ALICE BERTA JOSEPHINE KAUSER

Credit must be given to Elisabeth Marbury for inventing the now flourishing and even over-crowded business of play broker; but as she was of a strongly masculine character and as surrounded by friends as Miss de Barril, her success is neither as remarkable nor as interesting as that of Alice Kauser, who has won the top place in this business in a great city to which she came poor and a stranger.

Not that she had; grown up in the idea that she must make her own way in the world.  Far from it.  It is for that reason I have selected her as another example of what a girl may accomplish if she have character and grit backed up with a thorough intellectual training.  For, it must never be forgotten, unless one is a genius it is impossible to enter the first ranks of the world’s workers without a good education and some experience of the world.  Parents that realize this find no sacrifice too great to give their children the most essential of all starts in life.  But the extraordinary thing in the United States of America is how comparatively few parents do realize it.  Moreover, how many are weak enough, even when with a reasonable amount of self-sacrifice they could send their children through college, to yield to the natural desire of youth to “get out and hustle.”

Miss Kauser was born in Buda Pest, in the United States Consular Agency, for her father, although a Hungarian, was Consular Agent.  It was an intellectual family and on her mother’s side musically gifted.  Miss Kauser’s aunt, Etelka Gerster, when she came to this country as a prima donna had a brief but brilliant career, and the music-loving public prostrated itself.  But her wonderful voice was a fragile coloratura, and her first baby demolished it.  Berta Gerster, Miss Kauser’s mother, was almost equally renowned for a while in Europe.

Mr. Kauser himself was a pupil of Abel Blouet at the Beaux Arts, but he fought in the Revolution of 1848 in Hungary, and later with Garibaldi in the Hungarian Legion in Italy.

Miss Kauser, who must have been born well after these stirring events, was educated by French governesses and Polish tutors.  Her friends tell the story of her that she grew up with the determination to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and when she realized that, although handsome and imposing, she was not a great beauty according to accepted standards, she philosophically buried this callow ambition and announced, “Very well; I shall be the most intellectual woman in the world.”

There are no scales by which to make tests of these delicate degrees of the human mind, even in the case of authors who put forth four books a year, but there is no question that Miss Kauser is a highly accomplished woman, with a deep knowledge of the literature of many lands, a passionate feeling for style, and a fine judgment that is the result of years of hard intellectual work and an equally profound study of the world.  And who shall say that the wild ambitions of her extreme youth did not play their part in making her what she is to-day?  I have heard “ambition” sneered at all my life, but never by any one who possessed the attribute itself, or the imaginative power to appreciate what ambition has meant in the progress of the world.