He had tried, but everything was so against a gentleman; and Mirko such a delicate baby, and the mother's lovely face so often sad.

And then the time of the mother's first bad illness--how they had watched and prayed, and Mimo had cried tears like a child, and the doctor had said the South was the only thing to help their angel's recovery.

So to marry Ladislaus Shulski seemed the only way.

He had a villa in the sun at Nice and offered it to them; he was crazy about her--Zara--at that time, though her skirts were not quite long, nor her splendid hair done up.
When her thoughts reached this far, the black panther in the Zoo never looked fiercer when Francis Markrute poked his stick between its bars to stir it up on Sunday mornings.
The hateful, hateful memories! When she came to know what marriage meant, and--a man! But it had saved the sweet mother's life for that winter.

And though it was a strain to extract anything from Ladislaus, still, in the years that followed, often she had been able to help until his money, too, was all gone--on gambling and women.
And then the dear mother died--died in cold and poverty, in a poor little studio in Paris--in spite of her daughter's and Mimo's frantic letters to Uncle Francis for help.