Bon Dieu," the conductor told me to get off, as the Chateau was on the opposite side, a little farther up the hill. I went up the steps of the Chateau and banged on the great iron knocker. No one answered. So I pushed the huge heavy door open-it was not locked-and went in. The place seemed entirely deserted and empty, and so old and musty, even

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the stairs seeming crooked and shaky. I wandered about until finally I came to a door on the second floor, with a card nailed on it, bearing the name: "Count von Hatzfeldt." I knocked, and the funniest little old man opened the door, and stood blinking at me. "Count von Hatzfeldt?" I inquired. Ceremoniously he bowed, and holding the door open, ushered me in. He had transformed that great room into a wonderful studio. It was at least five times the size of the average New York studio, considered extra large. From the beams in the ceiHng hung a huge swing, and all about the walls and from the ceilings hung skins and things he had brought from Iceland, where he had lived for over six months with the Esquimaux, and he had ever so many paintings of the people. I was intently interested and I wished my father could see the place. Count von Hatzfeldt showed me the work he was doing for the directors of the Chateau de Ramezay Society, who were intending to make a museum of the place. He was restoring the old portraits of the different Canadian governors and men of historical fame in Canada. "I will want you to work on this Heraldry," he said, and indicated a long table scattered with water-color paper, water colors, and sketches of

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coats of arms. "I will sketch in the coat of arms, and you will do the painting, young lady. We use this gold and silver and bronze a great deal. This, I suppose, you know, is called 'painting en gauche.' "

I assured him I could do it. Papa had often painted in that medium, and had taught me. I told the Count that once a well-known artist of Boston called on papa to help him paint some fine lines on a big illustration. He said his eyes were bothering him, so he could not finish the work. It just happened that at that time papa's eyes were also troubling him, but as he did not want to lose the work, he had said: "I'll send my little girl to you. She can do it better than 1." "And Count von Hatzfeldt," I said proudly, "I did do it, and the artist praised me when I finished the work, and he told papa he ought to send me to Boston to study at the art schools there." At that time I was only thirteen. The Boston artist gave me ten dollars. I gave eight of it to mama. With the other two, I bought fifty cents' worth of candy, which I divided among all of us, mama included. With the dollar-fifty left, I bought Ellen a birthday present of a brooch with a diamond as big as a pea in it that cost twentyfive cents. Then Ellen and I went to St. Helen's

MARION Island, and there we ate peanuts, drank spruce beer ( a French-Canadian drink), had two swings and three merry-go-rounds, and what with the ten cents each for the ferry there was nothing left to pay our carfare home. So we walked, and mama was angry with us for being so late. She slapped Ellen for "talking back," and I always got mad if Ellen got hurt, so I "talked back" worse and then I got slapped, too, and we both had to go to bed without supper. I didn't tell all this to the Count; only the first part about doing the work, etc. He said-he talked with a queer sort of accent, like a German, though I believe he was Scandinavian: "Ya, ya 1 VeIl, I will try you then. Come you to vork to-morrow and if you do veIl, you shall have five dollar a veek. For that you vill ;york on the coat of arms two hours a day, and if I lind you can help me mit the portraits-it maybe you can lay in the bag-grounds, also the clothes-if so, I vill pay you some little more. iYa, ya 1" He rubbed his hands and smiled at me. He looked so much like a funny little hobgoblin that I felt like laughing at him, but there was also something very serious and almost angry in his expreSSIOn. "Now," said he, "the pusiness talk it is all done. Ya, ya 1"

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He said "Ya, ya I" constantly when h~ was thinking. "I have met your good papa," he went on, "and I like him much. He is a man of great gift, but-" He threw out his hands expressively. "Poor papa," I thought. "I suppose he let the Count see how unbusiness-like and absent-minded he is." After a moment the Count said: "His-your papa's face-it is a typical north. ern one-such as we see plenty in ScandinaviaYa, ya I" "Papa is half-Irish and half-English," I ~x­ plained. He nodded. "Ya, ya, it is so. Nevertheless his face is northern. It is typical, while you_It He regarded me smilingly. "Gott 1 You look like one little Indian girl that I meet when I live in the North. Her father, the people told me, was one big rich railway man of Canada, but he did not know that pretty little Indian girl, she was his daughter. Ya, ya I" He rubbed his hands, and nodded his head musingly, as he studied me. Then: "Come, I will show you the place here." Pulling aside a curtain covering a large window (the Count shut out all the light except the north

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light), he showed me the great panorama of the city below us. We looked across the St. Lawrence River, and in the street directly below was the old Bonsecour market. I could see the carts of the "habitants" (farmers) loaded with vegetables, fruit and fresh maple syrup, some of it of the consistency of jelly. Never have I tasted such maple syrup since I left Canada. In the midst stood the old Bonsecour Church. "Good people," it seemed to say, benevolently, "I am watching over you all!" "It is," said the Count, "the most picturesque place in Montreal. Some day I will paint it, and then it shall be famous. Ya, ya! At present it is convenient to get the good things to eat. I take me five or ten cents in my hand, and those good habitants they give me so much food I cannot use it all. You vill take lunch with me, Ya, ya! and we will have the visitors here in the Chateau de Rame-zal. Ya, ya I" He had kept on tap two barrels of wine, which he bought from the Oke monks. He said they made a finer wine than any produced in this country or the United States. They made it from an old French recipe and sold it for a mere song. These monks, he told me, also made cheese and butter, and the cheese, he said, was better than the best imported. I used to see these monks on the street, and even in the coldest days in winter

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75 they wore only sandals on their feet, and their bare heads were shaved bald on top. They owned an island down the St. Lawrence, and depended on its products for their existence.

XIII my surprise, Reggie was not at all pleased T o when I told him of the work I had secured. I had been so delighted, and papa thought it an excellent thing for me. He said the Count was a genius and I would learn a great deal from him. Reggie, however, looked glum and sulky and said in his prim English way: "You are engaged to be married to me, and I don't want my wife to be a working girl." "But, Reggie," I exclaimed, "I have been work. ing at home, doing all kinds of painting for dif. ferent people and helping papa." "That's different," he said sulkily. "A girl can work at home without losing her dignity, but when she goes out-well, she's just a working girl, that's all. Nice girls at home don't do it. My word! My people would take a fit if they thought I married a working girl. I've been trying to break it to them gradually about our engagement. I told them I knew very well a girl who was the granddaughter of Squire Ascough of Macclesfield, but I haven't had the nerve yet to tell them ·-to-er-"

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I knew what he meant. He hadn't told them about us here, how poor we were, of our large family, and how we all had to work. "I don't care a snap about your old people," I broke in heatedly, "and you don't have to marry me, Reggie Bertie. You can go back to England and marry the girl they want you to over there. (He had told me about her.) And, anyway, I'm sick and tired of your old English prejudices and notions, and you can go right now-the sooner the better. I hate you." The words had rushed out of me headlong. I was furious at Reggie and his people. He was always talking about them, and I had been hurt and irritated by his failure to tell them about me. If he were ashamed of me and my people I wanted nothing to do with him, and now his objecting to my working made me indignant and angry. Reggie, as I spoke, had turned deathly white. He got up as if to go, and slowly picked up his hat. I began to cry, and he stood there hesitating before me. "Marion, do you mean that?" he asked huskily. I said weakly: "N-no, b-but I sha'n't give up the work. I gave up acting for you, but I won't my painting. I've got to work!" Reggie drew me down to the sofa beside him. "Now, old girl, listen to me. I'll not stop

MARION your working for this Count, but I want you to know that it's because I love you. I want my wife to be able to hold her head up with the best in the land, and none of our family-none of our women folk-have ever worked. As far as that goes, jolly few of the men have. I never heard of such a thing in our family." "But there's no disgrace in working. Poor people have to do it," I protested. "Only snobs and fools are ashamed of it. Look at those Sinclair girls. They were all too proud to work, and their brother had to support them for years, and all the time he was in love with Ivy Lee and kept her waiting and waiting, and then she fell in love with that doctor and ran away and married him, and when Will Sinclair heard about it, he went into his room and shot himself dead. And it was aU because of those big, strong, lazy sisters and vain, proud old mother, who were always talking about their noble family. All of us girls have got to work. Do you think we want poor old papa to kill himself working for us big, healthy young animals just because we hap-pen to be girls instead of boys?" Reggie said stubbornly: "Nevertheless, it's not done by nice peopl~, Marion. It's not proper, you know." I pushed him away from me. "Oh, you make me sick," I said. "My brother-

You can go b:lck to England aud marry thc girl tlic)' want you to, ovcr thcrc.

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79 in-law, Wallace Burrows, would call that sort of talk rank snobbery. In the States women think nothing of working. They are proud to do it, women of the best families." Reggie made a motion of complete distaste. The word "States" was always to Reggie like a red rag to a bull. "My dear Marion, are you going to hold up the narsty Yankees as an example to me? My word, old girl! And as for that brother-in-law of yours, I say, he's hardly a gentleman, is he? Didn't you say the fellow was a-er-journalist or something like that?" I jumped to my feet. "He's a better kind of gentleman than you are I" I cried. "He's a genius, and-and-and- How dare you say anything about him I We all love him and are proud of him." I felt my breath coming and going and my fist doubling up. I wanted to pummel Reggie just then. j "Come, come, old girl," he said. "Don't let's have a narsty scene. My word, I wouldn't quarrel with you for worlds. N ow, look here, darling, you shall do as you like, and even if the governor cuts me off, I'll not give up my sweetheart." I He looked very sweet when he said that, and I melted in an instant. All of my bitterness and anger vanished. Reggie's promise to stand by me

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in spite of his people appealed to me as romantic and fine. "Oh, Reggie, if they do cut you off, will you work for me with your hands?" I cried excitedly. "My word, darling, how could I?" he ex· claimed. "I'm blessed if I could earn a tuppence with them. Besides, I could hardly do work that was unbecoming a gentleman, now could I, darling ?" I sighed. "I suppose not, Reggie, but do you know, I believe I'd love you lots more if you were a poor beggar. You're so much richer than I am now, and somehow-somehow-you seem sort of selfish, and as if you could never understand how things are with us. You seem-always-as if you were looking down on us. Ada says you think we aren't as good as you are." "Oh, I say, :Marion, that's not fair. I've always said your father was a gentleman. Come, come!" he added peevishly, "don't let's argue, there's a good girl. It's so jolly uncomfortable, and just think, I sharn't be with you much longer, now." He was to sail for England the following week.! I was wearing his ring, a lovely solitaire. In spite of all his prejudices and his selfishness, Reggie had lots of lovable traits, and he was so hand. some. Then, too, he was really very much in

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love with me, and was unhappy about leaving me. The day before he went, he took me in his arms and said, jealously: "Marion, if you ever deceive me, I will kill you and myself, too. I know I ought to trust you, but you're so devilishly pretty, and I carn't help being jealous of everyone who looks at you. What's more, you aren't a bit like the girls at home. You say and do really shocking things, and sometimes, do you know, I'm really alarmed about you. I feel as if you might do something while I'm away that wouldn't be just right, you know." I put my hand on my heart and solemnly I swore never, never to deceive Reggie, and to be utterly true and faithful to him forever. Somehow, as I spoke, I felt as if I were pacifying a spoiled child.

XIV

A LL of that summer I worked for the old

Count. Besides the Heraldry work, I assisted him with the restoration of the old oil portraits, some of which we had to copy completely. The Count had not much patience with the work the Society set him to do, and he let me do most of the copying, while he worked on other painting more congenial to him. He was making a large painting of Andromeda, the figure of a nude woman tied to the rocks, and in the clouds was seen Perseus coming to deliver her. He had a very pretty girl named Lil Markey to pose for this. My father was a landscape and marine painter, and never used models, and the first time I saw Lil I was repulsed and horrified. She came tripping into the studio without a stitch on her, and she even danced about and seemed to be amused by my shocked face. I inwardly despised her. Little did I dream that the time would come when I, too, would earn my living in that way. I got much interested when I saw the Count painting from life. He tied Lil to an easel with 82

MARION soft rags, so as not to hurt her hands, and later he painted the rocks from a sketch, behind her, where the old easel was. While Lil rested, she would swing (still naked) in the big swing, and jump about and sing. In all my experiences later as an artist's model in America, I never saw a model who behaved as Lil did. The Count would give her cigarettes and she would tell stories that were not nice, and I had to pretend I didn't hear or couldn't understand them. Lil was not exactly a bad girl, but sort of reckless and lacking entirely in modesty. She did have some decent homely traits, however.. She would wrap a piece of drapery about her and say: "You folks go on painting, and I'll be the cook." Then she would disappear into the xitchen and come back presently with a delicious lunch which she had cooked all herself. I was afraid the Count was falling in love with her, for he used to look at her lovingly and sometimes he called her "Countess." Lil would make faces at him behind his back, and whisper to me: "Golly, he looks like a dying duck." Twice a week, the Count had pupils, ri~h young women mostly, who learned to paint just as they did to play the piano and to dance. The Count would make fun of them to Lil and me.

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They would take a canvas and copy one of the Count's pictures, he doing most of the work. Then he would practically repaint it. The pupil, so the Count said, would then have it framed and when it was hung on the wall the proud parents would point to the work and admiring friends would say: "What talent your daughter has I" The Count, between chuckles and excited "Ya, ya's," would illustrate derisively the whole scene to Lit and me. He tried to form a Bohemian club to meet at the studio in the Chateau, and we sent out many invitations for an opening party. When the evening came there was a large gathering of society folk, and we had the place full. Every one went looking at the Count's things and exclaiming about them, and they asked what he termed the "most foolish questions" about art. Among them was a violinist, Karl Walter, whose exquisite music made me want to cry. He had a beautiful face, and I could not take my eyes from it all evening. When the party was over, he offered to see me home. The rest of the company were all departing in their carriages, and I thought rather drearily of that ride home on the horse-car. It seemed very short, however, with Mr. Walter. When we came to our door, he took my hand and said:

He would tell stories that were llot nice and I had to pretend 1 couldn't hcar or didn't understand them.

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MARION "Mademoiselle, I am going away for six months. When I return, I would like to know you better. Your sympathetic face was the only one I was playing to. The rest were all cattle." He never came back to our Montreal, and I heard that he died soon after leaving us. The morning after the party, the old Count was very irritable and cross, and when I asked him if he had enjoyed himself, he exclaimed disgustedly: "Stupid! Stupid! Those Canadians, do not know the meaning of the word 'Bohemian.' It was a 'pink tea.' Ugh!" I suggested that next time we should invite Patty Chase and Lu Fraser, and girls like that, but the Count shook his head with a hopeless gesture. "That is the other extreme," he said. "N 0, no, you, my little friend, are the only one worthy to belong to such a club as I had hoped to start. It is impossible in this so stupid Canada."

xv on the big iron knocker. R AT-A-TAT-TAT, called:

I

"Come in," and Mrs. Wheatley, an English woman, accompanied by her daughter, Alice, a pretty girl of fifteen, entered. She came directly over to me, with her hand held out graciously. "How do you do, Marion? I have been hearing about the Count, and I want you to introduce us." I did so, of course, and she went on to tell the Count that she wanted her daughter's portrait painted. "Just the head and shoulders, Count, and Miss Marion is here-her father and I are old friends - I shall not consider it necessary to come to the sittings. Marion win, I am sure, chaperon my little girl," and she smiled at me sweetly. The Count was much pleased, and I could see his eyes sparkling as he looked at Alice. She was lovely, in coloring like a rose leaf, and her hair was a beautiful reddish gold. Her mother was a woman of about forty-five, rather plump, who affected babyish hats and fluffy dresses and tried 86

MARION to look younger than she was. After the Count had named a price she thought reasonable,. she said Alice would come the next day. The Count was very gallant and polite to her and she seemed much impressed by his fine manners and I suppose. title. "I have such a lovely old-gold frame, Count," she said, "and I thought Alice's hair would just match it and look lovely in it." The Count threw up his hands and laughed when the door closed upon her, but he anticipated with pleasure painting the pretty Alice. The following day Alice came alone, and soon we had her seated on the model's platform. She was a gentle, shy little thing, rather dull, yet so sweet and innocent that she made a most appealing picture. The Count soon discovered that her neck was as lovely as her face. In her innocence, Alice let him slip the drapery lower and lower until her girlish bosoms were partly revealed. The Count was charmed with her as a model. He made two pictures of her, one for himself, with her neck and breasts uncovered, and the other for her mother, mumed up with drapery to the neck. A few weeks later, after the pictures were finished, I was crossing the street, when Mrs. Wheatley came rushing up to me excitedly: "Miss Ascoughl I am furious with you for allowing that wicked old Count to paint my Alice's

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portrait as I am told he did. Everyone is talking about the picture in his studio. It is disgraceful i An outrage I" "Oh, no, Mrs. Wheatley," I tried 'to reassure her, "it is not disgraceful, but beautiful, and the Count says that all beauty is good and pure and that is art, Mrs. Wheatley. Indeed, indeed, it is." "Art t H'mph! The idea. Art t Do you think r want my Alice shown like those brazen hussies in the art galleries? I am surprised at you, Marion Ascough, and I advise you, for the sake of your family, to be more careful of your reputation. I am going right over to that studio now and I will put my parasol through that disgraceful canvas." Fairly snorting with indignation and desire for vengeance, this British matron betook herself in the direction of the Chateau. Fortunate1y I was younger, and more fleet-footed than she, and I ran all of the way, and burst into the studio: "Count Hatzfeldt! Count Hatzfe1dt I Hurry up and hide Alice's picture. Mrs. Wheatley is coming to poke a hole in it." Just as we were speaking, there came an im· patient rap upon the door and the Count shoved his arms into the sleeves of his old velvet smokingjacket, and himself flung the door open. Before Mrs. Wheatley, who was out of breath, could say a word, he exclaimed:

MARION "How do you do it, madame? Heavens, it is vonderful, vonderful! How do you do it? Please have the goodness to tell me how you do it?" "Do what?" she demanded, surprised and taken aback by the Count's evident admiration and cordiality. "Why, madame, I thought you were your daughter. You look so young, so sweet, so fresh I Ah, madame, how I should love to paint you as the Spring! It is a treat for a poor artist to see so much freshness and peauty. Gott in Himmel t How do you do it?" An astounding change had swept all over Mrs. Wheatley. She was simpering like a girl, and her eyes were flashing the most coquettish glances at the Count. "Now, Count, you flatter me," she said, "but really I never do anything to make myself look: younger. I simply take care of myself and lead a simple life. That is my only secret." "Impossible," said the Count unbelievingly, and then his glance fell down to her feet and he exclaimed excitedly: "What I have been looking for so many years I It is impossible to find a model with the perfect feets. Madame, you are vonderfull" Her face was wreathed with smiles, and she stuck out her foot, the instep coyly arched, as she said:

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"Yes, it's true my feet are shapely and small. I only take threes, though I could easily wear twos or twos and a half." Then with a very gracious bend of her head and a smile she added winningly: "I believe it might be perfectly proper to allow you to use my foot as a model, especially as Marion is here." She beamed on me sweetly. I removed her shoe and stocking, and the Count carefully covered over a stool with a soft piece of velvet, upon which he set her precious foot. Enthusiastically he went to work drawing that foot. She playfully demanded that he must never tell anyone that her foot was the model for the sketch, though all the time I knew she wanted him to do just that. When he was through and we had all loudly exclaimed over the beauty of the drawing, she said: "And now, Count Hatzfeldt, may I see the copy of my daughter's picture?" The Count had covered it over before opening the door. "Certainly, madame." He drew the cover from the painting. "Here it is. Miss Alice did sit for the face. The lower part-it was posed by a professional model. It is the custom, madame." "As I see," said Mrs. Wheatley, examining the

£mhusiastically he went to work drawing that fOOl.

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MARION picture through her lorgnon. "Those professional models have no shame, have they, Count?" "None, none whatever, madame," sighed the Count, shaking his head expressively.

XVI

I

HAD received, of course, a great many letters from Reggie, and I wrote to him every day. He expected to return in the fall, and he wrote that he was counting the days. He said very little in his letters about his people, though he must have known I was anxiously awaiting word as to how they had taken the news of our engagement. Toward the end of summer, his letters came less frequently, and, to my great misery, two weeks passed away when I had not word from him at all. I was feeling blue and heartsick and, but for my work at the Chateau, I think I would have done something desperate. I was really tremendously in love with Reggie and I worried and fretted over his long absence and silence. Then one day, in late September, a messenger boy came with a letter for me. It was from Reggie. He had returned from his trip, and was back in Montreal. Instead of being happy to receive his letter, I was filled with resentment and 92

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indignation. He should have come himself and, in spite of what he wrote, I felt I could not excuse him. This was his letter: "DARLING GIRLIE:

I am counting the hours when I will be with you. I tried to get up to see you last night, but it was impossible. Lord Eaton's son, young Albert, was on the steamer coming over, and they are friends of the governor's and I simply had to be with them. You see, darling, it means a good deal to me in the future, to be in touch with these people. His brother-in-law, whom I met last night, is head cockalorum in the House of Parliament, and as I have often told you, my ambition is to get into politics. It's the surest road to fame for a Barrister. N ow I hope my foolish little girl will understand and believe me when I say that I am think. for you as much as for myself. I am hungry for a kiss, and I feel I cannot wait till tonight. Your own, REGGIE."

For the first time in my life I experienced the pangs of jealousy and yet I was jealous of some· thing tangible. It was lurking in my thought, and all sorts of suspicions and fears came into my hot head. When Reggie came that evening I did not open

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the door as usual. I heard him say eagerly, when the children let him in: "Where's Marion?" I was peeping over the banister, and I deliberately went back into the bedroom and counted five hundred before I went down to see him. He was walking excitedly up and down and as I came in he sprang to meet me, his arms outstretched; but I drew back coldly. Oh, how bitter I felt, and vindictive, too I "How do you do, Mr. Bertie," I said. "Mr. Bertie I Marion, what does this mean?" He stared at me incredulously, and then I saw a look of amazement and suspicion come into his face, which had grown suddenly red as with rage. "Good God!" he cried. "Do you mean you don't care for me any more? Then you must be in love with someone else." "Reggie," I sneered, "don't try to cover up your own falseness by accusing me. You pretend to love me, and yet after all these months when you get back, you do not come to me, but go to see other women (I was guessing) and men." I ended with a sob of rage, for I could see in Reggie's face that my surmises were correct. He, however, exclaimed:

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95 "Oh, that's it, is it?" And before I could move, he had seized me impulsively in his arms and was kissing me again and again. I never could resist Reggie once he got his arms about me. I always became just as weak as a kitten and I think I would have believed anything he told me then. I just melted to him, as it were. He knew it well, the power of his· strong arms about me, and whenever he wanted his way about anything with me he would pick me right up and· hold me till I gave in. After a moment, with me still in his arms, he said: "It's true I was with men and women, but that was not my fault. There's such a thing as duty. I had no pleasure in their society. I was longing for you all the time, but I had to stay with them because they are influential people, and I want to use them to help me-us, Marion." "Who were those women?" I demanded. "Only some friends of my family's. They had a box at the theatre, and there was young Eaton, of course, and his sister and a cousin. They bored me to death, give you my word they did, darling. Come, come now, be good to your tired old Reggie." I was glad to make up with him and, oh I infinitely happy to have him back. The great oceans of water that had been between us seemed to have melted away. Nevertheless, he had planted

MARION a feeling in me that I could not entirely rid myself of, a feeling of distrust. Like a weed, it was to grow in my heart to terrible proportions.

XVII

THE days that followed were happy ones for

me. Reggie was with me constantly, and I even got off several afternoons from the studio and spent the time with him. One day we made a little trip up the St. Lawrence, Reggie rowing all the way from the wharf at Montreal to Boucherville. We started at noon and arrived at six. There we tied up our boat and went to look for a place for dinner. We found a little French hotel and Reggie said to the proprietor: "We want as good a dinner as you can give us. We've rowed all the way from Montreal and are famished." "Bien! You sall have ze turkey which is nearly cook," said the hotel keeper. "M'sieu he row so far. It is too much. Only Beeg John, ze Indian, row so far. He go anny deestance. Also he go in his canoe down those Rapids of Lachine. Vous connais dat man-Beeg John?" Yes, we knew about him. Everyone in Montreal did. 97

MARION We waited on the porch while he prepared our dinner. The last rays of the setting sun were dropping down in the wood, and away in the distance the reflections upon the St. Lawrence were turning into dim purple the brilliant orange of a little while ago. N ever have I seen a more beautiful sunset than that over our own St. Lawrence. I said wistfully: "Reggie, the sunset makes me think of this poem: "The sunset gates were opened wide, Far off in the crimson west, As through them passed the weary day In rugged clouds to rest." Before I could finish the last line, Reggie bent over and kissed me right on the mouth. "Funny little girl," he said. "Suppose instead of quoting poetry you speak to me, and instead of .looking at sunsets, you look at me." "Reggie, don't you like poetry then?" "It's all right enough, I suppose, but I'd rather have straight English words. What's the sense of muddling one's language? Silly, I call it," he said. I felt disappointed. Our family had always loved poetry. Mama used to read Tennyson's "Idyls of the King," and we knew all of the char-

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99 acters, and even played them as children. Moreover, papa and Ada and Charles and even Nora could all write poetry. Ada made up poems about every little incident in our lives. When papa went to England, mama would make us little chilldren all kneel down in a row and repeat a prayer to God that she had made up to send him back soon. Ada wrote a lovely poem about God hearing us. She also wrote a poem about our Panama hen who died. She said the wicked cock hen, a hen we had that could crow like a cock, had killed her. How we laughed over that poem. I was sorry Reggie thought it was nonsense, and I wished he would not laugh or sneer at all the things we did and liked. "Dinner is ready pour m'sieu et madame I" Gracious I That man thought I was Reggie's wife. I colored to my ears, and I was glad Reggie did not understand French. He had set the table for two and there was a big sixteen pound turkey on it, smelling so good and looking brown and delicious. I am sure our Canadian turkeys are better than any I have ever tasted anywhere else. They certainly are not "cold-storage birds." They charged Reggie for that whole sixteenpound turkey. He thought it a great joke, but I wanted to take the rest home. The tide being against us, we left the rowboat at the hotel with

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instructions to return it, and we took the train back to Montreal. Coming home on the train, the conductor proved to be a young man who had gone to school with me and he came up with his hand held out: "Halla, Marion I" "Halla, Jacques." I turned to Reggie to introduce him, but Reggie was staring out of the window and his chin stuck out as if it were in a bad temper. When Jacques had passed along, I said crossly to Reggie: "You needn't be so rude to my friends, Reggie Bertie." "Friends I" he sneered. "My word, Marion, you seem to have a passion for low company." I said: "Jacques is a nice, honest feHow." "Na doubt," said Reggie loftily. ''I'll give him a tip next time he passes." "Oh, how can you be so despicably mean?" I cried. He turned around in his seat abruptly: "What in the world has come over you, Marion I Yau !lave changed since I came back." I felt the injustice of this and shut my lips tight. I did not want to quarrel with Reggie, but I was burning with indignation and I was hurt through and through by his attitude.

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In silence we left the train and in silence went to my home. At the door Reggie said: "We had a pleasant day. Why do you always spoil things so? Good-night." I could not speak. I had done nothing and he made me feel as if I had committed a crime. The tears ran down my face and I tried to open the door. Reggie's arms came around me from behind, and, tilting back my face, he kissed me. "There, there, old girl," he said, "I'll forgive you this time, but don't let it happen again."

XVIII

I

HAD finished the work for the Chateau de Ramezay, but the Count said I could stay on there, and that he would try to help me get outside work. He did get me quite a few orders for work of a kind he himself would not do. One woman gave me an order to paint pink roses on a green plush piano cover. She said her room was all in green and pink. When I had finished the cover, she ordered a picture "of the same colors." She wished me to copy a scene of meadows and sheep. So I painted the sunset pink, the meadows green and the sheep pink. She was delighted and said it was a perfect match to her carpets. The Count nearly exploded with delight about it. My orders seemed to give him exquisite joy and he sometimes said, to see me at work compensated for much and made life worth while. He used to hover about me, rubbing his hands and chuckling to himself and muttering: "Ya, ya!" I did a lot of decorating of boxes for a manu102

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facturer and painted dozens of sofa pillows. Also I put "real hand-painted" roses on a woman's ball dress, and she told me it was the envy of everyone at the big dance at which she wore it. I did not love these orders, but I made a bit of money, and I needed clothes badly. It was impossible to go around with Reggie in my thin and shabby things. Moreover, an especially cold winter had set in and I did want a new overcoat badly. I hated to have to wear myoid blanket overcoat. It looked so dreadfully Canadian, and many a time I have seen Reggie look at it askance, though, to do him justice, he never made any comment about my clothes. In a poor, large family like ours, there was little enough left for clothes. About the middle of winter, the Count began to have bad spells of melancholia. He would frighten me by saying: "Some day ven you come in the morning, you vill find me dead. I am so plue, I vish I vas dead." I tried to laugh at him and cheer him up, but every morning as I came through those ghostly old halls, I would think of the Count's words and I would be afraid to open the door. One day, about five in the afternoon, when I was getting ready to go, the Count who was sitting near the fire all hunched up, said: "Please stay mit me a little longer. Come sit

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by me a little vile. Your radiant youth vill varm me up." I had an engagement with Reggie and was in a hurry to get away. So I said: "I can't, Count. I've got to run along." He stood un suddenly and clicked his heels together. "Miss Ascough," he said, "I think after this, you better vork some other place. You have smiles for all the stupid Canadian poys, but you vould not give to me the leastest." "Why, Count," I said, astonished, "don't be foolish. I'm in a hurry to-night, that's all. I've an engagement." "Very vell, Miss Ascough? Hurry you out. It is pest you come not pack again." "Gh, very well I" I said. "Good-bye." I ran down the stairs, feeling much provoked with the foolish old fellow. Poor old Count! How I wish I had been kinder and more grateful to him; but in my egotistical youth I was incapable of hearing or understanding his pathetic call for sympathy and companionship. I was flying along through life, as we do in youth. I was, indeed, as I had said, "in a hurry." He died a few years later in our Montreal, a stranger among strangers, who saw only in the really beauty-loving soul of the artist the gro-

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tesque and queer. I wished then that I could have been with him in the end, but I myself was in a strange land, and I was experiencing some of the same appalling loneliness that had so oppressed and crushed myoid friend.

XIX I told Reggie I was not going to the W HEN Chateau any more, he was very thoughtful for some time. Then he said: "Why don't you take a studio up town? You can't do anything in this God-forsaken Hochelaga." "Why, Reggie," I said, "you talk as if a studio were to be had for nothing. Where can I find the money to pay the rent?" "Look here/' said he, "I'm sure to pass my finals this spring, and I'm awfully busy. It takes a deuce of a time to get down here. N ow if you had a studio of your own it would be perfectly proper for me to see you there, and then, besides, don't you see, darling, I would have you all to myself? Here we are never alone hardly, unless I take you out." "1 couldn't afford to pay for such a place," 1 said, sighing, for I would have loved to have a studio of my own. "Tell you what you do," said Reggie. "You let me pay for the room. You needn't get an 106

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1°7 expensive place, you know-just a little studio. Then you tell your governor that you get the room free for teaching or painting for the landlady, or something like that. What do you say, darling ?" "I thought you said you despised a lie?" was my answer. "You said you would never forgive me if I deceived you or told you a lie." "But that was to me, darling. That's different. It's not lying exactly-just using a bit of diplomacy, don't you see?" "1m afraid I can't do it, Reggie. I ought to stay at home. They really need my help, now Ellen and Charles are both married, and Nellie engaged and 'may marry any time." Nellie was the girl next to me. She was engaged to a Frenchman who was urging her to marry right away. "You see," I went on, "there's only Ada helping. The other girls are too young to work yet, though Nora is leaving home next week." "Nora! That kid! What on earth is she going to do?" "Oh, Nora's not so young. She's nearly seven· teen. You forget we've been engaged some time now, and all the children are growing up." I said this sulkily. Secretly I resented Reggie's constantly putting off our marriage day. "But what is she going to do?"

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"Oh, she's going out to the West Indies. She's got a position on some paper out there." "Whee!" Reggie drew a long whistle. "West Indies! I'll be jiggered if your parents aren't the easiest ever. Your mother is the last woman in the world to bring up a family of daughters, and I'm blessed if I ever came across any father like yours. Why, do you know when I asked him for his consent to our engagement, he never asked me a single question about myself, but began to talk about his school days in France, and how he walked when he was a boy from Boulogne to Calais. When I pushed him for an answer, he said absently, 'Yes, yes, I suppose it's all right, if she wants you,' and the next moment asked me if I had read Darwin." Reggie laughed heartily at the memory, and then he said: "Yet I'm fond of your governor, Marion. He is a gentleman." "Dear papa," I said, "wouldn't hurt a fly, but anybody could cheat him, and that is why I hate to deceive him." "Well, don't lie to him then if you feel that way. Just say you are going to take a studio up town and I bet you anything he'll never bother his head where you go or how you pay the rent. As for your mother, if you told her the studio was free, she would think that just the usual thing

MARION and that you were doing the landlord an honor in using it." Again Reggie burst out laughing, but I would not laugh with him, so he stopped and said: "Your mother's awfully proud of you, darling, and I don't blame her. She told me one day that you were the most beautiful baby in England, where she said you were born. She said she used to take you out to show you off, as you were her show child. Your mother is a joke, there's no mistake about that. And to think you are afraid to leave them to go up town! Come, come darling, don't be a little goose. Think how cozy it will be for us both!" It would be "cozy." I realized that, and then the thought of having a studio all to myself appealed to me. Reggie and I were engaged, and why should I not let him do a little thing like that to help me. Reggie had never been a very generous lover. The presents he made me were few and far between, and often I had secretly compared his affiuent appearance with my own shabby self. After all, I could get a room for a fairly nominal price, and perhaps if I got plenty of work, I would soon be able to pay for it myself. So I agreed to look for a place, much to Reggie's delight. As Reggie had predicted, papa and mama were not particularly interested when I told them I

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was going to open a studio up town, and even when I added that I might not be able to come home every night, but would sleep sometimes on a lounge in the studio mama merely said: "Well, you must be sure to be home for Sunday dinners anyway." Ada, however, looked up sharply and said: "How much will it cost you?" I stammered and said I did not know, but that I would get a cheap place. Ada then said: "Well, you ought to try and sell papa's paint. ings there, too. Nobody wants to come to Hochelaga to look at them." I replied eagerly that I would show papa's work, and I added that I was going to try and start a class in painting, too. "If you make any mone~," said Ada, "you ought to help the family, as I have been doing for some time now, and you are much stronger than I am, and almost as old." Ada had been delicate from a child, and al. ready I was taller and larger than she. She made up in spirit what she lacked in stature. She was almost fanatically loyal to mama and the family. She devoted herself to them and tried to imbue in all of us the same spirit of pride.

xx

L U room. FRAZER went with me to look for a Lu was an Irish-Canadian girl with whom I had gone to school. She worked as a stenographer for an insurance firm, and was very popular with all the girls. There was something about her that made nearly all the girls go to her and consult her about this or that, and tell her all about their love affairs. I think the attraction lay in Lu's absolute interest in others. She never talked about her own feelings or affairs, but was always willing to listen to the outpourings of others. When you told her anything she was full of sympathetic murmurs, or screams of joy, or expressions of indignation if the story you told her called for that. I had formed the habit of going to Lu about all my worries and anxieties over Reggie, and I always found a willing listener and staunch champion. The girls called her the Irish Jew, as she kept a bank account and whenever the girls were short of money they would borrow from Lu, who would charge them interest. Reggie III

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heartily disliked her without any just reason. He said: "She belongs to a class that should by right be scrubbing floors; only she got some schooling, so she is ticking the typewriter instead." Nevertheless, I liked Lu, and in spite of Reggie kept her as my friend, though she knew that he hated her. When I told her about Reggie's offer to pay for the studio, she said: "Urn! Then take as fine a one as you can get, Marion. Soak him good and hard. I hear he pays a great big price for his own rooms at the Windsor." I explained to her that I only wanted as cheap a place as I could get, and that as soon as I made enough money, I intended to pay for it myself. We looked through the advertisements in the papers, made a list and then went forth to look for that "studio." On Victoria Street, we found a nice big front parlor which seemed to be just what I wanted. The landlady offered it to me for ten dollars a month, and when I said that that would do nicely she asked if I were alone, and when I said I was, she said: "I hope you work out all day." I told her I worked in my room, and that I would make a studio out of it. Whereupon she said:

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"I prefer ladies who go out to work. I had one lady here before, and I had to put her out. She stayed in bed till eleven and I found cigarette ashes in her room. Then she had some gentlemen callers, and they actually shut the door. As this is a respectable house, I went into the back parlor and watched her through a crack in the folding doors. Then I goes back and raps on the door, and I says: 'Young person'-I wouldn't call the likes of her a lady-I says: 'Young person, I want my room. I'm a lone widow woman and I have to consider my reputation, and the carryings on in that room is what I won't have in my house.' So out she goes. I am a lady, even if I do keep a rooming-house." I looked at Lu, and Lu said: "We'll call again." "Oh," said the woman, "if you decide to take this room I'll make a reduction, and I don't mind gentlemen callers if you leave the door open." I felt a sort of disgust come over me and, telling her I did not want the room, I made for the door, hurrying Lu along. "Oh, I see," she shouted after us, "you want to shut the door I" After looking about, we found a back parlor in a French-Canadian house on University Street. The landlady was very polite, and I paid her eight dollars in advance.

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The following day I moved all my things into the "studio," as it now, in fact, began to look like, what with all my paintings about and some of papa's, an easel, palette and painting materials. I covered up the ugly couch with some draperies the Count sent over for me. Poor old fellow, he had sent word to me the very next day to come back, saying he missed his little pupil very much, but at Reggie's advice I wrote him that I had taken a studio of my own. He then sent me a lot of draperies and other things, and wrote that he would come to see me very soon. I had a sign painted on black japanned tin, with the following inscription : MISS MARION ASCOUGH ARTI3T

Orders taken for all kinds of work. I got the landlady to put it in the front window. There were a lot of crayon family portraits on my walls, and they looked very bad. I covered them over with draperies, and when Madame Lavalle, my landlady, came in she exclaimed: "Why you dat? Am I and my family so hugly then ?" I assured her that I covered them to protect

II you dedde to take this room, I'll make a reduction, and I don', mind gentlemen callers if you leave the door open.

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them from the turpentine that I used in my oil paints. She came to me later and said: "Mamselle, I am tell my husband you say the turpentine it may be will spoil the portraits of my familee. He's telling me dat will not spoil it. But if mamselle will not be offend, I the pictures will put in my own parlor, and if some time mamselle she have company, and wish her room to look more elegant, I will give ze permission to hang them on her walls again." The studio was all settled, and I stood to survey my work, a delightful feeling of proprietorship coming over me. I breathed a sigh of blessed relief to think I was now free of all home influence, and had a real place all of my own. llHere is some gentlemens to see mamselle," called Madame Lavalle, and there standing in the doorway, smiling at me with a merry twinkle in his eye, was Colonel Stevens. I had not seen him since that night, nearly four years ago, when Ellen and I went to ride with him in Mr. Mercier's carriage. With him now was a tall man with a very red face and nose. He wore a monocle in his eye, and he was staring at me through it. I was very untidy as I had been busy settling up, and my hair was all mussed up and my hands dirty. I had on my painting apron, and that was smudged over, too. I felt ashamed of my appearance, but Colonel Stevens said:

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"Isn't she cute ?" Then he introduced us. His friend's name was Davidson. "We were on our way to the Club," said the Colonel, "and as we passed your place I saw your sign, and 'By Gad,' I said, 'I believe that is my little friend, Marion.' Now Mr. Davidson is very much interested in art." He gave a. little wink at Mr. Davidson, and then went on, "and I think he wants to buy some of your paintings." "Oh, sit down," I urged. Customers at once 1 I was excited and happy. I pushed out a big armchair near the fire and Colonel Stevens sat down, and seemed very much at home. Mr. Davidson followed me to where I had a number of little paintings on a shelf. I began to show them to him, pointing out the places, but he scarcely looked at them. Stretching out his hand, he picked up two and said: "I'll take these. How much am I to give you?" "Oh, five-" I began. "Charge him the full price, Marion," put in the Colonel. "He's a rich dog." "I get five dollars for two of that size," I said. "Well, we'll turn it to ten for each," smiled Mr. Davidson. "Oh, that's too much I" I exclaimed.

"Char!:~

]Iilll lhe full prke, Marion:' put ill the Colonel. "He's a rich tog."

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"Tut, tut I" said Colonel Stevens, laughing. "They are worth more. She really is a very clever little girl, eh, Davidson?" I felt uncomfortable and to cover my confusion I started to wrap the paintings. "No, no, don't bother," said Mr. Davidson, "leave them here for the present. I'll call another time for them. We have to go now." When Mr. Davidson shook hands with me he pressed my hand so that I could hardly pull it away, and just as they were passing out, who should come up the stairs but Reggie 1 When he saw Colonel Stevens and Mr. Davidson, his face turned perfectly livid, and he glared at them. The minute the door had closed upon them, he turned on me: "What were those men doing here?" he demanded harshly. My face got hot, and I felt guilty, though of what, I did not know. "Well? Why don't you answer me? What was that notorious libertine, Stevens, and that beast, Davidson, doing here?" he shouted, and then as still I did not answer him, he yelled: "Why don't you answer me instead of standing there and staring at me, looking your guilt? God in heaven 1 have I been a fool about you? lIave you been false to me then ?" "No, Reggie, indeed, I haven't," I said. "I

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didn't tell you about Ellen and I going out with him because-because-" I thought he must have heard of that ride! "Going out with him t When? Where?" Suddenly he saw the money in my hand, and the sight of it seemed to drive him wild. "What are you doing with that money? Where did you get it from 7" I was holding the two ten-dollar bills all the time in my hand. "Are you crazy, Reggie 7" I cried. "How can you be so silly 7 This is the money Mr. Davidson paid me for these paintings." "Well, then, what are you doing here if he bought them?" demanded Reggie. "He left them here. He said he'd call some other time for them." "Marion, are you a fool, or just a deceitful actress 7 Can't you see he does not want your paintings? He gave you that money for expected favors and, damn it! I believe you know it. too." I went over to Reggie, and somehow felt older than he. A great pity for him filled my heart. I put my arms around his neck, and although he tried to push me from him, I stuck to him and then suddenly, to my surprise, Reggie began to cry. He had worked himself up to such a state of excitement that he was almost hysterical. I

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gathered his head to my breast, and cried with him. In a little while, we were sitting in the big armchair and I told Reggie all about the visit, and also about that ride of long ago-before I had even met him-that Ellen and I had taken with Colonel Stevens and Mr. Mercier. I think he was ashamed of himself, but was too stubborn to admit it. Before he left, he made a parcel of those two paintings, and sent them over, with a bill receipted by me, to the St. James Club.

XXI

I T was snowing hard.

The snow was commg down in great big flakes. I had built a big fire in my grate and had turned off all the gas lights. The flames from the grate threw their glare upon the walls. I was waiting for Reggie, and I was wondering where I was going to get some money to pay for clothes I badly needed now, but out of the little I had been earning I had been obliged to send most of it home. It seemed to me as if every time Ada came to see me, it was as a sort of collector. Help was needed at home, and Ada was going to see that we all did our share. I had had my studio now some time and I had made very little money. Reggie had paid the rent each month, but I had never taken any other help from Reggie. He seemed to have so much money to spend, and yet he was always saying he was too poor to marry though he had passed his examinations and was a full partner in the big law firm. He said he wanted to build up a good practice before we married. 120

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I heard his footsteps in the hall and the door opened. "Hallo, hallo 1 Sitting all alone in the dark, darling ?" Reggie came happily into the studio. He was in evening dress with his rich fur-lined coat thrown open. He sat down on the arm of my chair. "I'm awfully disappointed, darling," he said. "I had been looking forward to spending the evening here by the fire with you, but I'm obliged to go with my partners and a party of friends to a dinner they are giving, and I expect to meet that member of Parliament I told you about. If I can break away early, I'll come back here and say good-night to the sweetest girl in the world. So don't go home to-night, as we can have a few moments together anyway." I was left once more alone. I sat there staring into the fire. Why did Reggie never take me to these dinners? There were always women there. Why was I not introduced to his friends? Why did he ,leave me more and more alone like this? He was jealous of every man who spoke to me, and yet he left me alone and went to dinners and parties where he did not think I was good enough to go. Some one was rappin~on.the door, and I called: "Come !" It was Lu Frazer.

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"Why, Marion Ascough, what are you sitting alone in the dark for? Where is the fair one of the golden locks?" Lu was shaking the snow from her clothes, but she stopped suddenly when she saw my face. ·'What are you crying about?" "I'm not crying. I'm just yawning." Lu put her hands on my shoulders. "What's his nibs been saying to you now?" she asked. I shook my head. Somehow I didn't feel like confiding even in Lu this night. "Look here, Marion," she said, "I met an old admirer of yours as I came here to-night, and he asked me to try and get you to go with him and a friend to a little supper. He said you knew his friend-that he'd bought some pictures from you. His name's Davidson. Folks do say that his father was the Prince of Wales and that he got fresh with one of the Davidson girls that time when he was in Canada and their father entertained him, and they pass this Davidson off as a younger son of the family. I told Colonel Stevens I'd do what I could. Now, I saw that Bertie getting into a sleigh all rigged up in evening clothes and with that Mrs. Marbridge and her sister. Folks are saying he's paying attention to the latter lady. I said to myself, when I saw him: 'What's sass for the goose is sass for the

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gander.' Marion, you're a fOOl to sit moping here, while he is enjoying himself with other women." I jumped to my feet. "I'll go with you, Lu-anywhere. I'm crazy to go with you. Let's hurry up." "All right, get dressed while I 'phone the Colonel. He said he'd be waiting at the St. James Club for an answer for the next half-hour." I have a very dim remembrance of that evening. We were in some restaurant, and the drink was cold and yet it burned my throat like fire. I had never tasted any liquor before, except the light wine that the Count sometimes sparingly gave me. I heard some one saying-I think it was Mr. Davidson: "She's a hell of a girl to take out for a good time." I said I felt ill, and Lu took me out to get the air. She said she would be back soon. But once out there, I conceived a passionate desire to return to my room and I ran away in the street from Lu. As I opened my door a feeling of calamity seemed to come over me. It must have been nearly twelve o'clock, and I had never been out so late before, not even with Reggie. As I came in, Reggie, who had been sitting by

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the table, stood up. He stared at me for a long time without saying a word. Then: "You've been out with men I" he said. "Yes," I returned defiantly, "I have." "And you've been drinking I" "Yes," I said. "So have you." He Hung me from him, and then all of a sudden he threw himself down in the chair by the table and, putting his head upon his arms, he shook with sobs. All of my anger melted away and I knelt down beside him and entreated him to forgive me. I told him just where I had been and with whom, and I said that it was all because I was tired, tired of waiting so long for him. I said: "Reggie, no man has a right to bind a girl to a long engagement like this. Either marry me, or set me free. I am wasting my life for you." He said if we were to be married now, his whole future would be ruined; that he expected to be nominated to a high political position, and to marry at this stage of his career would be sheer madness. I promised to wait for Reggie one more year j but I was very unhappy, and all the rest of that winter I could not refrain from constantly referring to our expected marriage, though I knew it irritated him for me to refer to it.

XXII

MY Frenchman. younger sister, Nellie, had married her The family began to look upon me as they did on Ada, as an old maid I And I was only twenty-one. Reggie had been much wrapped up in certain elections and I had seen him only for a few minutes each day, when one night he came over to the studio. He looked very handsome and reckless. I think he had been drinking, for there was a strange look about his eyes, and when he took me in his arms I thought he was never going to let me go. Whenever Reggie was especially kind to me, I always thought it a good time to broach the subject of our marriage. So now I said: "Reggie, don't you think it would be lovely if we could arrange to be married in June? I hate to think of another summer alone." It was a clear, sweet night in April, and my windows were all open. There was the fragrance of growing green in the air, and it seemed as warm as an early summer day. I felt happy, and 125

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oh, so drawn to my handsome Reggie as he held me close in his arms. He put his warm face right down on mine, and he said: "Darling girl, if we were to marry, you cannot imagine the mess it would make of my career. My father would never forgive me. Don't you see my whole future might be ruined? Be my wife in every way but the silly ceremony. If you loved me, you would make this sacrifice for me." Something snapped in my head I I pushed him from me with my hands doubled into fists. For the first time I saw Reginald Bertie clearly! My sister was right. He was a monument of selfishness and egotism. He was worse. He was a beast who had taken from me all my best years, and now-now he made a proposition to me that was vile I-me, the girl he had asked to be his wife I What had I done, then, that he should have changed like this to me? I was guilty of no fault, save that of poverty. I knew that had I been possessed of those things that Reggie prized so much, never would he have insulted me like this. I felt him approaching me with his arms held out, but I backed away from him and suddenly I found myself hysterically speaking those lines from Camille. I was pointing to the door: "That's your way!" I screamed at him. "Go!"

If you IOl'cd me you would make this sacrifice for mc.

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"Marion - darling - forgive me - I didn't mean that." But I wouldn't listen to him, and when at last he was out of my room, I locked and bolted the door upon him.

XXIII

I

DID not sleep all of that night, and when the

morning dawned I had made up my mind what to do. I packed up all my things and then I went out to see Lu Frazer. I told her I was going to leave Montreal-that I wanted to go to the Statesto Boston, where that artist had told papa I ought to study. I felt sure I would get work there, and could study besides. I borrowed twenty-five dol. lars from Lu, and promised to pay her back thirty. five within three months. When I got back to my studio I found this letter from Reggie:

"DARLING: I know you will forgive your heartbroken Reg. gie, who was not himself last night. All shall be as it was between us, and I swear to you that never again will I say anything to my little girl that will hurt her feelings. Your repentant, REGGIE."

I crushed his letter up in my hand. I felt that 128

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my love for him was dead. I never wanted to see him again. He had sacrificed me {or the sake of his selfish ambitions. My train was to leave at eight, and Lu was going to be there to see me off. I sat down and wrote the following letter to Reggie before leaving the house: II

DEAR REGGIE:

I am leaving for Boston tonight. I have loved you very dearly, and I feel bad at leaving you without saying good.bye, but I will not live any longer in that studio that you pay for, and I could not stand home any more. I can earn my living better in Boston, and when you are ready I will come back to you, but I cannot trust myself to say good-bye. Your loving, MARION."

Then I went down to Hochelaga and said goodbye to them all at home. Papa hunted up the address of Mr. Sands, that artist for whom I had done that work when a little girl of thirteen. Papa felt sure he would help me get something. Mama and papa seemed to have a vague idea that I had some definite place I could go to, and they did not ask any questions. We girls often felt older than our parents. ~nyway, more worldly, and they had the greatest trust in our ability to take care of ourselves.

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Ada thought it a good thing for me to go. She said I would get better pay for my work in Boston, and that I must be sure to send something home each week, just a& Nora was doing. I felt a lump in my throat when I left the old house. There was still a bit of snow in the garden, though it was April, where I had played as a child. I put my head out of the cab window to take a last look at the familiar places, which I told myself, with a sob, I might never see agam. Lu was at the station. She had my ticket, and the balance of the twenty-five dollars in an envelope which she slipped into my hand. The train was nearly due to go. My foot was on the step when I heard Reggie's voice calling my name. He came running down the platform: "Marion ! You shall not go. You're carrying this too far, darling.'" "Yes, yes, I'm going," 1 said to Reggie. "You're not going to stop me any longer." "But, Marion, I didn't mean what 1 said.";1 stared up at him directly. "Reggie, if 1 stay, will we be married-right away?" "Why-Marion, look here, old girl, you can wait a little longer, can't you?" I laughed up at him harshly.

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"No I" I cried harshly, "I can't. And I hope God will never let me see your face again." I ran up the steps of the train and started inside. I did not look out.

XXIV

NEVER shall I forget that journey in the train, I had not thought to get a sleeper, so I sat up all night long. I had the whole seat to myself. The conductor turned the next seat over toward me, and by putting up my feet, I was fairly comfortable. I shut my eyes and tried to go to sleep, but the thoughts that came thronging through my head were too many. I wept for my lost sweetheart, and yet I vowed never to go back to him. His future should not be spoiled by me. Oh, as I thought of how many times Reggie had said that, a feeling of helpless rage against him took possession of me. I saw him in all his ambitious, selfish, narrow snobbery and pride. Even his love for me was a part of his peculiar fastidiousness. He wanted me for himself because I was prettier than most girls, just as he wanted all luxurious things, but he never stopped to think of my comfort or happiness. Somehow, as the train slipped farther and farther away from Montreal, Reggie's influence 13 2

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over me seemed to be vanishing, and presently, as I gazed out into the night, he passed away from my mind altogether. We were passing through dark meadows, and they looked gloomy and mysterious under that starlit sky. I thought of how papa had taught us all so much about the stars, and how he said one of :i)ur ancestors had been a great astronomer. Ada knew all of the planets and suns by name and could pick them out, but to me they were always little points of mystery. I remembered as a little girl I used to look up at them and say to one particular star: "Star bright, star light First star I see to-night, Wish I may-wish I might Get the wish I wish to-night." Then I would say quickly: "Give me a doll's carriage." Ada had told me if I did that for seven nights, the fairies would give me whatever I asked for, and each night I asked for that doll's carriage. I watched to see it come and I would say to Ada: "What's the matter with that old fairy? I thought you said she'd give me my wish?" Ada would answer: "Oh, fairies are invisible, and no doubt the carriage is right near by, but you can't see it."

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"But what's the use," I would say, "of a carriage I can't see?" "Try it again," would say Ada. "Perhaps they'll relent. You probably offended them, or didn't do it just right." For seven nights more, I would faithfully repeat the formula. Then at Ada's suggestion I would hunt in the tall grass at the end of the garden. "Perhaps," Ada would say, "there is a fairy sitting on the edge of a blade of grass and she has the carriage." Then I would lie in the grass and wait for the carriage to become visible. I never got that doll's carriage. The fairies never relented. I dozed for a little while and was awakened by the faint crowing of cocks, and I thought sleepily of a little pet chicken I used to dress in baby's clothes, and I dreamed of a lovely wax doll that Mrs. McAlpin had given me. It was queer how, as I lay there, all these little details of my childhood came up to my mind. I saw that wax doll as plainly as if I had it in my arms again. My brother Charles had taken a slate pencil and had made two cruel marks on its sweet face, and had left the house laughing at my rage and grief. All day long I had nursed my doll, rocking it back and forth in my arms and sobbing:

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"Oh, my doll 1 Oh, my doll I" Ada had said: "Don't be silly. Dolls don't feel. But she is disfigured for life, like smallpox." I threw her down. I rushed up to Charles' room, bent upon avenging her. Hanging on the wall was a lacrosse stick, the most treasured possession of my brother. I seized a pair of scissors and I cut the catgut of that lacrosse. As it snapped, I felt a pain and terror in my heart. I tried to mend it, but it was ruined. Ada's shocked face showed at the door. "I'm glad I" I cried to her defiantly. "Poor Charles," said Ada, "saved up all of his little mOl'ley to get that stick, and he did all those extra chores, and he's the captain of the Shamrock Lacrosse team. You are a mean, wicked girl, Marion." "I tell you I'm glad I" I declared fiercely. But when Charles came home and saw it, he held that stick to his face and burst out crying, and Charles never, never cried. I felt like a murderer, and I cried out: "Oh, I'm sorry, Charles. Here's all my pennies. You buy a new one." uyou devil I" he stormed and lifted up his hand to strike me. I fled behind papa's chair, but I wished, oh 1 how I wished, that Charles would forgive me.

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It all came back to me like a dream, in the train, and I found myself crying for Charles even as I had cried then. And again I began to think of Reggie, Reggie who had hurt me so terribly, Reggie whom I had thought I loved above everybody else in the world. What was it he had said to me? That I should be his wife without a ceremony! I sat up in the seat. I felt frozen stiff. I was looking at the naked truth in the plain light of day. The glamour was gone from my romance. I was awake to the bare, ugly facts. The train was moving slowly, and some one said we were nearing Boston. I shook off all memories of Montreal and an expectant feeling of excitement came over me. What did this big United States mean to me? I felt suddenly light and happy and free! Free! That was a beautiful word that everyone used in this "Land of the Free." I went into the dressing-room and washed my face and hands and did my hair fresh. A girl was before the mirror, dabbing powder and rouge over her face, and she took up all the room so I could not get a glimpse of myself in the mirror. "You look as fresh as a daisy," she said, turning around and looking at me, "and I guess you've had a good night's rest. I hardly sleep in those

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stuffy sleepers, and my fellow's to meet me so I don't want to look a fright." I asked if we were near to Boston, and she said we were there now. The train had come to a standstill.

xxv WHEN I left the train with my bag in my hand, I felt excited and a little bit afraid. I realized that I had no special destination, and the part of the city where the station was did not look as if it was a place to find a room. There were many cars passing, and I finally got on one, a Columbus Avenue. As we rode along I looked out of the window and watched the houses for a "Room to Let" sign, and presently we came to some tall stone houses, all very much alike, and ugly- and severelooking after our pretty Montreal houses with their bits of lawn and sometimes even little gardens in front. There were "Room to Let" signs on nearly all the houses in this block. So I got out and went up the high steps of the one I thought looked the cleanest. I rang the bell and a black woman opened the door. I said: "Is your mistress in?" :And she said: "How?" We never say "How?" like that in Canada. If we aren't polite enough to say: "I beg your 13 8

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pardon," then we say: "What?" So I thought she meant, how many rooms did I want, and I said: "Just one, thank you." She walked down the hall, and I heard her say to some one behind a curtain there: "Say, Miss Darling, there's a girl at the door. I think she's a forriner. She sure talks and looks like no folks I knows." There was a quiet laugh, and then a faded little woman in a faded little kimono came hurrying down the hall. I call her "faded-looking," because that describes her very well. Her face, once pretty, no doubt, made me think of a halfwashed-out painting. Her hair was almost colorless, though I suppose it had once been dull brown. N ow wisps of grayish hair stood out about her face as if ash had blown against it. She had dim, near-sighted eyes, and there was something pathetically worn- and tired-looking about her. "Well? What is it you want?" she inquired. I told her I wanted a little room, and said: "I've just arrived from Montreal." "Dear me I" she exclaimed, "you must be tired I" She seemed to think Montreal was as far away as Siberia. She showed me up three flights of stairs to a tiny room in which was a folding bed. As I had never seen a folding bed before, she opened it

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up and showed me how it worked. When it was down there was scarcely an inch of room left and I had to put the one chair out into the hall. She explained that it would be much better for me to have a folding bed, because when it was up I could use the room as a sitting-room and see my company there. I told her I did not expect any company as I was a perfect stranger in Boston. She laughed-that queer little bird-like laugh I had heard behind the curtain, and said: "I'll take a bet you'll have all the company this room will hold soon." There was something kindly about her tired face and when I asked her if I had to pay in advance-the room was three dollars a weekshe hesitated, and then said: "Well, it's the custom, but you can suit yourself. There's no hurry." I sometimes think that nearly everyone in the world has a story, and, if we only knew it, those nearest to us might surprise us with a history or romance of which we never dreamed. Take my little faded landlady. She was the last person in the world one would have imagined the heroine of a real romance, but perhaps her romance was too pitiful and tiny to be worth the telling. Nevertheless, when I heard it-from another lodger in the house-I felt drawn to poor Miss

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Darling. To the world she might seem a withered old maid. I knew she was capable of a great and unselfish passion. She had come from Vermont to Boston, and had worked as a cashier in a down-town restaurant. She had slowly saved her money until she had a sufficient sum with which to buy this rooming-house, which I sometimes thought was as sad and faded as she. While she was working so hard, she had fallen in love with a young medical student. He had even less money than Miss Darling. When she opened her rooming-house she took him in, and for three years she gave him rent free and supported him entirely, even buying his medical books, paying his tuition, his clothes and giving him pocket money. He had promised to marry her as soon as he passed, but within a few days after he became a doctor he married a wealthy girl who lived in Brookline and on whom he had been calling all the time he had been living with Miss Darling. The lodger who told me about her said she never said a word to anyone about it, but just began to fade away. She lost thirty pounds in a single month, but she was the "pluckiest little sport ever," said the lodger. It seemed to me our stories were not unlike, and I wondered to myself whether Reggie was

MARION capable of being as base as was Miss Darling's lover. While I was taking my things out of my suitcase, Miss Darling watched me with a rather curious expression, and suddenly she said: "I don't know what you intend to do, but take my advice. Don't be too easy. If I were as young and pretty as you, I tell you, I would make every son of a gun pay me well." I said: "I'll be contented if I can just get work soon." She looked at me with a queer, bitter little smile, and then she said: "It doesn't pay to work. I've worked all my life." Then she laughed bitterly, and went out suddenly, closing the door behind her. As soon as I had washed and changed from my heavy Canadian coat to a little blue cloth suit I had made myself, I started out at once to look up the artist, Mr. Sands, whose address papa had given me. I lost my way several times. I always got lost in Boston. The streets were like a maze, winding around and running off in every direction. I finally found the studio building on Boylston, and climbed up four flights of stairs. When I got to the top, I came to a door with a neat little visiting card with Mr. Sands' name upon it. I

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remembered that Count von Hatzfeldt had his card on the door like this, and for the first time I had an instinctive feeling that my own large japanned sign: "Miss Ascough, Artist," etc., was funny and provincial. Even papa had never put up such a sign, and when he first saw mine, he had laughed and then had run his hand absently through his hair and said he "supposed it was all right" for the kind of work I expected to do. Dear papa I He wouldn't have hurt my feelings for worlds. With what pride had I not shown him my sign and "studio 1" I knocked on Mr. Sands' door, and presently he himself opened it. At first he did not know me, but when I stammered: "I'm-Miss Ascough. D-don't you remember me? I did some work for you in Montreal eight years ago, and you told me to come to Boston. Well-I've cornel" "Good LordI" he ejaculated. "Did I ever tell anybody to come to Boston? Good Lord 1" And he stood staring at me as if he still were unable to place me. Then after another pause, during which he stared at me curiously, he said: "Come in, come in 1" While he was examining me, with his palette stuck on his thumb and a puzzled look on his face as if he didn't quite know what to say to me or to do with me, I looked about me.

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It was a very luxurious studio, full of beautiful draperies and tapestries. I was surprised, as the bare stairs I had climbed and the outside of the building was most unbeautiful. Sitting on a raised platform was a very lovely girl, dressed in a Greek costume, but the face on the canvas of the easel was not a bit like hers. Mr. Sands, as though he had all of a sudden really placed me in his mind, held out his hand and shook mine heartily, exclaiming: "Oh, yes, yes, now I remember. Ascough's little girl. Well, well, and how is dear old Montreal? And your father, and his friendwhat was his name? Mmmmum-let me seethat German artist-you remember him? He was crazy-a madman I" Lorenz was the artist he meant. He was a great friend of my father's. Papa thought him a genius, but mama did not like him at all, because she said he used such blasphemous language and was a bad influence on papa. I remember I used to love to hear him shout and declaim and denounce all the shams in art and the church. He was a man of immense stature, with a huge head like Walt Whitman's. He used to come to the Chateau to see the Count, with whom he had long arguments and quarrels. He was German and the Count a Dane. He would shout excitedly at the Count and wave his arms, and the

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Count would shriek and double up with laughter sometimes, and Mr. Lorenz would shout: "Bravo I Bravo I" They talked in German, and I couldn't understand them, but I think they were making fun of English and American art. And as for the Canadian-l The mere mention of Canadian art was enough to make the old Count and Lorenz explode. Poor old Lorenz I He never made any money, and was awfully shabby. One day papa sent him to Reggie's office to try to sell a painting to the senior partner, who professed to be a connoisseur. Mr. Jones, the partner, came out from his private office in a hurry and, seeing Lorenz waiting, mistook him for a beggar. He put his hand in his pocket and g2ve Lorenz a dime. Then he passed out. Lorenz looked at the dime and said: "VeIl, it vill puy me two beers." Reggie had told me about that. He was irrItated at papa for sending Lorenz there, and he said he hoped he would not appear again. I told Mr. Sands all about Lorenz and also about the Count I had worked for; about papa, some of whose work the Duke of Argyle had taken back to England with him, as representative of Canadian art (which it was not-papa had studied in France, and was an Englishman, not a Canadian), and of my own "studio." While

MARION I talked, Mr. Sands went on painting. The model watched me with, I thought, a very sad expression. Her dark eyes were as gentle and mournful as a Madonna's. She didn't look unlike our family, being dark and foreign-looking. She was French. Mr. Sands was painting her arms and hands on the figure on the canvas. He explained that the face belonged to the wife of Senator Chase. She was the leader of a very smart set in Brookline. He said the ladies who sat for their portraits usually got tired by the time their faces were finished, and he used models for the figures, and especially the hands. "The average woman," said Mr. Sands, "has extreme ugly hands. The hands of Miss St. Denis, as you see, are beautiful-the most beauti. ful hands in America." I was standing by him at the easel, watching him paint, and I asked him if it were really a portrait, for the picture looked more like a Grecian dancing figure. Mr. Sands smiled and said: "That's the secret of my success, child. I never paint portraits as portraits. I dress my sitters in fancy costumes and paint them as some character. There is Mrs. Olivet. Her husband is a wholesale grocer. I am going to paint her as Carmen. This spirituelle figure with the filmy veil about her is Mrs. :Ash Browning, a dead-and-alive, wishy-washy individual; but, as you see, her

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'beauty' lends itself peculiarly to the nymph she there represents." I was so much interested in listening to him, and watching him work, that I had forgotten what I had come to see him about, till presently he said: "So you are going to join the classes at the Academy?" That question recalled me, and I said hastily: "I hope so, by-and-by. First, though, I shall have to get some work to do." He stopped painting and stared at me, with his palette in his hand, and as he had looked at me when he opened the door. I unwrapped the package I had brought along with me, and showed him the piano scarf I had painted as a sample, a landscape I had copied from one of papa's and some miniatures I had painted on celluloid. I said: "People won't be able to tell the difference from ivory when they are framed, and I can do them very quickly, as I can trace them from a photograph underneath, do you see?" His eyes bulged and he stared at me harder than ever. I also showed him some charcoal sketches I had done from casts, and a little painting of our kitten playing on the table. He picked this up and looked at it, and then set it down, muttering something I thought was: "Not so

MARION bad." After a moment, he picked it up again and then stared at me a moment and said: "I think you have some talent, and you have come to the right place to study." "And work, Mr. Sands," I said. "I've come here to earn my living. Can you give me some painting to do?" He put down his palette and nodded to Miss St. Clair to rest. Then he took hold of my hand and said: "Now, Miss Ascough, I am going to give you some good advice, chiefly because you are from my old Montreal (Mr. Sands was a Canadian), because of your father and our friend, good old man Lorenz. Finally, because I think it is my duty. Now, young lady, take my advice. If your parents can afford to pay your expenses here, stay and go to the art schools. But if you expect to make a living by your painting in Boston, take the next train and go home!" "I can't go home!" I cried. "Oh, I'm sure you ri:mst be mistaken. Lots of women earn their livings as artists. Why shouldn't I? I worked for Count von Hatzfeldt, and he said I had more talent than the average woman who paints." "How much did he pay you?" demanded Mr. Sands. "Five dollars a week and sometimes extra," I said.

I w..s so interested in listening to him and watching him work that I had forgotten what 1 had come to see him aool11.

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Sands laughed. "You would starve on that here even if you could make it, which I doubt. In Montreal you had your home and friends. It's a different matter here altogether." I felt as I once did when, as a child, I climbed to the top of a cherry tree, and Charles had taken away the ladder, and I tried to climb down without it. I kept repeating desperately: "I won't go back! I tell you, I won't! No, no, nothing will induce me to go back!" I gathered up all my paintings. I felt distract,:::d and friendless. Mr. Sands had returned to his painting and he seemed to have forgotten me. I saw the model watching me, and she leaned over and said something in a whisper to Mr. Sands. He put his palette down again and said: "Come, Miss St. Denis. This will do for today. We all need a bit of refreshment. Miss Ascough looks tired." I was, and hungry, too. I had had no lunch, for I lost so much time looking for Mr. Sands' studio. He brought out a bottle wrapped in a napkin, and a big plate of cakes. He said: "I want you to taste my own special brand of champagne cocktail." He talked a great deal then about brands of wines and mixtures, etc., while I munched on the

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cakes which I found difficulty in swallowing, because of the lump in my throat. But I was determined not to break down before them, and I even drank some of the cocktail he had mixed for me. Presently, I said: "Well, I guess I'll go," and I gathered up my things. Mr. Sands stood up and put his hands on my shoulders. Miss St. Denis was standing at his elbow, and she watched me all the time he was speaking. "Now, Miss Ascough, I am going to make a suggestion to you. I see you are determined not to go back. Now the only way I can think of your making a living is by posing." I drew back from him. "I am an artist," I said, "and the daughter of an artist." He patted me on the back. "That's all right. I know how you feel. I've been a Canadian myself; but there's no use getting mad with me for merely trying to help you. You will starve here in Boston, and I'm simply pointing out to you a method of earning your living. There's no disgrace connected with such work, if it is done in the proper spirit. As far as that goes, many of the art students are earning extra money to help pay their tuition that way. The models here get pretty good pay. Thirtyfive cents an hour for costume posing and fifty

MARION cents for the nude. We here in Boston pay better than they do in New York, and we treat them better, too. Of course, there are not so many of us here and we haven't as much work, but a model can make a fair living, isn't that so, Miss St. Denis?" She nodded slowly, her eyes still on me ; but there was something warm and pitying in their dark depths. "Now," went on Mr. Sands, "I don't doubt that you will get plenty of work. You are an exceedingly pretty girl. I don't need to tell you that, for, of course, you know it. What's more, I'll safely bet that you have just the figure we find hard to get. A perfect nude is not so easy as people seem to think-one whose figure is still young. Most models don't take care of themselves and it's the hardest thing to find a model with firm breasts. They all sag, the result oi wearing corsets. So we are forced to use one model for the figure, another for the legs, another for the bust-and so on, before we get a perfect figure, and when we get through, as you may guess, it's a patchwork affair at best.Y OUF figure, I can see, is young and-er-has lifeesprit. Are you eighteen yet?" "I'm nearly twenty-two." "You don't look it. Urn! The hands are all right-fine I-and the feet"-he smiled as

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I shrank under his gaze-'~they seem very little. Small feet are not always shapely, but I dare say yours are. Your hair-and your coloring- Yes, I think you will do famously. It's rather late in the season-but I dare say you'll get something. Now, what do you say? Give over this notion of painting for a while, and perhaps I can get you some work right away." "I'll never, never, never pose-nude," I said. "Hm I Well, well-of course, that's what we need most. It's easy to get costume modelsmany of our women friends even pose at that. However, now would you consider it very infra dig. then to pose for me, say to-morrow, in this Spanish scarf. You are just the type I need, and I believe I can help you with some of the other artists." I thought of the few dollars I had left. I had only about twelve dollars in all. Mr. Sands said he would pay me the regular rate, though I was not experienced. After a moment's thought I said: "Xes, I'll do it." "Now, that's talking sensibly," he said, smiling, "and Miss St. Denis here will take you with her to other places to see about getting work." She said: "Yes, certainement, I will do so. You come wiz me now."

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I thanked Mr. Sands, and he patted me on the shoulder and told me not to worry. He said he would give me some work regularly till about the middle of May when he went away for the summer. I would get thirty-five cents an hour, and pose two hours a day for him. When we got to the street, the lights were zll lit and the city looked very big to me. Miss St. Denis invited me to have dinner with her. She knew a place where they served a dinner for twenty-five cents. She seemed to think that quite cheap. I told her I couldn't afford to pay that much every mght and she said: "Well you will do so by-and-by. Soon you will get ze work-especially eef you pose in ze nude." I said: "I will never do that." She shrugged. After dinner she tooK me to a night school where she posed, as she said she wished me to see how it was done. Of course, I had already seen Lil Markey pose for the Count, but she was just an amateur model then. It did seem worse to me, moreover, to go, out there before a whole class than before one man. Miss St. Denis seemed surprised when I said that, and she declared it was quite the other way. That night I sat in my little narrow bedroom and looked out of the window, and I thought of all I had learned that day, and it seemed clear

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to me that Mr. Sands was right. There was little chance of my making a living as an artist in Boston. What was to become of me then? Should I return home? The thought of doing that made me clinch my hands passionately together and cry to myself : "N 0, no; never, neverl" I remembered something Mr. Davis had said to me when he was teaching me to act. He said that I should forget my own personality and try to imagine myself the person I was playing. Why should I not do this as a model? I resolved to try it. It could not be so bad, since Mr. Sands had recommended it. Yes, I would do it! I would be a model! But I should not tell them at home. They would not understand, and I did not want to disgrace them. With the resolve came first a sense of calmness, and then suddenly a rush of rage against Reggie who had driven me to this. I had the small town English girl's foolish contempt for a work I really had no reason for despising. As the daughter of an artist, and, as I thought, an artist myself, it seemed to me, I was signing the death warrant of my best ambitions and, as I have said, I felt, with rage, that Reggie was to blame for this. I looked out of that window, and lifting up my eyes and clasped hands to the skies, I called:

"Oh, God ill I lcavell, hcar mc, a",1 if I c\'cr go kLck \0 l