----"

"I can't eat dead violets," he explained. "So don't keep tryin' to make
me do it."

This had the effect he desired, and subdued her; she abandoned her
unsisterly coquetries, and looked beamingly about her, but her smile was
more mechanical than it had been at first.

At home she had seemed beautiful; but here, where the other girls
competed, things were not as they had been there, with only her mother
and Miss Perry to give contrast. These crowds of other girls had all
done their best, also, to look beautiful, though not one of them had
worked so hard for such a consummation as Alice had. They did not need
to; they did not need to get their mothers to make old dresses over;
they did not need to hunt violets in the rain.

At home her dress had seemed beautiful; but that was different,
too, where there were dozens of brilliant fabrics, fashioned in new
ways--some of these new ways startling, which only made the wearers
centers of interest and shocked no one. And Alice remembered that she
had heard a girl say, not long before, "Oh, ORGANDIE! Nobody wears
organdie for evening gowns except in midsummer." Alice had thought
little of this; but as she looked about her and saw no organdie except
her own, she found greater difficulty in keeping her smile as arch and
spontaneous as she wished it. In fact, it was beginning to make her face
ache a little.

Mildred came in from the corridor, heavily attended. She carried a great
bouquet of violets laced with lilies of-the-valley; and the violets were
lusty, big purple things, their stems wrapped in cloth of gold, with
silken cords dependent, ending in long tassels. She and her convoy
passed near the two young Adamses; and it appeared that one of the
convoy besought his hostess to permit "cutting in"; they were "doing it
other places" of late, he urged; but he was denied and told to console
himself by holding the bouquet, at intervals, until his third of the
sixteenth dance should come. Alice looked dubiously at her own bouquet.

Suddenly she felt that the violets betrayed her; that any one who looked
at them could see how rustic, how innocent of any florist's craft they
were "I can't eat dead violets," Walter said. The little wild flowers,
dying indeed in the warm air, were drooping in a forlorn mass; and it
seemed to her that whoever noticed them would guess that she had picked
them herself. She decided to get rid of them.

Walter was becoming restive. "Look here!" he