renely
occupied elsewhere. The great questions of Capital and Labor, were not
half so important to them, as the fact of the lost afternoon, or the
essays that must be written for to-morrow's English, or even that this
was ice-cream night with dancing class to follow. But Patty, on the
front seat, sat with wide, serious eyes fixed on the lecturer's face.
She was absorbing his arguments--and storing them for use.

Tea followed according to schedule. The three chosen ones received
their guests with the facility of long-tried hostesses. The fact that
their bearing was under inspection, with marks to follow, did not
appreciably diminish their case. They were learning by the laboratory
method, the social graces that would be needed later in the larger
world. Harriet and Mae presided at the tea table, while Patty engaged
the personage in conversation. He commented later, to Miss Lord, upon
the students' rare understanding in economic subjects.

Miss Lord replied with some complaisance that she endeavored to have her
girls think for themselves. Sociology was a field in which lessons could
not be taught by rote. Each must work out her own conclusions, and act
upon them.

Ice-cream and dancing restored the balance of St. Ursula's, after the
mental exertions of the afternoon. At half-past nine--the school did not
retire until ten on dancing nights--Patty and Priscilla dropped their
goodnight courtesy, murmured a polite "_Bon soir, Mam'selle_," and
scampered upstairs, still very wide awake. Instead of preparing for bed
with all dispatch, as well-conducted school girls should, they engaged
themselves in practising the steps of their new Spanish dance down the
length of the South Corridor. They brought up with a pirouette at
Rosalie Patton's door.

Rosalie, still in the pale blue fluffiness of her dancing frock, was
sitting cross-legged on the couch, her yellow curls bent over the open
pages of a Virgil, tears spattering with dreary regularity on the lines
she was conning.

The course of Rosalie's progress through senior Latin might be marked by
blistered pages. She was a pretty, cuddling, helpless little thing,
deplorably babyish for a senior; but irresistibly appealing. Everyone
teased her, and protected her, and loved her. She was irrevocably
predestined to bowl over the first man who came along, with her ultra
feminine irresponsibility. Rosalie very often dreamed--when she ought to
have been concentrating upon Latin grammar