Anna Marie was to be a new woman. She had decided that for herself. In the carrying out of her destinies, Anna Marie had cut her hair short. She also made a specialty of very mannish costumes, and, outwardly, at least, became as virile as a woman might be with a make-up the basis of which was bound to be a skirt.

Anna Marie was motherless, and at the age of nineteen, when she determined to become a new woman, had no advice save her father's to depend on. When she discussed an adoption of broader and more masculine methods on her girlish part with her father, the old gentleman looked puzzled, and said:

“Well, my dear! I have great confidence in your judgment. There is nothing like experience, so go ahead. You will find, however, before you have gone far, that you labour under many structural defects. The great Architect didn't lay you out for a man, Anna Marie; you were not intended for such a fate.” However, Anna Marie kept on. She was looking for a fuller liberty and a wider field. She was too delicately and too accurately determined in her tastes to be a fool to cigarettes, or swept down in a current of profanity. Bad language she would leave to the real man; in her career as a new woman nothing so vigorous was needed.

But men did other things, had other freedoms; and from that long male list of liberties Anna Marie proceeded to pick out a line of freedom for herself. She had had enough of that pent-up Utica which confines the conventional woman. What she wanted was more room: that is, of proper, decorous sort.

Of course, as Anna Marie proceeded up the long trail of masculinity, it was noted by critics that she still continued essentially feminine as to many common male accomplishments. She could not throw a stone, except in that vague, pawey, overhand fashion usual with ladies, and which confers on the missile neither direction nor force. And when Anna Marie essayed to run, she still put everybody in mind of a cow trying to keep an engagement.

While others noted those solemn truths, Anna Marie did not. She thought she was making strenuous progress, and combed her short hair as a man combs his, and walked with long, decided stride.

Anna Marie rode a bike, and decided to don bloomers for this ceremony. She came to the bloomer decision hesitatingly, but made up her mind at last. Secretly she regarded bloomers as the Rubicon. It was bloomers which flowed between herself and the new woman in full standing; and once Anna Marie had broken on the world in this ill-considered costume, she would feel herself graduated, and no longer at school to Destiny. Therefore, there dawned a day when Anna Marie came down the avenue on her bike, be-bloomered to heart's content. She had made the plunge; the Rubicon was crossed, and Anna Marie felt now like a female CÆsar who must conquer or die.

On the bike-bloomer occasion Anna Marie was weak enough to hurry. She put her unbridled steed to fullest speed, and flashed by the onlookers like unto some sweet meteor. She blamed herself afterward for being such a craven, but concluded that by sticking to her bloomers she would acquire heart and slacken speed in time.

The worst feature about the bloomer business was that Anna Marie wotted not how hideous she looked. She did not know that a printer on his way to his case, caught a fleeting impression of her as she sped by, and that he at once “put on a sub.,” took a night off, and became dejectedly yet fully drunk. Nor did she wist that a nervous person was so affected by the awful tout ensemble of herself, bike, and bloomers that he repaired to Bloomingdale and sternly demanded admission as a right.

No; Anna Marie rode all too frightened and too fast to reap these truths. Still, she might not have altered her system if she had known. For Anna Marie was resolute. Bent as Anna Marie was on her completion as a new woman, she resolved to inhabit bloomers and ride her two-wheeled vehicle even unto a grey old age. How else, indeed, could she be a new woman? A girl friend who had stood appalled at the vigour of Anna Marie asked her as to the bloomers.

“They are good things,” observed Anna Marie. “There's a comfort in bloomers which lurks not in the tangled wilderness of the ordinary skirt. Their fault is that in donning bloomers one does not put them on over one's head. It is a great defect. As it is, one never feels more than half-dressed.” Anna Marie declared that the great want of the day was bloomers, through which one thrust one's arms and head in the process of harnessing.

Anna Marie had a brother George. This youth was twelve years of age. George was essentially masculine. Anna Marie could see that, and it came to her as a thought that in the course of becoming a new woman of fullest feather, a good, ripe method would be to study George. Should she do as George did, young though he was, she was sure to succeed. George would do from instinct what she must do by imitation. Anna Marie felt these things without really and definitely thinking them. It so fell out that, without telling George, Anna Marie began to take him as guide, philosopher and friend. And all without really knowing it herself.

Unconsciously, George loved her all the better because of this, and, moved by a warm, ingenuous lack of years, began to take Anna Marie into his confidence like true comrade. Anna Marie encouraged his frankness.

“George,” said Anna Marie, one day, “whenever you are about to do anything peculiarly boyish and interesting, always tell me, so that I may join you in your sport.”

George said he would, and he did.

It so befell one day, as the fruit of this comradeship, that George changed the channel of Anna Marie's manly determination, and caused her to abandon the rÔle of a new woman. This is the story, and it all taught Anna Marie, with the rush of a landslide, that, however industriously she might prune and train her habits to the trellis of the male, she would never be able to bring her nature to that state of icy, egotistical, cold-blooded hardihood absolutely necessary to the perfect man, and therefore indispensable to the new woman. But the story.

“Anna Marie,” said George, coming on her one day, “Anna Marie, me and Billy Sweet wants you.”

“What is it, George?” asked Anna Marie.

“We're going to hang a dog out back of the barn,” explained George. “Me and Billy are to be the jury, and we want you for judge. Hurry up, now! that's a good fellow!”

Anna Marie felt a shock at thought of taking the life of anything. Her first feeling was that George was a brute—a mere animal himself. But Anna Marie quickly reflected, that, whatever George might be, at least his hardened sex was the promontory the new woman must steer by. She put down the garment she was sewing and sought the scene of canine trial.

“You see, Anna Marie!” explained George, pointing to a saffron-coloured dog, which stood with dolorous tail between his legs and looked very repentant, “he murdered a kitten, and we are going to try to convict and hang him. You sit down there by the fence, and the trial won't take a minute. Billy and me have got our minds made up, and we won't take no time to decide. There's the rope, and we're going to hang him to the limb of that maple.”

Anna Marie felt worried. Still, she allowed herself to be installed, and the trial proceeded. It was very brief. George produced the defunct kitten,—which looked indeed, very dead,—with the remark, “Say, you yellow dog! you're charged with murdering this cat; have you got anything to say against being hung?”

The yellow cur feebly wagged his disreputable tail, and looked at Anna Marie in a fashion of sneaking appeal. He said as plain as words: “Save me!”

“I wouldn't hang the poor thing, George,” said Anna Marie, and she began to pat the felon yellow cur.

“You're a great judge!” remonstrated George, indignantly. “It ain't for you to decide; it's for me and Billy. We are the jury, and in favour of hanging him, ain't we, Billy?”

Billy nodded emphatically.

“But, George,” expostulated Anna Marie, “it is so cruel! so brutal!”

“Brutal!” scoffed George. “Don't they hang folks for murder every day? You wear bloomers and talk of being a new woman and having the rights of a man! I have heard you with that Sanford girl! And now you come out here and try to talk off a yellow dog who is guilty of murder, and admits it by his silence! You would act nice if it was a real man and a real murder case! Come on, Billy; let's string him up.”

Here George seized on the cowering victim of lynch law, and started for the maple, where the rope already dangled for its prey. Anna Marie became utterly feminine at this, and burst into tears. Her nineteen years and her progress toward a new womanhood did not save her. In her distress she turned to the other member of the jury.

Billy Sweet, at the age of thirteen, was an ardent admirer of George's sister, loved her dearly, if secretly, and meant to marry her in ten or fifteen years, when he grew up. At present he played with George and kept a loving eye on his future bride. Anna Marie knew of Billy's partiality, so she cunningly turned on this admirer, like a true daughter of the olden woman.

“You think as I do, don't you, Billy?” And Anna Marie's tone had a caress in it which made Billy's ears a happy red.

“Yes, ma'am!” said Billy.

George was disgusted.

“You are the kind of a juryman,” said George, full of contempt, “that makes me tired. There, Anna Marie, take your yellow dog, and don't try to play with me no more. You are too soft!”

Anna Marie felt that some vast deposit of good, hard sense lay hidden in George's last remark. On her way to the house she did a good deal of thinking, as girls whose mothers are dead do now and then. The development of her cogitations was told in a remark to her girl friend:

“It's so tiresome, this being a new woman! I am going to give it up. I am afraid, as father says, I am 'not built right.'”

And thus it ended. Marie is exceedingly the olden woman now. She has beaten her sword into a pruning-hook, her bike into a spinning-wheel! She no longer walks with long, decided stride. She is a woman in all things, and will scream and chase a street car as if it were the last going that way for a week, like the tenderest and frailest of her kind. She has retracted as to bloomers. Anna Marie has returned to the agency, and forever abandoned the warpath of a new and manly womanhood.