The writing itself was like her, slender and fine and straight, a little reckless, daintily desperate.  That “I,” now, on the white paper might be Sheila skimming across the snow.

“My dear Dickie—­somehow I can’t call you ’Mr. Hudson’—­I am so terribly sorry about the way I acted to you last night.  I don’t know why I was so foolish.  I have tried to explain to your father that you did nothing and said nothing to frighten me, that you were very polite and kind, but I am afraid he doesn’t quite understand.  I hope he won’t be very cross with you, because it was all my fault—­no, not quite all, because I think you oughtn’t to have followed me.  I’m sure you’re sorry that you did.  But it was a great deal my fault, so I’m writing this to tell you that I wasn’t really frightened nor very angry.  Just sorry and disappointed.  Because I thought you were so very nice.  And not like Millings.  And you liked the mountains better than the town.  I wanted—­I still want—­you to be my friend.  For I do need a friend here, dreadfully.  Will you come to see me some afternoon?  I hope you didn’t hurt yourself when you slipped on those icy steps.

“Sincerely SHEILA ARUNDEL”

Dickie put the note into his pocket and looked unseeingly at Jim.  Jim was turning up the bottoms of his trousers preparing to go.

“So you won’t come to our dance?” he asked straightening himself, more ruddy than ever.

“Well, sir,” said Dickie slowly and indifferently, “I wouldn’t wonder if I would.”

CHAPTER VII

DISH-WASHING

On that night, while all Millings was preparing itself for the Greelys’ dance, while Dickie, bent close to his cracked mirror, was tying his least crumpled tie with not too steady fingers, while Jim was applying to his brown crest a pomade sent to him by a girl in Cheyenne, while Babe was wondering anxiously whether green slippers could be considered a match or a foil to a dress of turquoise blue, while Girlie touched her cream-gold hair with cream-padded finger-tips, Sheila Arundel prowled about her room with hot anger and cold fear in her heart.

Nothing, perhaps, in all this mysterious world is so inscrutable a mystery as the mind of early youth.  It crawls, the beetle creature, in a hard shell, hiding the dim, inner struggle of its growing wings, moving numbly as if in a torpid dream.  It has forgotten the lively grub stage of childhood, and it cannot foresee the dragon-fly adventure just ahead.  This blind, dumb, numb, imprisoned thing, an irritation to the nerves of every one who has to deal with it, suffers.  First it suffers darkly and dimly the pain growth, and then it suffers the sharp agony of a splitting shell, the dazzling wounds of light, the torture of first moving its feeble wings.  It drags itself from its shell, it clings to its perch, it finds itself born anew into the world.

When Sheila had left the studio with Sylvester, she was not yet possessed of wings.  Now, the shell was cracking, the dragon-fly adventure about to begin.  To a changed world, changed stars—­the heavens above and the earth beneath were strange to her that night.