ice, with a determined look on his face. He found his
waiting-room full of patients, and it was one o'clock before he had
dismissed the last one. Then he shut his door and took a drink before
going over to the hotel for his lunch. He smiled as he locked his
cupboard. "I feel almost as gay as if I were going to get away for a
winter myself," he thought.

Afterward Thea could never remember much about that summer, or how she
lived through her impatience. She was to set off with Dr. Archie on the
fifteenth of October, and she gave lessons until the first of September.
Then she began to get her clothes ready, and spent whole afternoons in
the village dressmaker's stuffy, littered little sewing-room. Thea and
her mother made a trip to Denver to buy the materials for her dresses.
Ready-made clothes for girls were not to be had in those days. Miss
Spencer, the dressmaker, declared that she could do handsomely by Thea
if they would only let her carry out her own ideas. But Mrs. Kronborg
and Thea felt that Miss Spencer's most daring productions might seem out
of place in Chicago, so they restrained her with a firm hand. Tillie,
who always helped Mrs. Kronborg with the family sewing, was for letting
Miss Spencer challenge Chicago on Thea's person. Since Ray Kennedy's
death, Thea had become more than ever one of Tillie's heroines. Tillie
swore each of her friends to secrecy, and, coming home from church or
leaning over the fence, told them the most touching stories about Ray's
devotion, and how Thea would "never get over it."

Tillie's confidences stimulated the general discussion of Thea's
venture. This discussion went on, upon front porches and in back yards,
pretty much all summer. Some people approved of Thea's going to Chicago,
but most people did not. There were others who changed their minds about
it every day.

Tillie said she wanted Thea to have a ball dress "above all things." She
bought a fashion book especially devoted to evening clothes and looked
hungrily over the colored plates, picking out costumes that would be
becoming to "a blonde." She wanted Thea to have all the gay clothes she
herself had always longed for; clothes she often told herself she needed
"to recite in."

"Tillie," Thea used to cry impatiently, "can't you see that if Miss
Spencer tried to make one of those things, she'd make me look like a
circus girl? Anyhow, I don't know anybody in Chicago. I won't be going
to parties."

Tillie always repl