“How much wine have you drunk?  Enough to do justice to the family annals?”

“Really, you have been well informed.  No, I have not drunk enough for that; but Mrs. Ryder has sent her virgins home with me.  I am afraid their lamps are upset again.  I drink nothing after to-night.  You shall not ask again, ‘How much?’”

My fire was out when I reached home.  My head was burning and aching.  I was too tired to untwist my hair, and I pulled and dragged at my dress, which seemed to have a hundred fastenings.  Creeping into bed, I perceived the odor of flowers, and looking at my table discovered a bunch of white roses.

“Roses are nonsense, and life is nonsense,” I thought.

When I opened my eyes, Alice was standing by the bed, with a glass of roses in her hand.

“Charles put these roses here, hey?”

“I suppose so; throw them out of the window, and me too; my head is splitting.”

“To make amends for not giving you any last night,” she went on; “he is quite childish.”

“Can’t you unbraid my hair, it hurts my head so?”

She felt my hands.  I was in a fever, she said, and ran down for Charles.  “Cass is sick, in spite of your white roses.”

“The devil take the roses.  Can’t you get up, Cassandra?”

“Not now.  Go away, will you?”

He left the room abruptly.  Alice loosened my hair, bound my head, and poured cologne-water over me, lamenting all the while that she had not brought me home; and then went down for some tea, presently returning to say that Charles had been for Dr. White, who said he would not come.  But he was there shortly afterward.  By night I was well again.

Dr. Price gave us a lecture on late hours that week, requesting us, if we had any interest in our education, or expected him to have any, to abstain from balls.

Ben Somers disappeared; no one knew where he had gone.  The Ryders were in consternation, for he was an intimate of the family, since he had gone into Judge Ryder’s office, six weeks before.  He returned, however, with a new overcoat trimmed with fur, the same as that with which my new cloak was trimmed.  A great snowstorm began the day of his return, and blocked us indoors for several days, and we had permanent sleighing afterward.

In January it was proposed that we should go to the Swan Tavern, ten miles out of Rosville.

I had made good resolutions since the ball, and declined going to the second, which came off three weeks afterward.  The truth was, I did not enjoy the first; but I preferred to give my decision a virtuous tinge.  I also determined to leave the Academy when the spring came, for I felt no longer a schoolgirl.  But for Helen, I could not have remained as I did.  She stayed for pastime now, she confessed, it was so dull at home; her father was wrapped in his studies, and she had a stepmother.  I resolved again that I would study more, and was translating, in view of this resolve, “Corinne,” with Miss Prior, and singing sedulously with Mrs. Lane, and had begun a course of reading with Dr. Price.