No greater contrast could be conceived than that between the woman
reputed to have deserted her husband in turn for a renegade French
priest and a minstrel, and the woman who rose to greet the interviewer
who called at the Vincennes hotel for Mrs. Mary Noonan McDonald.
Twenty years of sorrow have left snow white hair that still crowns her
head with the same wealth as that of younger days, and twenty years
of struggle to support herself have dulled the fire of those gray
eyes that once looked over a smoking revolver with which the girl wife
held at bay the police raiders of her husband's gambling house. But
the slender figure appeared as erect as ever, though standing forth
with an added frailty beside her stalwart, brown-faced son, Guy, and
her face, though pale and sad, scarcely confessed to her 60 years of
age.
[Illustration: MARY NOONAN McDONALD, MICHAEL C. McDONALD, MRS. MICHAEL
C. McDONALD]
This is the woman who began her career in Chicago as the helpmate
of an old-time gambling king, and is ending her days in the work of
rescuing wayward girls; this is the woman who was driven to abandon
the name of McDonald and bury her identity for the last fifteen years
under the alias of Mrs. Grashoff, holding communication only with her
children and secretly visiting Chicago periodically to see them.