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HIS is her letter:

"It has become necessary for me to earn my own living. I have been delicately reared and well educated, but I am not very strong physically. People say I am pretty. From my earliest childhood I have had a great desire to go on the stage. I think of making it my life work. What would you advise me to do?"

My answer is this: Take up any honest employment in preference to becoming an actress. You come from the South, where women are tenderly brought up, where great care is taken of their surroundings, of the mode of speech used to them, and where consideration is the keynote of a man's attitude to women. You are imaginative and ambitious, you believe in yourself, and although you have in a vague way a slight idea of the temptations of the stage, you think you are strong enough to withstand them. Suppose you did; suppose you were as pure as snow, you would not