But the rôle I craved to create for my friend was far different--some
good, honest bourgeois interior, where lips are coarse and cheeks are
ruddy, and where life is composed of real scenes, set to the real
music of life, the homely successes and failures, and loves and hates,
and embraces and tears, that fill out the orchestra of the heart;
where romance and poetry abound _au naturel_; and where--yes, where
children grow as thick as nature permits: the domestic interior of the
opera porter, for instance, or the clockmaker over the way. But what
a loss the orphan-asylum would have suffered, and the dreary lacking
there would have been in the lives of the children! For there must
have been moments in the lives of the children in that asylum when
they felt, awake, as they felt in their sleep when they dreamed their
mothers were about them.




THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL

She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent
girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of
the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was
put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her
how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by
(good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her
there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward
elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid
found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters
had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And