ment.
When they got off the street-car and walked back to Mrs. Lorch's house
in the dusk, Eckman put her hand in his overcoat pocket--she had no
muff--and kept squeezing it ardently until she said, "Don't do that; my
ring cuts me." That night he told his roommate that he "could have
kissed her as easy as rolling off a log, but she wasn't worth the
trouble." As for Thea, she had enjoyed the afternoon very much, and
wrote her father a brief but clear account of what she had seen.

One night at supper Mrs. Andersen was talking about the exhibit of
students' work she had seen at the Art Institute that afternoon. Several
of her friends had sketches in the exhibit. Thea, who always felt that
she was behindhand in courtesy to Mrs. Andersen, thought that here was
an opportunity to show interest without committing herself to anything.
"Where is that, the Institute?" she asked absently.

Mrs. Andersen clasped her napkin in both hands. "The Art Institute? Our
beautiful Art Institute on Michigan Avenue? Do you mean to say you have
never visited it?"

"Oh, is it the place with the big lions out in front? I remember; I saw
it when I went to Montgomery Ward's. Yes, I thought the lions were
beautiful."

"But the pictures! Didn't you visit the galleries?"

"No. The sign outside said it was a pay-day. I've always meant to go
back, but I haven't happened to be down that way since."

Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen looked at each other. The old mother spoke,
fixing her shining little eyes upon Thea across the table. "Ah, but Miss
Kronborg, there are old masters! Oh, many of them, such as you could not
see anywhere out of Europe."

"And Corots," breathed Mrs. Andersen, tilting her head feelingly. "Such
examples of the Barbizon school!" This was meaningless to Thea, who did
not read the art columns of the Sunday INTER-OCEAN as Mrs. Andersen did.

"Oh, I'm going there some day," she reassured them. "I like to look at
oil paintings."

One bleak day in February, when the wind was blowing clouds of dirt like
a Moonstone sandstorm, dirt that filled your eyes and ears and mouth,
Thea fought her way across the unprotected space in front of the Art
Institute and into the doors of the building. She did not come out again
until the closing hour. In the street-car, on the long cold ride home,
while she sat staring at the waistcoat buttons of a fat strap-hanger,
she had a serious reckoning with herself. She seldom thought about her
way of life,