n put in a final plea for the State University, which would not
cost half as much as Edith's school. Seeing that it meant more to her
than he had known, and having a particular affection for this younger
daughter of his, Mr. Holland was on the point of giving in when the
newspapers came out with a scandal that centered about the suicide of a
girl student at the university. That settled it; Ruth would stay home
with her mother. She could go on with music, and study literature with
Miss Collins. Miss Collins stood for polite learning in the town. There
was not the remotest danger of an education received through her
unfeminizing a girl. But Ruth soon abandoned Miss Collins, scornfully
informing her parent that she would as soon study literature with a
mummy.

With Ruth, the desire to go to college had been less a definite craving
for knowledge than a diffused longing for an enlarged experience. She
wanted something different, was impatient for something new, something
more. She had more curiosity about the life outside their allotted place
than her friend Edith Lawrence had. She wanted to go to college because
that would open out from what she had. Ruth would have found small
satisfaction in that girls' school of Edith's had her father consented
to her going. It was little more than the polite learning of Miss
Collins fashionably re-dressed. Edith, however, came home with a new
grace and poise, an added gift of living charmingly on the surface of
life, and held that school was lovely.

During that year her friend was away--Ruth was nineteen then--she was
not so much unhappy as she was growingly impatient for something more,
and expectant of it. She was always thinking that something was going to
happen--that was why things did not go dead for her. The year was
intensifying to her; she missed her friend; she had been baffled in
something she wanted. It made her conscious of wanting more than she
had. Her energies having been shut off from the way they had wanted to
go, she was all the more zestful for new things from life. There was
much in her that her life did not engage.

She loved dancing. She was happily excited that night because they were
going to a dance. Waiting for Deane, she wondered if he had danced any
during the year, hoping that he had, and was a little better dancer than
of old. Dear Deane! She always had that "Dear Deane!" feeling after she
had been critical about him.

She wished she did think of Dean