with females," he told me often enough, with special reference to matrimony; and at first was almost disposed to send me back to Pesth because of my sex. That inclination soon changed, however; and all the love that was in his big heart was devoted to my small self. 

But he treated me much more like a boy than a girl. I had my own way in everything; nothing was too good for me. In a word, I was spoiled to a degree which only American parents understand. 

"Old Gilmore's heiress" was somebody in Jefferson City, I can assure you; and if I gave myself ridiculous airs in consequence, the fault was not wholly my own. I am afraid I had a very high opinion of myself. I did what I liked, had what I wished, went where I pleased, and thought myself a great deal prettier than I was. I was in short "riding for a fall;" and I got it--and fell far; being badly hurt in the process. 

The trouble came in New York where I went when I was eighteen; setting out with the elated conviction that I was going to make a sort of triumphal social progress over the bodies of many discomfited and outclassed rivals. 

But I found that in New York I was just one among many girls, most of them richer and much prettier than I: a nobody with provincial mannerisms among heaps of somebodies with an air and manner which I at first despised, then envied, and soon set to work at ninety miles an hour speed to imitate. 

I had all but completed this self-education when my trouble came--a love trouble, of course. I became conscious of a great change in myself. Up to that point I had held a pretty cheap opinion of men in general, and especially of those with whom I had flirted. But I realized, all suddenly, the wrongfulness of flirting. That was, I think the first coherent symptom. The next was the painful doubt whether a very handsome Austrian, the Count von Ostelen, was merely flirting with me. 

I knew German thoroughly, having spoken it in my childhood; and I had ample opportunities of speaking it now with the Count. We both made the most of them, indeed; until I found--I was only eighteen, remember--that the world was all brightness and sunshine; the people all good and true; and the Count the embodiment of all that a girl's hero should be. 

I was warned against the Count, of course: one's intimate friends always see to that; but the warnings acted as intelligent persons will readily understand--they made me his champion, and plunged me deeper than ever into 

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