ression of fixed inattention, Molly,
that you're thinking of Mr. Durgin!"

Mary gave a start of protest, but she was too honest to deny the fact
outright, and Bessie ran on:

"No, we don't sit on a bench in the Common, or even in the Garden, or on
the walk in Commonwealth Avenue. If we come to it later, as the season
advances, I shall make him stay quite at the other end of the bench, and
not put his hand along the top. You needn't be afraid, Molly; all the
proprieties shall be religiously observed. Perhaps I shall ask Aunt
Louisa to let us sit out on her front steps, when the evenings get
warmer; but I assure you it's much more comfortable in-doors yet, even in
town, though you'll hardly, believe it at the Shore. Shall you come up to
Class Day?"

"Oh, I don't know," Mary began, with a sigh of the baffled hope and the
inextinguishable expectation which the mention of Class Day stirs in the
heart of every Boston girl past twenty.

"Yes!" said Bessie, with a sigh burlesqued from Mary's. "That is what we
all say, and it is certainly the most maddening of human festivals. I
suppose, if we were quite left to ourselves, we shouldn't go; but we seem
never to be, quite. After every Class Day I say to myself that nothing on
earth could induce me to go to another; but when it comes round again, I
find myself grasping at any straw of a pretext. I'm pretending now that
I've a tender obligation to go because it's his Class Day."

"Bessie!" cried Mary Enderby. "You don't mean it!"

"Not if I say it, Mary dear. What did I promise you about the pericardiac
symptoms? But I feel--I feel that if he asks me I must go. Shouldn't you
like to go and see a jay Class Day--be part of it? Think of going once to
the Pi Ute spread--or whatever it is! And dancing in their tent! And
being left out of the Gym, and Beck! Yes, I ought to go, so that it can
be brought home to me, and I can have a realizing sense of what I am
doing, and be stayed in my mad career."

"Perhaps," Mary Enderby suggested, colorlessly, "he will be devoted to
his own people." She had a cold fascination in the picture Bessie's words
had conjured up, and she was saying this less to Bessie than to herself.

"And I should meet them--his mothers and sisters!" Bessie dramatized an
excess of anguish. "Oh, Mary, that is the very thorn I have been trying
not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my
embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folk