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 she was beautiful. They wanted to marry her, droves of them—practically all the eligible single men in Kansas City. Wilhelmina Ford—she had given Ambrose her name in the first instance—was merely bored and irritated by those protestations of admiration and devotion. While as yet she had travelled but little she had become aware, through her extensive reading and through an examination of certain portraits in the public prints, that men existed in the great world whose achievements and general personal appearance far exceeded anything available in Kansas City. This discovery, made not too belatedly, had set her resolutely against binding herself, or even giving a tentative promise, to any of the nondescript fellows of her acquaintance. She therefore returned rubies and diamonds by the bucketful, dispatched rich tributes of orchids and Madonna lilies to orphan asylums, and conveyed drayloads of boxes of candy to her less or more fortunate—according to the point of view—female friends.

Latterly her disdainful attitude had not found favour with her parents. They considered her—she was just past seventeen—at an age at which a girl should begin to entertain serious thoughts in regard to her future. She did not take the trouble to