n this language at the university and passed all her
examinations, she found these technical descriptions of costumes
frightfully hard to understand.) She stuck at it, though, for a long
while, until one morning a comparison occurred to her that made her shut
the folio with a slam. It had been in just this way, with just this
dogged, blind, hopeless persistence, that, ages ago, in that former
incarnation, she'd tried to study law!

This was too much for her. She walked out of the library with the best
appearance of unconcern that she could muster,--it had been a near thing
that she didn't break down and cry--and she did not go back. Probably it
was just as well that Galbraith hadn't sent for her. She'd only have
made a ghastly failure of it, if he had.

The background, of course, to all these endeavors and discouragements,
or, to describe it more justly, the indivisible, all-permeating ether
they floated about in, was, just as it had been in the time of her
success--Rodney. The occupations, routine and otherwise, that she gave
her mind to, might seem, in a way, to crowd him out of it, although not
one of them was undertaken without some reference to him; the success of
this, the failure of that, brought him nearer, put him farther away,
like the children's game of _Warm and Cold_.

When she ran out of occupations that could absorb the conscious part of
her mind, she did not even try to resist direct thoughts about him.
She'd spent uncounted hours since that opening night, wondering if he
knew where she was, inventing reasons why, knowing, he didn't come to
her; explanations of the possibility of his still remaining in
ignorance. She'd gone over and over again, the probable things that he
would say, the things that she would say in reply, when he did come.

She was prepared for his anger. He was, she felt, entitled to be angry.
But she felt sure she could get him to listen while she told him just
why and how she had done it, and what she had done, and she had a sort
of tremulous confidence that when the story was told, entire, his anger
would be found to have abated, if not altogether to have disappeared.
And afterward, when the shock had worn off, and he had had time to
adjust himself to things, he'd begin to feel a little proud of her. They
could commence--being friends. She'd constructed and let her mind dwell
on almost every conceivable combination of circumstances, except the one
thing that happened.

Only, as