as
immensely relieved, too, for she knew that if Elinor vetoed her plan she
must give it up.

"I might come over after I'm dressed," she suggested gratefully, with a
smile at the discomfited Judith. "I wanted to ask if Bruce would walk
over with me--it's in one of those old houses across the Square--but Ju
was so fierce I was afraid to open my lips."

Elinor promised for Bruce and after a little chat Patricia left, feeling
that she was making quite a concession to the family tie.

"As Rosamond says, I can't give up everything to other people, or I'd
lose my personality," she mused as she went briskly along the frosty
streets toward the Lodge. "And personality means so much to a singer."

She felt rather proud of herself now. It had been difficult for her to
come to this point of view and Rosamond had rambled on in her amiable
fashion many a time on the subject before she had brought her
impressionable room-mate to see it as she did.

"If I merely went to the studio and nowhere else, I'd grow one-sided,"
thought Patricia, cheerfully ignoring the fact that she spent most of
her time nowadays between her lessons and practicing either at home with
Rosamond or doing errands for that luxuriant young lady.

In the weeks she had been in Artemis Lodge she had been absorbing
Rosamond, living, breathing and sleeping Rosamond, until she was merely
a variation of the older girl's charming self. She did not see that
Rosamond was more self-centered than anyone she knew. She forgot how
eager she had once been, and how proud, to mingle with the people who
were always dropping in to see Bruce and Elinor. In a word, she was, for
the time, like the man who points his telescope at the flower by his
side and cries out that the world is made of pink petals and yellow
stamen. She was no longer Patricia--she was Rosamond Merton's version of
Patricia.

And the most remarkable part was that she had come to this state of mind
through her best impulses and by the way of her generous admirations.
The manner of her coming had been so whole-souled and liberal, too, that
she deserved to have arrived at more than this.

She went to the studio on Sunday evening and showed her pretty simple
evening frock, decorated with a wide band of glittering trimming from
Rosamond's ample store, and she had the one real quarrel of her life
with Elinor because that tender sister made her rip it off before she
would consent to her either appearing at the studio