For a year or two they found a substitute for happiness in pretending that they were really at college; they simulated, day by day, the life that they supposed was led there; they became devoted to their new game.  Excited through tales told by tutor and friend, they developed a passionate loyalty for their college and class; they were solemnly elected to coveted societies, they witnessed Harvard victories, they strove fiercely for honours; their ideals were lofty, their courage clean and high.

So completely absorbed in the pretence did they become that their own tutors ventured to suggest to Mr. Tappan that such fiercely realistic mimicry deserved to be rewarded.  Unfortunately, the children heard of this; but the Trust Officer’s short answer killed their interest in playing at happiness, and their junior year began listlessly and continued without ambition.  There was no heart in the pretence.  Their interest had died.  They studied mechanically because they were obliged to; they no longer cared.

That winter they went to a few more parties—­not many.  However, they were gingerly permitted to witness their first play, and later, the same year, were taken to “Lohengrin” at the opera.

During the play, which was a highly moral one, they sat watching, listening, wide-eyed as children.

At the opera Geraldine’s impetuous soul soared straight up to paradise with the first heavenly strains, and remained there far above the rigid, breathless little body, bolt upright in its golden sarcophagus of the grand tier.

Her physical consciousness really seemed to have fled.  Until the end she sat unaware of the throngs, of Scott and Kathleen whispering behind her, of several tall, broad-shouldered, shy young fellows who came into their box between the acts and tried to discuss anything at all with her, only to find her blind, deaf, and dumb.

These were the only memories of her first opera—­confused, chaotic brilliancy, paradise revealed:  and long, long afterward, the carriage flying up Fifth Avenue through darkness all gray with whirling snow.

* * * * *

Their eighteenth year dragged, beginning in physical and intellectual indifference, but promised stormily as they became more accustomed to glimpses of an outside world—­a world teeming with restless young people in unbelievable quantities.

Scott had begun to develop two traits:  laziness and a tendency to sullen, unspoken wrath.  He took more liberty than was officially granted him—­more than Geraldine dared take—­and came into collision with Kathleen more often now.  He boldly overstayed his leave in visiting his few boy friends for an afternoon; he returned home alone on foot after dusk, telling the chauffeur to go to the devil.  Again and again he remained out to dinner without permission, and, finally, one afternoon quietly and stealthily cut his studies, slipped out of the house, and reappeared about dinner-time, excited, inclined to be boisterously defiant, admitting that he had borrowed enough money from a friend to go to a matinee with some other boys, and that he would do it again if he chose.