at. They
would--most of them--have understood that the chief reason a man went to
a university was to learn to get along with his fellow men and to hold
his own in the world. The girls labored under the idea that one went to
a university for the exclusive purpose of making high marks in their
studies. They put in stolid hours of study and were quietly glad at
their high averages; but it actually seemed as if many of them used
college as a sort of shelter rather than an opportunity for the exercise
of personality.

However, there were plenty of the other sort--gallant, excursive
spirits, and as soon as Kate became acquainted she had pleasure in
picking and choosing. She nibbled at this person and that like a
cautious and discriminating mouse, venturing on a full taste if she
liked the flavor, scampering if she didn't.

Of course she had her furores. Now it was for settlement work, now for
dramatics, now for dancing. Subconsciously she was always looking about
for some one who "needed" her, but there were few such. Patronage would
have been resented hotly, and Kate learned by a series of
discountenancing experiences that friendship would not come--any more
than love--at beck and call.

Love!

That gave her pause. Love had not come her way. Of course there was Ray
McCrea. But he was only a possibility. She wondered if she would turn to
him in trouble. Of that she was not yet certain. It was pleasant to be
with him, but even for a gala occasion she was not sure but that she was
happier with Honora Daley than with him. Honora Daley was Honora Fulham
now--married to a "dark man" as the gypsy fortune-tellers would have
called him. He seemed very dark to Kate, menacing even; but Honora found
it worth her while to shed her brightness on his tenebrosity, so that
was, of course, Honora's affair.

Kate smiled to think of how her mother would be questioning her about
her "admirers," as she would phrase it in her mid-Victorian parlance.
There was really only Ray to report upon. He would be the beau ideal
"young gentleman,"--to recur again to her mother's phraseology,--the son
of a member of a great State Street dry-goods firm, an excellently
mannered, ingratiating, traveled person with the most desirable social
connections. Kate would be able to tell of the two mansions, one on the
Lake Shore Drive, the other at Lake Forest, where Ray lived with his
parents. He had not gone to an Eastern college because his father
wished him t