ay she had met this little
crisis. But to have met it with such easy courage meant to her something
more reassuring than a momentary pride in the serenity she had shown.
For she found that what she had resolved in her inmost heart was now
really true: she was "through with all that!"

She walked on, but more slowly, for the tobacconist's shop was not far
from her now--and, beyond it, that portal of doom, Frincke's Business
College. Already Alice could read the begrimed gilt letters of the
sign; and although they had spelled destiny never with a more painful
imminence than just then, an old habit of dramatizing herself still
prevailed with her.

There came into her mind a whimsical comparison of her fate with that
of the heroine in a French romance she had read long ago and remembered
well, for she had cried over it. The story ended with the heroine's
taking the veil after a death blow to love; and the final scene again
became vivid to Alice, for a moment. Again, as when she had read
and wept, she seemed herself to stand among the great shadows in the
cathedral nave; smelled the smoky incense on the enclosed air, and heard
the solemn pulses of the organ. She remembered how the novice's father
knelt, trembling, beside a pillar of gray stone; how the faithless lover
watched and shivered behind the statue of a saint; how stifled sobs and
outcries were heard when the novice came to the altar; and how a shaft
of light struck through the rose-window, enveloping her in an amber
glow.

It was the vision of a moment only, and for no longer than a moment did
Alice tell herself that the romance provided a prettier way of taking
the veil than she had chosen, and that a faithless lover, shaking with
remorse behind a saint's statue, was a greater solace than one left on a
street corner protesting that he'd like to call some time--if he could!
Her pity for herself vanished more reluctantly; but she shook it off and
tried to smile at it, and at her romantic recollections--at all of them.
She had something important to think of.

She passed the tobacconist's, and before her was that dark entrance to
the wooden stairway leading up to Frincke's Business College--the very
doorway she had always looked upon as the end of youth and the end of
hope.

How often she had gone by here, hating the dreary obscurity of that
stairway; how often she had thought of this obscurity as something lying
in wait to obliterate the footsteps of any girl w