de of "bounds," and surrendered to
the spirit of the youthful sisterhood.

But the girls in their teens answer readily to the call of ROMANCE. And
occasionally, in the twilight hour between afternoon study and the
dressing bell, as they gathered in the window-seat with faces to the
western sky, the talk would turn to the future--particularly when
Rosalie Patton was of the group. Pretty, dainty, inconsequential little
Rosalie was preeminently fashioned for romance; it clung to her golden
hair and looked from her eyes. She might be extremely hazy as to the
difference between participles and supines, she might hesitate on her
definition of a parallelopiped, but when the subject under discussion
was one of sentiment, she spoke with conviction. For hers was no mere
theoretical knowledge; it was gained by personal experience. Rosalie
had been proposed to!

She confided the details to her most intimate friends, and they confided
them to their most intimate friends, until finally, the whole school
knew the entire romantic history.

Rosalie's preeminence in the field of sentiment was held entirely
fitting. Priscilla might excel in basket-ball, Conny Wilder in
dramatics, Keren Hersey in geometry and Patty Wyatt in--well, in
impudence and audacity--but Rosalie was the recognized authority in
matters of the heart; and until Mae Mertelle Van Arsdale came, nobody
thought of questioning her position.

Mae Mertelle spent an uncomfortable month shaking into place in the
school life. The point in which she was accustomed to excel was
_clothes_, but when she and her four trunks arrived, she found to her
disgust that clothes were not useful at St. Ursula's. The school uniform
reduced all to a dead level in the matter of fashion. There was another
field, however, in which she might hope for supremacy. Her own
sentimental history was vivid, compared to the colorless lives of most,
and she proceeded to assert her claims.

One Saturday evening in October, half-a-dozen girls were gathered in
Rosalie's room, on piled-up sofa cushions, with the gas turned low and
the light of the hunter's moon streaming through the window. They had
been singing softly in a minor key, but gradually the singing turned to
talk. The talk, in accordance with the moonlight and flying clouds, was
in a sentimental vein; and it ended, naturally, with Rosalie's Great
Experience. Between maidenly hesitations and many promptings she retold
the story--the new girls had