Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 53: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

dis- S tiened. Humanity discour- aged her, life discouraged her, she was almost discouraged with heaven—what she knew When one has worked cheer- about it. fully among the poor for ten years, one may be expected, one may be ex- cused for a momentary hiatus in the ex- altation ! This hiatus lasted all day, beginning in Celia’s room before her mirror. It was her birthday. She was thirty years old. Not a popular age for a heroine. One does not see pictures of women of thirty printed on the covers of ten-cent magazines. Yet Miss Maitland had read in an article the statement that “more men killed themselves for women of thirty than for any other age!’— This did not console her. Her de- pression continued throughout break- fast, when she opened her mail to learn that the owner of the tenement block, where her kind footsteps had worn the stairs bare, refused to clean up the filth and rubbish—refused everything except to grow rich. Her correspondeiice was a continuous wail, as envelope after envelope re- vealed to her the demands of the poor. “And yet,” she thought to herself, “aren't we commanded by Heaven to ask?” Her man of affairs warned her that she was imperiling her capital by her lavish generosity, and urged her to “practice economy.” “So many practice it from necessity,” she thought, and recalled her tenements, and the family of eight living on fifty cents a day, and wondered what their economies would be! Before she started out on her after- noon’s round of occupation, she decided that she was very blue—simply because she was a woman, and alone in the world, and humanity was too big to em- brace her; she was lost in the arms of the mass. Unless one is born a saint, and, at sixteen years of age, can shed blood that turns to lilies, it takes till past middle life to win a halo! “It seems too ridiculous,” she thought, “to be too young, at thirty, for anything, but I am too young for sainthood!” She made a few calls—she had never been an anchorite—and at three o’clock started for East Eightieth Street, where her tenements were. Although dressed in the plainest of clothes, there was something about Celia Maitland that made the people with her look a bit less distinguished. Her glass informed her that she had not a gray hair in her head, not a wrinkle on her face, that her lips were red, and her eyes charming ; yet she was alone. She was ina very bad mood to- day, as she went forth “to feed her lambs,” and she wondered what all the ‘treasures of Heaven” could give to her to make up for the pleasures she was evidently losing in life. To-day her tenements appeared to be a honeycomb of failures. She could not give all her goods to feed the poor, OOO) K<