for the first time in public and as though nothing had happened.
Alice drove up that morning and, at noon, she drove home so David and she did not have a walk together to the car line. They were together only on the campus and in classes, where outwardly everything was the same. That eleven o'clock class, with Fidelia in the room with David and Alice, was especially the same—outwardly. There was Fidelia, warm and glorious with color in the edge of the sunlight; there was David, serious and busy with his note-book. Alice sat quiet, as usual, vaguely hearing the words of the lecture while she watched David.
Her peace and dreaming satisfaction had departed from this hour ever since Fidelia Netley had come; today it was become for Alice an hour of ordeal requiring her to sit still when she wanted to leap up and run from the room, when she wanted to scream, to do—anything
Every day that week, until Saturday, she subjected herself to that ordeal and went through it outwardly quiet and calm, whatever her nerves were. On Saturday was the dance, the Tau Gamma "formal," which she was to lead with David and where Fidelia would be.
Alice had a new dress for the dance and a new bracelet, a narrow band of gold with sapphires of the blue of her eyes. She had new, silver slippers with new buckles which her father, himself, selected. He had her meet him in town on Saturday morning for a shopping excursion; and she knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was trying, by money, to help her fight Fidelia.
