should deport herself with reserve while traveling in public. And now I found this early training had gained for me the reputation of being imperious and also the appellation of "New England Virgin," this latter appearing to me so insulting that I was ready then and there, to pack my trunk and go home if any one ever dared say it to me again. Mr. Softlee sat in my section until we reached our "next stand" and succeeded in talking me into a good humor.

He really was a very interesting man. I found he had been in the profession since his early boyhood and had played with great actors whose very names were dreams of grandeur to me. At that time I did not notice that his store of knowledge was entirely bounded, hilled, daled, laked, and streamed by the theatrical profession, that vocation being so new and interesting to me, from its artistic side, that I drank in every word with intoxicating delight.

He had such lovely stories about that beautiful soul Edwin Booth. When he was with McCullough this thing happened; with the elder Southern something else. Dear old Billie Florence was one of the most versatile of actors. What a great actress Mrs. D. P. Bowers was! What a great man such an one was. Such another was, in his estimation, the greatest tragedian then living. Art! Art! Art! characterization and generalization until, in spite of the direful beginning of Mr. Temper's insult, that afternoon from St. Louis to Evansville was the most interesting, delightful, and happy of any I had as yet spent "on the road.'

CHAPTER III.

TWO FRIENDS AND SOME INCIDENTS.

From that day I seemed to have found a friend, the first who really took a kindly interest in me and who assumed to care whether I was unhappy or not. Mr. Steele Softlee became a good chum, a companion, and, in a sense, a protector. When the distance from the depot to the hotel was great, he would walk it with me and save me the trouble (and what was to me, then, embarrassment) of going to the hotel office to register my name and be assigned a room. Mr. Softlee would now send me to the parlor, and soon a bell boy would come and take me to the room allotted to me.

Mr. Nevermind did this courtesy for Miss Melloweye, and thus we were thrown together more than the other ladies who attended to the selecting of their rooms for themselves. Although Billie was chummy enough with Miss Gaily, and Mr. Temper and the lady with the straw colored hair were hand and glove, as they said, they never allowed these ladies to interfere with their personal convenience.

I found Miss Stella Melloweye a very sweet mannered girl and quite disposed to like me, which was more than I could say of the others. After a

time she asked me to her room, and when I screwed my courage to the point of going (she was the "leading lady" and a great personage in my eyes) she talked so sweetly of her mother, to whom she seemed to be most devoted and who lived in New York, that I instantly loved her for her evident filial and beautiful nature.

"Mamma is such a dear, religious soul," she told me. "I had a letter from her the other day in which she said she had asked the prayers of her Church for her little daughter, who was away on the road and subjected to so many temptations. By the way," she asked, "do you belong to the Association for the Union of Church and Stage?"

"No," I replied, "I never heard of it before." She laughed and said:

"That doesn't matter. It is an organization for the bringing together of church and stage. All churches and all actors are admitted who care to join. I am one of the charter members."

I was delighted to hear this, for I had always been told that actors were, as a class, most irreligious. "Do many actors and actresses belong to it?" I asked.

"Oh, a great many," she answered. "You really must join. I'll propose your name for you."

"Thank you," I said, "what are the duties, or rather what is the idea?"

"Well," she explained, "the ministers in various towns, who belong, welcome the visiting actors who

attend their churches, and in some cities they have reading rooms for members of companies to go to and meet people of the churches and read and-and—”

I do not know why she paused, possibly because there were no more duties to explain; but I was going over in my mind the places we had visited, and I could not remember of having heard of any of our company going to such reading rooms, and as to attending church, nearly all our traveling was done on Sunday, and I had not been inside my own church more than once since we left New York. I did not, however, express these thoughts to Miss Melloweye for she was quite enthusiastic on the subject, and I felt that if I joined the society I would soon learn its real virtue.

I was more than delighted to find Miss Melloweye so serious minded a girl, especially as I had been quite disappointed in Miss Gaily, who was now almost frigid to me, and Mrs. Biber, who positively snubbed me. Girl-like, however, I should have liked to have her confidence about her engagement, but she never mentioned Mr. Nevermind's name to me, and if he came in when I was chatting with her, I always felt an unuttered invitation to shorten my call, and as I would hurriedly make my adieu without being pressed to stay, I realized I was quite right in obeying the subtle suggestion.

My heart was heavy to discover, after we had been out several weeks, that these two objects of my romantic dreams had violent quarrels. One evening

Miss Melloweye was taken from the stage in hysterics, and the entire company patted her hands and iced. her head for nearly an hour before she could be quieted.

I was in agony. She was my ideal, so sweet, so lovable. I was sure it must have been his fault. How did he dare to be cruel to her? I tried to get at the cause of this outbreak from Miss Gaily, but she only sneered at me and told me I was wasting my pity.

"That's a trick she has when she thinks he is getting tired of her," she said. Then she added sarcastically, "Children shouldn't get mixed up in these things, anyway.”

Mr. Steele Softlee walked to the hotel with me after we put Miss Melloweye in a cab, and he saw my undisguised distress; never had I heard a human being cry as this girl had cried. But Mr. Softlee explained that the artistic temperament did every thing with an excess of emotion and that, though the show was great, the real grief was no more than that which many a woman would suffer in silence.

"But what had he done?" I asked, sorely puzzled. "I don't know," he returned. "Robert is a queer fellow, and Stella is so terribly in love with him that she thinks if she doesn't have every moment of his time he is tiring of her; and, of course, he likes to get out with the boys and whoop things up now and then and