Some were frankly coquettish and self-conscious, but in a most healthy and normal fashion.  These frequently adjusted stray locks of hair, felt of their belts at their backs to be sure that the fastenings were intact, then straightened themselves with charming little feminine motions.  Their flowerlike faces frequently turned towards the teacher, and there was in them a perfect consciousness of the facts of sex and charm, but it was a most innocent, even childlike consciousness.

The last type belonged to those intent upon their books, soberly adjusted to the duties of life already, with little imagination or emotion.  This last was in the minority.

“Thank God!” Horace thought, as his eyes met one and another of the girl-faces.  “She is not, cannot be, a common type.”  And then he felt something like a chill of horror as his eyes met those of a new pupil, a girl from Alford, who had only entered the school the day before.  She was not well dressed.  There was nothing coquettish about her, but in her eyes shone the awful, unreasoning hunger which he had seen before.  Upon her shoulders, young as they were, was the same burden, the burden as old as creation, which she was required to bear by a hard destiny, perhaps of heredity.  There was something horribly pathetic in the girl’s shy, beseeching, foolish gaze at Horace.  She was younger and shyer than Lucy and, although not so pretty, immeasurably more pathetic.

“Another,” thought Horace.  It was a great relief to him when, only a week later, this girl found an admirer in one of the schoolboys, who, led by some strange fascination, followed her instead of one of the prettier, more attractive girls.  Then the girl began to look more normal.  She dressed more carefully and spent more time in arranging her hair.  After all, she was very young, and abnormal instincts may be quieted with a mere sop at the first.

When Horace reached home that day of the drive he found that Rose had returned.  Sylvia said that she had been at home half an hour.

“She went to Alford,” she said, “and I’m afraid she’s all tired out.  She came home looking as white as a sheet.  She said she didn’t want any dinner, but finally said she would come down.”

At the dinner-table Rose was very silent.  She did not look at Horace at all.  She ate almost nothing.  After dinner she persisted in assisting Sylvia in clearing away the table and washing the dishes.  Rose took a childish delight in polishing the china with her dish-towel.  New England traits seemed to awake within her in this New England home.  Sylvia was using the willow ware now, Rose was so pleased with it.  The Calkin’s soap ware was packed away on the top shelf of the pantry.

“It is perfectly impossible, Aunt Sylvia,” Rose had declared, and Sylvia had listened.  She listened with much more docility than at first to the decrees of sophistication.

“The painting ain’t nearly as natural,” she had said, feebly, regarding the moss rosebuds on a Calkin’s soap plate with fluctuating admiration which caused her pain by its fluctuations.