A DIFFICULT and embarrassing bit of business, in connection with Fidelia Netley, was what detained Alice with Myra up there in Myra's room in Willard, which Nell Gould and Fidelia had just left. And the girls were unable to get to that business quickly; for after Fidelia closed the door on her departure, Alice and Myra gazed at each other in silence for several moments after Miss Netley's definite, clicking tread had diminished down the hallway. Both girls, for the instant, were holding breath; then Myra parted her lips with an audible gasp and laughed.
"Tell me the exact truth, Alice; how does she make you feel?"
"She's one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen," Alice said in her quiet, considering and utterly honest way.
"Of course she is; but that's not how she makes you feel," Myra rejoined. "A peacock's perfectly stunning."
"She's not like a peacock," Alice put in, too quickly. "There's lots to that girl, I know."
"No, you don't; you just try to feel it because she's a Tau Gamma and practically wished onto us whether we like it or not and you're congenitally cursed with the determination to make the best of anything; then you try twice as hard because you know you don't like her. You can't help it, Alice."
"What?"
"Not liking her. Now take me, for instance," Myra went on. "I offer little to look at, the Lord knows; I'm short and plain . . . "
"You're not!"
"I adore you, darling, but we will stick to the unflattering fact for the present crisis," Myra retorted. "I am what is perfectly obvious. I'm not in Fidelia Netley's class at all. I couldn't possibly compete with her and come between her and any man she wanted. By the same token, she can't come between me and Lan; for he isn't after looks or he'd never have cared for me. Therefore I can't have anything actually personal against her; but I hate her, Alice!"
"No!" denied Alice, more emphatically for Myra's hot vehemence.
"I hate her; hate her," Myra repeated, amazing herself with her own feeling. "I can't tell you why but I suppose it's because I'm afraid of her. I'm not afraid of her for myself, I just told you; so it can't be personal. I reckon it's generic fear—the sort of fear they talk about in biology. You fear an enemy if it's the sort that has hurt or can hurt your kind whether it can really do anything to you or not. At moments I was almost amused to death, she was so frank and absolutely after just one thing. I never heard anybody quite so open as when she said to me, "My dear, which are the men you know?" I thought I would positively expire. But the men won't!"
"Expire about her, you mean?" asked Alice.
"No, dearest; in droves they'll expire. They'll breathe their last at her word. They won't see anything amusing, I mean. At moments I was seized with the almost ungovernable impulse to borrow a bugle and rush to the roof of stanch old Willard and blow to college and town 'save himself who can'; but no man would thank me. No one would trouble to save himself, if he could. They're demons for that danger." And Myra arose, shaking her small, plain self belligerently.
"She needn't be an enemy," Alice asserted after a moment's silence.
"She? She can't help it."
"Then, we shouldn't hold it against her. I don't like her, My," Alice confessed. "But that's mostly because I do feel afraid of her; and that's silly, I suppose."
"Silly?" said Myra, the plain, staring at her dearest friend. "For you, it's raving lunacy!"
Alice flushed hotly and then brought Myra and herself to business. "We're just thinking about our personal feelings, My, and not about her. She's a Tau Gamma; she's here now; she's our 'sister'!"
Myra, interrupted. "She's not mine, or she wouldn't be, if I'd had the vote on her. If Minnesota hadn't wished her into Tau Gamma, she'd never have got in here."
"But that makes no difference now; we've got to ask her to join us."
"Not right away," Myra reminded. "We can't, even if we all wanted to. We've got to write Minnesota and Stanford, first. Why didn't she go back to them, when she decided to return to college? It looks queer to me, I tell you, Alice."
"Of course we'll write the Minnesota chapter, and Stanford," Alice said. She was the head of the local chapter. "But"
"But we'll not find out anything against her, even if there is something," Myra finished. "I know that. If Nell had trouble here and went to Stanford, would we tell? Of course not. So we're stuck, as I see it; we're going to have her and we might as well pretend to like it. All right, Allie; I'll be good. I'll give in." And Myra went over and kissed Alice.
She held Myra clasped for a moment and then got up. "I'd better be starting along now."
"You'd better stay here; it's a fright of a night."
"David's driving me home," Alice reminded; and Myra made no more objection but helped Alice on with her coat and accompanied her to the front entrance.
David, waiting in the snow and feeling increased impatience to possess Alice, was becoming stirred to an emotional renewal of his rebellion against his father and the ideas to which he had been reared. His revolt no longer turned on his taking Mr. Fuller's ten thousand dollars but dwelt upon his father's denial of David's right to marry Alice how and when Alice and he pleased. He longed to have Alice in his arms and for the contact of his lips on hers and for the warmth of hers on his; he longed for physical possession of her; and he was not ashamed of it; nor, he resolved, would he let himself again be ashamed of it nor would he fear natural desire because his father would call it sin.
What a dismal, solemn rite his father would have marriage be! First, of course, he—David—should become a minister of God; he should be fired with zeal for doing God's work. If then he found that he needed a wife and she could enter with all her soul into service of the Lord, he might marry. Paul, the great apostle, of course did not marry. "It is good for a man not to touch a woman," wrote Paul to the Corinthians. Nevertheless, if a man were not strong enough in the spirit to subdue the flesh, "let every man have his own wife . . . for it is better to marry than to burn."
Dave knew all that scripture by heart; he knew it so well, indeed, that it came to his mind, as it was written, entirely without bidding and when, in fact, he would not have it.
This said that to marry was to indulge a weakness of the flesh which—so Ephraim Herrick taught—might be redeemed if man and wife joined spiritually for God and if, as God blessed them, they bore children and brought them up to live righteously and in fear of the Lord. Thus Ephraim and Sarah Herrick had done. Thus they would have David do, at the right time. But now was not the right time for him to think of marriage and certainly not marriage with Alice Sothron, who was a worldly girl—oh, granted she was a generous, fond, unselfish girl—but she was a worldy girl for she did not know how to be anything else. She would make him a worldly wife; she was precisely the sort the apostle Paul had in mind when, two thousand years ago, he preached: "He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife."
Ephraim Herrick considered this already proved in regard to Alice, who had taught his son to dance in the first year David was away from home, and with that wedge of sensuality had widened the breach between father and son till now the world and the flesh were claiming him; he was selling his soul to borrow money to enter the race for riches, and denying his duty to God.
"Dances! He's still throwing up dances to me!" Dave ejaculated, in his review with himself of his father's bigoted creed. It made no difference to his father that almost all the university danced in these days—and many professors as well as the girl and men students; nor did it alter his father's view that the university, Methodist as it was, gave over its gymnasium for dances where girls went decolleté and boys put their arms about them and danced with them. Dancing now was something David could do without qualms of the right or wrong of it; but three years ago, that was not so. Suppose he had clung to the narrow interdict on dancing which had been drilled into him during his youth; what sort of a man would he be now? And was it not the clutch of other such proscriptions and senseless dreads which controlled him yet?
He squared about to Willard impatiently. "Alice—why doesn't she come?" Then he saw her in the lighted doorway.
She was the taller of the two who now appeared there; for the other was Myra. Alice made a figure very familiar to him but not quite as he expected. She was less, in some way; he thought, "She's tired." He moved toward the door and she parted from Myra and came out; and as she saw him, she called to him in her eager, gentle way and she hurried to him. He quickened his step to her, feeling his heart leaping and pounding. She was not less to him now.
"Oh, Davey!" she cried to him; and he caught her hands which she gave to him together. He held them tight between his own; that was safe enough there just out of the light; he wanted to kiss her; but that was not safe there. "Alice!" he said. "Oh, this is good!"
"You've missed me, Davey?"
"Never anything like it with me before."
"Nor with me," she confessed.
"Let's get in the car." And he led her to it, releasing one of her hands and holding the other. Then he had to relinquish that. So he got into the car and he took the driving seat and switched on the dashboard light to see the dials and starter; but as soon as he had the engine going, he let it run idle to warm and he switched off the light.
She had merely waited, sitting quiet and close beside him. He had off his gloves and, feeling for her wrists, he found she had unbuttoned her gloves and stripped them off and he drew her slender, soft hands together again and brought them up to his lips, as he bent, and kissed them and then held her fingers against his cheek.
"Glad to have me back?" he inquired of her.
"Oh, Davey!" she whispered, gasping; and he felt her trembling and liked it. He liked her exclaiming, as she did in a moment, "You're not cold at all but you've been waiting out there for me!"
"That's why I couldn't get cold," he said.
"No; you're so strong. And you got it, Davey! You got it!"
She meant that "it"—that ten thousand dollars of Mr. Fuller's—about which she had known ever since there was the first chance of getting it and about which he had telephoned her at Willard when he came out from town.
"Yes," he said. "I got it. And it's put up with Snelgrove's money. It's a deal, Alice!"
He had been about to take her in his arms. How lovely she was, how slender and gentle and what feeling for him she put in her soft, almost shy touches. He was feeling the loveliness of her hand on his cheek and he had been about to clasp her closer, but something about that ten thousand, which she had mentioned, downed his impulse.
They had made rules for themselves, Alice and David, long ago when they became "engaged"—rules to keep their love fine and pure, free from the cheapening and debasement of many kisses and caresses. They might kiss on meeting, when alone, kiss before parting, of course; and at some other times; they might keep their hands in each other's but other clasps must be feared. So, in spite of that five-minute-ago defiance of fear of physical possession, Dave satisfied himself now with switching on the light again to see her face—the clear, dear line of her forehead and nose, the soft dark brown of her hair and the blueness of her eyes always open to his. She had lovely eyes and so loyal looking—unswervingly loyal to him, indeed, ever since that day, long ago, when they rested on his in a way he would never forget and she said: "We're going to be good friends forever, aren't we, you and I?"
That made one of their marker days about which they liked often to speak and which often came to him when he suddenly looked down at her and found her gazing at him, as she was now, certain of herself being his and wondering, in just this way, how wholly he was hers.
"Hello," he said to her, and smiled.
"Hello," she said; and he threw in the gear and sent the car forward.
"Plenty of snow," he remarked as the wheels slipped. "We'll not be home in a hurry."
"I'm not in a hurry now, Davey."
"Nor I. But you were before?"
"When I knew you would be down here and after I hadn't seen you for two days! Of course! And you'd come early, I thought; you were here before you said you'd be, weren't you?"
"Yes; for then I thought you'd come out early."
"Oh, Davy, I would have, but to-night—" she stopped. She had forgotten Fidelia Netley in her meeting with David. Now that she remembered the new girl, she thought how senseless had been her pang of fear of Fidelia Netley and how senseless, also, was any fear of losing David to another. It arose—she always said to herself—from the fact that at the start she had David so much to herself; for at first hardly another girl in college had thought about the serious, self-conscious boy, so pitifully strange to amusements and luxuries, who had come to Evanston to attend classes while working. Not only had they left him to himself but some of them had been rather entertained by Alice's "taking him up" and teaching him how to dance and "looking out for him." Now no one in college was so competent to look out for himself and, also, look out for a girl; and now many girls appreciated him; there was not one, who knew him, that did not like to refer to her friendship with David Herrick. Suppose he could come to care for one of them? "I haven't got to suppose that," Alice said to herself; and aloud she told him: "You see, a new Tau Gamma arrived to-night. She was initiated at our Minnesota chapter; we just heard about her and Myra had her in her room meeting some of our girls."
"I saw her," said Dave and the image of that unusual, vital girl, as she first had appeared, rose in his mind.
"You did? Where?"
"In front of Willard. She came out with Nell Gould and Nell introduced me. I suppose she's the one; a great looking girl; red hair. She's staying at Fansler's. But Nell didn't tell me she was a Tau Gamma."
"Nell wouldn't," Alice said. "We haven't asked her to join our chapter yet. She told you she was staying at Mrs. Fansler's?"
"No; I knew that," Dave replied. "I walked with her to the corner, Alice."
"Where did Nell go?" Alice asked, fluttering at a stab of that fear, that senseless fear which had been growing in these days when every girl now looked at Dave and wanted to know him.
"Oh, she was along," Dave responded and remembered how Nell had seemed lost in the half-light when he could still see Miss Netley's face.
Alice was questioning herself, how had he known that Fidelia Netley was staying at Mrs. Fansler's? She knew it must have been mere chance; yet it frightened her that Fidelia Netley had met him at once. And he thought her "great looking" and had walked with her to the corner forgetting that he had walked also with Nell.
"She was the one?" Dave asked.
"Who?"
"That girl; she's the Tau Gamma?"
"Yes. You—liked her?"
Alice had not meant to add that; she had not meant to talk about Fidelia Netley any more; but the question pressed itself. At first Alice had dimissed it; then she realized, "I'm not asking that because I'm feeling afraid." And she determined, "I won't be afraid; I've no cause to be; I won't."
"Why, I liked her," Dave replied. "I certainly liked her. Unusual and pleasant, too, isn't she?"
This was no disloyalty, to say that he liked a new sorority sister and to volunteer that she was pleasant.
Alice agreed: "Yes, she was pleasant." Then the demand forced itself out: "How did you know she was staying at Mrs. Fansler's?"
"Oh, some of the fellows saw her at the station and told her how to get there. They were talking about her at the house. Good she's a Tau Gamma already or you'd have a fight for her on your hands, if you wanted her. Lan saw her and told me to tip you off to her; of course he didn't know you had her already."
"We haven't her really yet," Alice corrected. "We have to write the chapter that initiated her, of course; then we have to vote to invite her to join us. Minnesota initiated her."
Alice nearly added: "Then she went to Stanford." But Alice did not; it would have been too near to suggesting something disagreeable to tell how Fidelia Netley had shifted about from college to college. Yet Alice could not help wanting Dave to know that perhaps everything was not so fair about this unusual girl whom he had found great looking and so pleasant. The next minute she was very glad she had not told him, for he said:
"Yes; she mentioned she started at Minnesota and then went to Stanford. Her family move to California?"
"No, she has no family—only an aunt who hates her and who kept her living in schools. The court took her from her aunt eight years ago and since then she's been brought up by a bank. Tau Gamma has been the nearest thing to a family she's ever known," Alice told quietly. That was only fair to Fidelia Netley to tell, though it visibly increased David's interest when Alice wanted so hard to stop it.
"That's hard luck. Then you're taking her in, of course."
"Yes; I think so."
"What class'll she be in? Ours?"
"Partly in ours. She was junior at Leland Stanford."
"Where's her home? I mean where's the bank that's bringing her up?"
"White Falls, Iowa."
"How'd she happen to shift here?"
"Why, she was out of school for a while; and she got so lonely she thought she'd come back. She thought she'd try it here for she wanted some of our music work along with college."
"Netley; is that her name?"
"Yes; Fidelia Netley."
"What?"
"Fidelia," Alice repeated the Christian name.
"New one on me; altogether she's a new one on me," Dave repeated, giving his conscious attention again to the drifts. He felt more disturbed over hurting Fidelia Netley by his quick, thoughtless remark. A girl brought up by an aunt who hated her and kept her living at schools, and then handed over to the guardianship of a bank, surely faced difficulties. He recalled how she had gazed at him under the light, how beautiful her face was and how well-developed was her figure.
The keeping in mind of the beauty of a girl's body was what his father would call lust; and Dave, thinking of this, forgot Fidelia Netley as recollection of his struggle with his father claimed his feelings. At the same moment, Alice mentioned his father with the purpose of taking their talk finally from Fidelia Netley.
"How did you find your father, Davey?"
"Alice, we had the worst time ever!"
"Over the ten thousand dollars?"
"Over everything! The ten thousand dollars simply touched off the other troubles; everything went, money and my plan to go into business and—" he stopped.
"And to marry me," Alice finished.
"Yes; he tried again to break that up. Great chance he had."
"Davey, he feels worse about that—about me—than about your going into business; isn't that true?"
"No; yes; what if he does?" Defiantly Dave thrust an arm about Alice and pressed her close to him as he drove. Gone from her, also, was any fear, or any thought, of Fidelia Netley. She was happy. Not wholly happy; she never could be completely happy until David and she owned each other without right of any one to forbid them love. As it was, his father had a certain right, to forbid them; or perhaps it was not that. Perhaps, without having the right, he possessed rather a power to part them. So, though she no longer thought of Fidelia Netley, Alice quivered in her happiness as David held her and proclaimed:
"I'm going to make money, Alice! I want to! There's nothing wrong about making money. But, by George, to hear father talk you'd say I was out for murder. It's been all right for me to go out for money to put myself through Northwestern and to help at home; that's been right because he's kept on supposing that in the end I'd step into the ministry. But the ten thousand I took from Mr. Fuller has settled that, anyway. So much is over."
He snatched his arm from about her to pull at the wheel as the draw of the drift caused the wheel to oppose him. When he had the drift beaten:
"We're going to make money, Alice! I'm going to have the agency for Hamilton cars—mighty good cars, with square, decent value in them and a fair profit on every job we sell. We're going to pay back Mr. Fuller with interest and then bank some of our money so we'll always have something back of us and earning a little for us, too. There's nothing wrong in that; not even father could say so. We're going to spend some on ourselves in living; and we're going to live fairly well, I hope. We're going to give away some more money. I couldn't mention that to father; he'd think I was throwing it up to him and he wouldn't take anything more from me—or let mother take it. But I'll have the money for them and for ourselves. Not having money is—is—you've never known and you'll never know, if I can help it, how horrible it is! But it's horrible, horrible!" he said again, not meaning to but because he had to.
"Davey!" was all Alice said; and he felt the firm, gentle clasp of her fingers on his forearm. He could not look about to her and keep the wheels in the ruts of the snow but he understood she was making her gentle protest.
"What is it?" he asked.
"It brought you to me, Davey."
"What did?"
"Your not having money. Oh, I know it's been horrible; I don't like to think of it having been horrible for you. But Davey—Davey, how can I feel so about it when it brought me you?"
"It wasn't that, Alice," he denied, almost impatiently. "We'd have got together anyway."
"Yes; we must have; we must have. But—" she squeezed his strong, tense forearm with all the power of her slender fingers and let him go.
He swung the car about a corner and headed it east directly into the wind. They had come to the southern limit of Evanston where the road, which they had been following, turns to the very shore of the lake and clings to the edge of the water for the dark distance south past Calvary Cemetery to the beginning of the great north shore residence blocks of Chicago.
It was a wild, lonely stretch of road that night with no other car in sight, with the roaring violence of the lake beyond the black void on the left and on the right, the dark, silent cemetery, snow-covered and storm-swept, and with gray, still monuments suddenly appearing on the side as the headlights of the motorcar diffused a glow in the sweep of the whistling snow.
"What does your father say about me?" Alice asked.
Dave jerked his head but made no reply.
"He blames me for your taking the money from Mr. Fuller?"
"No!" Dave denied but halted the car.
"Davey, I know!"
"You don't; you don't understand at all. He doesn't say anything against you as you, dear, he couldn't; not possibly. He likes you—for one of your sort," David added honestly. "He's said you're as lovely a worldly girl as could be. Oh, Alice!"
"Go on! I knew of course he considers me just worldly."
"I want you to be! Why not? See here; to show how far father is from us, I'll tell you one thing he said to me. He told me in plain words that my trouble was that I wanted to work for money to make you comfortable and to please you. That's wrong, in his mind—for a man to work for things to please his wife. He ought to be pleasing God all the time; or I ought to. I won't. I want to please you."
He went silent and Alice stayed very still. Then she said: "Doesn't he work to please your mother, Davey?"
"No; I never thought about that till yesterday; but it's true. He's consistent. That's how he's put his life over with mother and with himself; that's how he's had six children on a salary averaging a thousand dollars a year. He doesn't think of pleasing her; she's his partner in his game of forever pleasing God."
Again he stopped abruptly and then, at the sight of the monuments in the district of the dead beside him, he stirred almost savagely.
"Eternity makes me tired. I've seen my father lay up his treasures in Heaven until he's blue in the face; and what good will they ever do him? I'm going to have a few of mine here."
He turned to Alice and took her in his arms, hugging her to him and kissing and kissing her.
She yielded at first; then she resisted; not knowingly, perhaps, and only a very little. He overcame that slight resistance and she offered no more but clung to him, holding to him, and her lips kissed his and his cheek. He kissed her lips, her forehead, her temples, her cheeks and her lips again; when his fury at last was going, he kissed her hands. Then he released her and she sat back, disheveled and gasping and he sat back on his side, staring at her.
"Shall we drive on now?" he challenged her.
"No."
"We—we can't do that again."
"No."
"I never saw your eyes so bright. You're not sorry, Alice?"
She caught a deep breath and repeated again her monosyllable, "No."
Now he would have more. "No, what?"
"No, Davey."
"You hate me for that, Alice?"
"Hate you!" she closed her eyes. "We never had anything like that before, dear."
"No."
"Not even at first, Davey, before we made our rules."
"No," he said, almost resentfully now. "Why didn't we? Because we were afraid—or I was afraid and made you afraid! Afraid; afraid of everything right and natural and warm and alive because forever I was told to think of that!" he gestured with defiance to the still, gray stones of the graveyard. "What a crazy idea to believe you ought to be brought up for death instead of for life! Let's get away from here."
Being in the driver's seat, of course he was the one to do the getting away; and he put a foot on the clutch and a hand to the gear. "Kiss me," he commanded her, leaning toward her before he started the car; she kissed him again and he drove away from the dark resting-ground of the dead to the avenue of lighted homes aglow through the snow.
"The lust of the flesh," the words of Paul so often repeated by his father ran in Dave's brain and iterated themselves more emphatically the more he would smother them. "Ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh; for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit."
This amazing moment, which he had just taken, stirred what was called the lust of the flesh. "What of it?" David Herrick defied himself. He looked about to Alice who was sitting in her corner gazing at him and not saying a word. "Happy?" he demanded of her.
She waited a moment and then said, steadily: "More than I ever was in all my life, I think."
"You don't know?"
"Yes, I know—about me, Davey; but about you, I don't."
"Why not?"
"Davey!" She clasped his wrist tight. "Can you—are you sure—can you?"
"What?"
"Marry me?"
"I'll show them!"
"Them? Who?"
"Father, I mean," he corrected; but he meant Paul, too, and all the apostles of Eternity. Of course he did not tell her; yet she suspected at least a part.
"But can you be happy, Davey? Oh, you know what I'm thinking of—your conscience, Davey, and ail the duties you make yourself do! Can we, Davey? Can we?"
"Listen! Will you marry me, definitely—we'll set the day right here and now—on the twenty-second of June? Is that all right with you?"
"The twenty-second of June will be all right with me, Davey."
"Just 'all right'?"
"Oh, my boy! my boy!"
He swung the car to the curb and again stopped.
After he once more grasped the wheel and gear-shift, he felt no relapse to guilt for his stirred sensation; he did not even try to down it; he gloried in it, thrusting his arm about Alice, gathering her against him and, when he drove into another drift, snatching at the wheel and struggling violently with the snow. So he brought her to her home.
Only after he had left her and was on the elevated train for Evanston did his new defiance of his father and of Paul, the apostle, and the company of saints living with the Lord, begin to break with him. While he was in the lighted, warm car of the train and surrounded by the ordinary, worldly, somewhat sleepy people on their way to the suburbs from the city, he maintained most of his defiance; but when he left the train, he happened to be alone, and alone made his way through the snow down dark, quiet streets.
He passed a row of small houses which lay between the tracks and the university neighborhood and he noticed one alight. While he approached it, the glare of motorcar headlights confronted him and an automobile labored through the snow to the little house where a man with a small satchel hurriedly got out.
"A doctor," Dave said to himself; and he saw a man waiting in the open doorway of the house and holding to the door nervously and anxiously. Dave got a glimpse of a woman gazing out an upper window and from her posture of awe and dread, he imagined that a child in that house had been taken seriously ill. He stopped and stared up at the house and there came to him an image from a Sunday-school card, which he had been given when a little boy and which illustrated the text from Exodus: "I will pass through the land and will smite the firstborn."
It pictured the Angel of Death hovering over a house; and Dave, standing there in the dark and the snow, imagined the Angel above this house and waiting, whether to pass on or to strike, not upon anything the hurried little man with the satchel might do, but waiting upon something far more fundamental than that. And suddenly Dave seemed to himself to be standing, not before this house, but before the cottage in which he was born and above which, when he was a baby, the Angel of Death had hovered, with the doctor helpless to send the angel away until the father and mother had prayed to God, promising God that their firstborn, if spared, would do his work.
"Silly!" said Dave to himself, to get himself out of this; and he turned and went on; but as he walked alone down the silent, deserted street, fright seized him for his defiance of Eternity.
He tried to shake it off by thinking of Alice and summoning to himself the sensation of her in his arms; but he could not. He failed to regain the sensation and, instead, he remembered that she, too, had been afraid not for herself but for him; and after he had declared to her his defiance of fear, she had doubted him.
He had left the train at a station which was slightly north of the Delta Alpha house; and so, as he turned south, he came first to Mrs. Fansler's.
"There's where that girl lives," he said to himself. "Fidelia Netley," he repeated her name; and he looked up at the big house which was all dark now except for a night-light aglow in the halls. He wondered where, in the house, she was; and he wondered this without becoming aware of any real significance in his wondering, although that was a strange thing for David Herrick. For he knew many of the girls living in that house but never before had wondered in which portion any of them roomed.
Likewise he failed to realize that it was when he neared Mrs. Fansler's and his thoughts went to Fidelia Netley that his fears, stirred by the lighted cottage beside the tracks, had quieted.
"Everybody's asleep," Dave said to himself; but he was not thinking about everybody in that house.
As a matter of fact, Fidelia was not asleep but since her lighted window was at the rear, Dave did not notice it. She stayed up to all hours of the night, did Fidelia Netley, and without suffering either in energy or appearance for she possesed a marvelous fund of vitality which her sound sleep completely restored.
She liked to half undress and thrust her bare feet into soft slippers and to let down her hair and, with her door locked on everybody, she would "do" her diary.
She was doing that now; and her diary was no brief "line a day" but was a full and remarkably frank record of her important doings and, even more, of her important sensations of each day.
Since this had proved an unusually critical and momentous day, she had filled two pages with her handwriting before she got into the chronicle of her arrival at Mrs. Fansler's. She wrote:
"I told Mrs. Fansler about Idaho; at least, I mentioned that I went there from Stanford. I don't know why I told it. It seemed to slip out; but it did no harm. Any one can go to Idaho for any of a thousand reasons; and there's no one here who would know anything about my visit there. A man from Mondora is in college, Roy Wheen. I never heard his name. But Mondora, how I can see it! The stores with their funny, second story false fronts and all needing paint; the white dust and the sun on the streets!
"I was riding to the right, I remember. We bought bread there and cartridges. I was happy; or I thought I was. Then we went on to Lakoon!
"Probably this Roy Wheen was not even in Mondora when I was there; he would never know me. No one that I've seen has mentioned him at all. Hatfield house, where he lives, is not in fraternity circles.
"Tau Gamma girls invited me to Willard after supper. Tau Gamma is certainly the sorority here, as I'd heard it was. Alice Sothron runs the chapter because she has the most money and can do entertaining and other things for the girls. She's rich and generous and sweet; but that's about all. She doesn't, but I can make her, like me. She wants to be fair and she's the one that will write to Minnesota and Stanford about me. Well, Minnesota will come through for me; Stanford, too. They'll O. K. me and Alice Sothron will tell this chapter to take me in.
"The man in college is David Herrick—everybody calls him Dave. He's the sort of man I've sense enough now to appreciate. They say he was nobody at all when he came here four years ago but now everybody drags him into the conversation in some way. He was waiting for Alice Sothron when I came out of Willard. I liked his looks and the way he stood; I saw there was no mere boy but a man. We were introduced and he said, after I told him I'd been at Minnesota and Stanford, 'now you're trying us.' Then he was sorry; and nice, I'm going to like him; hasn't been about the world much but he has will and character. He's innocent and strong. I like him now; I keep thinking about him. He's certainly a contrast to S."
Fidelia wrote the initial but not the name and she stopped writing. She glanced over the page but her mind was not on it; for the last line she had written had turned her thought emotionally into the past.
It went back beyond the date of the beginning of this volume of her diary; for she closed this book and stepped to her trunk, which had been brought to her room after supper. Unlocking the trunk, she uncovered a set of twelve diary volumes which contained her self-record from the time she was ten years old. She touched the covers of several of the books but took out only one which was easily distinguished from the others by its scorched leather.
The sight and feel of this charred binding increased Fidelia's excitement, reminding her of two occasions when she had thrown it into a fire and then rescued it. She fingered the blackened edges for a moment before turning to the pages dated, in that period after she left Stanford University.
"Lakoon, Idaho," she read at the top of an entry; then she forgot everything as she read, breathing deeply, her own record of her own doings and passions at that time and place, preserved for herself as she would remember it.
Every time she took this book in her hands, she knew she ought to finish burning it; but every time she opened it, she knew why she had not destroyed it and why she never would. Nothing she could read elsewhere could compare with this; and when she said to herself that, if she destroyed the book, she would remember all, she found this was not so. How amazingly vivid the image and sensations restored by the written word!
So she always kept the book near her, trusting to the excellent lock of her trunk. She was quivering when, at last, she ceased to read; quivering when she packed it down in place in her trunk, covered it and securely locked it in. Quivering she turned and stared away and, in her need to muster some new sensation to obliterate that of the past, she brought to her feelings the personality of the man whom to-night she had met and liked and who had interested her.
"Dave Herrick!" she said his name aloud; and, repeating it, she put her hand to her hair and began preparing for sleep to be ready for the meetings of to-morrow.