My girlhood days were spent quite placidly in Miss Nourse’s school, which was known in Cincinnati as “The Nursery,” and where all the girls of the Herron family, as well as Mr. Taft’s only sister, Fanny, received their education. Miss Nourse was a Maine woman with a thorough New England education and with a thoroughly New England idea of imparting it. She insisted, especially, upon languages and literature. Much of my time, outside of that taken up in regular school work, I devoted to the study of music, and I practised my scales on the family piano with such persistence that I wonder the whole neighbourhood did not rebel. Music was the absorbing interest of my life in those days, the inspiration of all my dreams and ambitions.