Garland, whose
father kept the fish market, and Abie Stern, Junior, the tailor's son.
"Is this Judith Randall? Well, Judith, this is Joe; Joe Garland. I'm
getting up a crowd to go skating to-night, and have a rarebit afterward.
Would you care to come?"

She was one of the crowd. Natalie, little, sparkling-eyed, and
black-haired, with the freshest and readiest of laughs, was more
popular, filling her dance orders first and playing the lead in
theatricals, and Rena Drew was more prominent, president of the class
and the debating society, and the proud owner of the strongest voice in
the school quartette, a fine big contralto which wrapped itself round
Judith's small, clear soprano at public appearances and nearly
extinguished it. Willard, the most eligible of the boys, was Judith's
unquestioned property, otherwise nothing distinguished her. She was one
of the crowd, and accepted the fact demurely, as if it were a matter of
course, not a dream come true. Just as discreetly she conducted her
affair with Neil Donovan, captain-elect of the team, literary editor of
the school paper, star debater, and in his way a creditable conquest, if
she had cared to claim him openly.

"Neil danced three dances with me," confided Natalie, in the hushed
whisper appropriate to the confidences that were part of the ceremony of
spending the night together after a party, though Natalie's room, with
the old-fashioned feather bed, where the two were cuddling together, was
on the third story of the rambling white house, and safe out of hearing.

"Neil?"

"Judy, it's too bad to call him Murph and make fun of him. The day he
came into the store to solicit ads for the _Record_ father said that boy
would go far, if he had half a chance, but no boy had a chance in this
town, the way it is run, and no Irish boy ever did have a chance. Well,
an Irish boy is just as good as anybody, if they only thought so."

"But they don't."

"Judy, you are horrid about Neil. You always are about any boy I get
crushed on. Neil has perfectly beautiful eyes, and he is so sensitive.
He kept looking at you all through that last schottische as if you had
hurt his feelings. He must have gone home soon after that. I didn't see
him again. You didn't dance with him once."

"No."

"Poor boy. And he's up there in the schoolhouse with you, hour after
hour, practising quartette stuff, and Willard so crazy about you he
can't see, and Rena crazy about Willard----"

"Rena ca