f June, having
received her last communion in the little ivy-covered stone chapel from
the hands of the bishop himself, smiled upon by Miss Thompson and the
other teachers, who had three years before pronounced her "a perfect
little fright," and kissed by a few of her schoolmates. She felt that
she was coming into her own, thanks to her magic lamp--that life ahead
looked promising. Yet she had changed as little fundamentally during
these three years as a human being well could. She had passed from the
narrowest poverty of the Alton side street to the prodigal ease of
Herndon Hall, from the environment of an inferior "rooming-house" to
companionship with the rich daughters of "our very best people,"--from
an unformed child to the full physical estate of womanhood,--all within
three short years; but she had accommodated herself to these great
transitions with as little inward change as possible. Her soul was the
soul of the Clarks, tricked out with good clothes and the manners and
habits of the rich. Addie, it seemed, had at last arrived at her
paradise in the person of her daughter, but it was a pale and
inexpressive Addie, who made no large drafts upon paradise.

Adelle departed in the Glynn motor for the Glynn country-place, where
she was to stay until the Glynns sailed for Europe. She was prettily
dressed in ecru-colored embroidered linen, with a broad straw hat and
suede gloves and boots, according to the style of the day, and she was
really happy and almost aware of it. Eveline was glum because her
mother--a stern-looking matron who knew exactly what she wanted out of
life and how to get it--had refused peremptorily to let her invite Bobby
Trenow to accompany them. Bobby was Eveline's darling of the hour, as
Adelle knew: Eveline had let him kiss her for the first time the
previous evening, and she was "perfectly crazy" about him. To Adelle,
Bobby was merely a smooth, downy boy like all the rest, who showed bare
brown arms and white flannels in summer, and had as little to say for
himself as she had. She was amused at Nelly's fussed state over the loss
of Bobby; she could not understand Mother Glynn's objection to the
harmless Bobby's occupying the vacant seat in the roomy car;--but then
she did not understand many things in the intricate social world in
which she found herself. She did not know that there is no one of their
possessions that the rich learn more quickly to guard than their women.
The aristocrats of al