"What did she want to do?" Myra demanded.
"It just happened to be me who had David who had—who had to have her. She didn't do it, My; he did."
"He did his half, all right!" Myra admitted; she had become as open in her enmity to David as to Fidelia. "And you don't blame him, either!" Myra accused and she went on uttering her impatience with Alice's "abjectness."
Alice replied. "I don't care if I am abject. I can't think of anybody but him. My, I've all my life planned for years and years ahead—with David! We planned it all together. Where we'd live and how, and everything we'd do. We've taken the same courses for four years so we'd be interested in the same things; we've—" Alice broke down and cried.
"You start at forgetting Dave!" Myra commanded almost savagely. "You start forgetting him right now!"
But no one knew better than Myra that Alice never could do it; no one more fully realized the force of that tremendous, initial advantage which David had taken of Alice when he came to college, an overworked, serious and awkward boy, so strange to social manners that others laughed at him but Alice drew to his defense; no one better undestood that Alice never could hope to find, nor could she ever have heart to seek for, a substitute for her love for David which had been growing throughout the four years they had been developing from girl and boy together.
Theirs was an intimacy not to be likened to any ordinary engagement and least of all to the lightly held
