Ralph's turn: that affair seemed still to
be going on. My feelings were a strange medley of despondency and
stimulation....

Our eyes met. Her partner now was Ham Durrett. Capriciously releasing
him, she stood before me,

"Hugh, you haven't asked me to dance, or even told me what you thought of
the play."

"I thought it was splendid," I said lamely.

Because she refrained from replying I was farther than ever from
understanding her. How was I to divine what she felt? or whether any
longer she felt at all? Here, in this costume of a woman of the world,
with the string of pearls at her neck to give her the final touch of
brilliancy, was a strange, new creature who baffled and silenced me....
We had not gone halfway across the room when she halted abruptly.

"I'm tired," she exclaimed. "I don't feel like dancing just now," and led
the way to the big, rose punch-bowl, one of the Durretts' most cherished
possessions. Glancing up at me over the glass of lemonade I had given her
she went on: "Why haven't you been to see me since I came home? I've
wanted to talk to you, to hear how you are getting along."

Was she trying to make amends, or reminding me in this subtle way of the
cause of our quarrel? What I was aware of as I looked at her was an
attitude, a vantage point apparently gained by contact with that
mysterious outer world which thus vicariously had laid its spell on me; I
was tremendously struck by the thought that to achieve this attitude
meant emancipation, invulnerability against the aches and pains which
otherwise our fellow-beings had the power to give us; mastery over
life,--the ability to choose calmly, as from a height, what were best for
one's self, untroubled by loves and hates. Untroubled by loves and hates!
At that very moment, paradoxically, I loved her madly, but with a love
not of the old quality, a love that demanded a vantage point of its own.
Even though she had made an advance--and some elusiveness in her manner
led me to doubt it I could not go to her now. I must go as a
conqueror,--a conqueror in the lists she herself had chosen, where the
prize is power.

"Oh, I'm getting along pretty well," I said. "At any rate, they don't
complain of me."

"Somehow," she ventured, "somehow it's hard to think of you as a business
man."

I took this for a reference to the boast I had made that I would go to
college.

"Business isn't so bad as it might be," I assured her.

"I think a man ought to go