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Star that I first met Mrs. Radner. She was a youngish woman, pretty, magnetic, charmingly dressed, alert-eyed, with the mouth of a lover and the chin of a bank president-the woman, I thought as I looked at her, not so much of today as of tomorrow.

Mrs. Radner had made, as a hotelkeeper,a fortune that even men respected. Her house, the "Delnord," overflowed the year round with guests who swore by it as by their own Lares and Penates. Every inch of it, from the cretonne hangings in the bedrooms to the chastened splendor of the lobby entrance, was not only subtly expressive of a refined woman's taste and gift in home-making, but eloquent also of a commanding generalship that kept every private at his post, doing his duty.

"It's wonderful," I enthused, as we ended our inspection of the place in Mrs. Radner's sumptuous little office, and she sank down in a swivel-chair before a businesslike desk with a double row of call-buttons.

"Oh, not that," she deprecated, "only good housekeeping multiplied, by a thousand or so. Any woman who can run her own house successfully should be able to manage a hotel. In fact, I think it's the coming profession for women. Some day all of the big hotels will be run by women. Women would bring to the profession what Darwin calls hereditary instincts' that have come down to them through hundreds of generations of good housewives--"

The opening of the door interrupted her. I looked up and saw the figure of a man in

She was a youngish woman, pretty, magnetic, charmingly dressed, alert-eyed, with the mouth of a lover and the chin of a bank president-the woman not so much of today as of tomorrow

yachting flannels silhouetted against the darkness of the hall behind him.

"Don't wait lunch for me, Maida," he said. "I'm going to take Dalhousie up the river in the boat, and I may not be back until night."

"My husband," said Mrs. Radner in explanation, as the man disappeared; and then she smiled. "He's got a new motorboat, and he's as crazy over it as a little boy over a Christmas toy."

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'Are you also fond of motor-boating?" I inquired, to make conversation.

"Oh, I don't know," she replied, "I suppose I should be if I had time, but the difference between failure and success in running a house like this depends on whether you are always on the job or not."

That was the beginning of my acquaintance with Mrs. Radner, an acquaintance that ripened into friendship and close intimacy. For I found no other woman more congenial than this keen-eyed, strong, capable business woman, who was full of a wise philosophy of life, and a tenderness and a sympathy that I never knew to fail.

Gradually I fell into the habit of dropping into her little office for a cup of tea in the late afternoon, when the work of the day was done for her and the work of the evening had not begun. Gradually I grew accustomed to fleeting glimpses of her big, handsome husband, always immaculately dressed, always starting off to play golf or to motor-boat or to automobile or to amuse himself in some way, always idle and irresponsible.

It was in one of these talks in the dusk over our tea that Mrs. Radner first broached to me a problem that I had never considered before the problem of the difficulty of a wife helping a husband without hindering him, and without making him hate her as we hate those to whom we are under obligations.

I had been congratulating her for the thousandth time upon her success.

"Have I achieved success?" she replied, vith a note of sadness in her buoyant voice. "I wonder if I have succeeded? I've made money. I've done good work. I've won for myself a position of respect among those who know me; but I have failed in the biggest thing in life. I have failed as a wife; and the curious part of it is that my failure was the result of my love and tenderness, and in the very moment

that I was giving the very best that was in me-every bit of intelligence and effort of which I was capable-to trying to help my husband, I know now that I did him a wrong as deadly as the bitterest malignity. could invent.

"When I look back, I think that I married my husband because I was sweet-andtwenty and had come to the love-time of life, and he was the man whom I knew least in all the world, and so was clothed with a romance that the boys with whom I had grown up did not possess. He had come as a stranger to the little MiddleWestern town in which I lived, and he was a tall, upstanding young fellow, and he found me at the psychological moment, when I was ready to fall in love with any man who made love to me.

"In our provincial community, parents took no more responsibility about the marriage of their daughters than the birds do about the mating of their young, nor do I remember that I looked an inch into the future. Tom Radner was good-looking, he danced well, he had the manners and bearing of a gentleman, and he was the agent for some sort of business house in Chicago. That was all I knew about him, and all I sought to know. In my experience and observation of life, girls always picked out their husbands for themselves, and their parents acquiesced without a murmur; and after people got married, the husbands worked and made comfortable incomes which their wives spent, and they lived happily ever after.

"Of course, there was Matty Allen, whose husband drank. They were dreadfully poor and she had to come home to live, but nothing so terrible could happen to me. In fact, it had never happened but once to anyone whom I knew. We were such a prosperous, moral, decent little community.

"So I was married. The first shock I got, as a bride, was when I found out that Tom didn't like to get up of a morning, and that he did like to dawdle over his breakfast, and that he was fully two hours later getting down to business every day than anybody else in the town. This didn't seem the right way to go about making a fortune to me, and I would wake him up a dozen times each morning before he would get up. I tried in every way to hurry him off; but as he made the excuse that it was so hard for him to leave me, even for

a few hours, my flattered vanity would not permit me to be severe.

"So matters went along for two or three months, Tom attending less and less to business, letting opportunities to make sales that even I could see go by, if it happened to be a good day for fishing, or some one proposed a pleasure-jaunt somewhere. Letters from the house for which he worked came, breathing dissatisfaction with the way that affairs were going, but he refused to be warned, and called his employers old grouches, and declared he wasn't going to work himself to death for anybody.

'Finally one day the blow fell. He was summarily dismissed, and a new man put in his place. We had been able to save nothing out of his salary, and as we were practically penniless, I had to undergo that crowning humiliation of a woman's lifegoing back home to live on my people.

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Apparently Tom did not feel about this as I did. I thought that he would move heaven and earth to get employment. He did look around a bit in a listless, halfhearted way, and if anyone had offered him a bank presidency or something of the sort, with short hours and nothing to do but sign checks, he would have accepted it. But soft snaps and easy jobs are not pursuing men in these days, and as nothing agreeable presented itself, he would come home after one of these bootless quests and announce that business was rotten— that there was 'nothing doing.' Then he would throw himself into the hammock and doze the day peacefully away.

"I was frantic. My people were generosity itself and made me welcome as the day to all they had, but they were poor and needed their moderate income for themselves. My father was old and worked hard, and the sight of him toiling to feed me and my big, strong, husky husband ate into my very soul. Besides, I am naturally energetic and industrious myself, and I think there is nothing on earth that fills an active woman with such contempt for a man as for him to be just trifling, lazy, and 'no account.' She could forgive dishonesty or murder more easily

"With the coming of the fall I persuaded Tom to go to Chicago and look for work. His brother-in-law secured a place for him in a wholesale house at a small salary, and I flew to him to help him by my presence and brace him up. I did all that a woman

could do. I tried to make him believe that I thought he had the making of a second. Rockefeller in him; I tried in every way in the world to inspire him, to supplement his weakness with my strength. But it was no use. He would start off with great enthusiasm, but in a little while, as soon as the novelty of what he was doing wore off, he would throw it up. He wouldn't work. He wouldn't stick to anything when it ceased to be play and the long steady grind started. He lost many

"He lost that position.

other positions that his patient brotherin-law got for him, or that I got for him, and we grew poorer and poorer, until I knew every hardship and want. At last we were again penniless, and this time we took refuge in our destitution with his people.

"But I had had enough of eating the bitter bread of dependence. As Tom could not, or rather would not, make a living, I determined to strike out myself. I knew that if I could not do anything else I could sweep floors and make beds, and I made up my mind that I would do both for hire in somebody's house before I would live in another home on sufferance.

"The one thing I knew how best to do, the thing I have always liked to do best, was cooking and keeping house, and so I went out and, literally on my honest face, I rented a house. I furnished it on the instalment plan, because that was the only way I could get furniture, and I advertised for boarders. And because I was determined to succeed, because I gave every particle of intelligence I had to learning the business, because I thought of it day and night, and always of how to do it better and better, and because I worked eighteen hours a day during those first years, I made a success of it, and the boarding-house grew into the 'Delnord,' and I became a rich and prosperous woman.

"Because I loved him, because I was so sorry for him, because his weakness appealed to the eternal mother in me that is in every woman, I made my husband my most cherished guest, my 'star boarder.' All of his friends had fallen away from him, disgusted by his lack of energy and manliness, but I clung the tighter to him. I still believed, with a woman's fatuous faith and her insane egotism, that I could make a man of him by encouraging him, by bolstering him up, and by never letting him see that I thought that he had failed.

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We were talking in Mrs. Radner's businesslike little office when the door opened and a man in yachting flannels Dalhousie up the river in the boat, and I may not be back until night." "My husband,"

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interrupted us. "Don't wait lunch for me, Maida," he said. "I'm going to take said Mrs. Radner in explanation, as the man disappeared

did him so terrible a wrong. That was where my love misused him more than hate could have done. That is why I cannot but accuse myself.

"I know now that when I did not shut my door in his face and tell him that I would not support a strong, ablebodied man-that he must either work or starve-I took away from him his one chance of manhood. I made him a parasite. I enervated him by making it so easy and so comfortable at home that he succumbed to the temptation of taking life easily. If I had cast him out and made my love the reward for his effort, he might have struggled with his weakness and triumphed over it.

"But I didn't do it. I didn't have the courage to do it. I couldn't bear to think of his being cold and hungry when I had warmth and food, and so I have made him into the weakling he is. I robbed him of his one last chance of manhood, and he hates me for it, without knowing why.

"And that is why I say that I have failed as a wife, and why most of us women who achieve professional successes fail as wives. The wives who really help their husbands are the weak, dependent women who force out of men the best that is in them. Believe me, the Daughter of the Horse Leech, continually crying 'more, more,' is behind the door of many a rich man's success."

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