She did not notice that she trod swiftly across a trail of
soiled rice in the Hubert driveway.

She was like a person recovered from a fever who finds mere health a
condition of joy. She went back to her music, to her neglected books,
with a singing heart. And in accordance with the curious ways of
Providence, noted in the proverb relating the different fates of him
who hath and him who hath not, there was at once added to her pleasure
in the old elements of her life the very elements she had longed for
unavailingly. Seeing her friendly and shining of face, friendliness
went out to her. She had made many new acquaintances during her brief
glittering flight and had innumerable more points of contact with the
University life than before. She was invited to a quite sufficient
number of hops and proms, had quite the normal number of masculine
"callers," and was naively astonished and disillusioned to find that
those factors in life were by no means as entirely desirable and
amusing as her anguished yearning had fancied them. She joined one of
the literary societies and took a leading part in their annual outdoor
play. At the beginning of her Junior year, Judith entered as a
Freshman and thereafter became a close companion. Sylvia devoured
certain of her studies, history, and English, and Greek, with
insatiable zest and cast aside certain others like political economy
and physics, which bored her, mastering just enough of their elements
to pass an examination and promptly forgetting them thereafter. She
grew rapidly in intellectual agility and keenness, not at all in
philosophical grasp, and emotionally remained as dormant as a potato
in a cellar.

She continually looked forward with a bright, vague interest to
"growing up," to the mastery of life which adolescents so trustfully
associate with the arrival of adult years. She spent three more years
in college, taking a Master's degree after her B.A., and during those
three years, through the many-colored, shifting, kaleidoscopic,
disorganized life of an immensely populous institution of learning,
she fled with rapid feet, searching restlessly everywhere for that
entity, as yet non-existent, her own soul.

She had, in short, a thoroughly usual experience of modern American
education, emerging at the end with a vast amount of information, with
very little notion of what it was all about, with Phi Beta Kappa and a
great wonder what she was to do with herself.

Up to that mo