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and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much

good teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the

expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her mother's girb

hood with positive envy because it was so full of happy industry and

extenuating obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to believe that

her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at her mother, but

had not the courage to cry out what was in her heart: "1 might believe

I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might

enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of

the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are

removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is

like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning."

This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and

the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do

with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about

her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through

poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her; it peers

at her in the form of heavy-laden market women and underpaid street

laborers, gibing her with a sense of her uselessness.

1 recall one snowy morning in Saxe-Coburg, looking from the window of our little hotel upon the town square, that we saw crossing and

recrossing it a single file of women with semicircular heavy wooden

tanks fastened upon their backs. They were carrying in this primitive

fashion to a remote cooling room these tanks filled with a hot brew

incident to one stage of beer making. The women were bent forward,

not only under the weight which they were bearing, but because the

tanks were so high that it would have been impossible for them to have

lifted their heads. Their faces and hands, reddened in the cold morning air, showed clearly the white scars where they had previously been

scalded by the hot stuff which splashed if they stumbled ever so little

on their way. Stung into action by one of those sudden indignations

against cruel conditions which at times fill the young with unexpected

energy, I found myself across the square, in company with mine host,

interviewing the phlegmatic owner of the brewery who received us

with exasperating indifference, or rather received me, for the innkeeper mysteriously slunk away as soon as the great magnate of the

town began to speak. I went back to a breakfast for which I had lost my

appetite, as I had for Gray's "Life of Prince Albert" and his wonderful