“It might as well be I as you,” Bessie said one day, “if we only think so.  It’s all very weird, dear, and I’m not sure but it is you who sit day after day at my lonely casement and watch the sparrows examining the fuzzy buds of the Jap ivy to see just how soon they can hope to build in the vines.  Do you object to the ivy buds looking so very much like snipped woollen rags?  If you do, I’m sure it’s you, here in my place, for when I come up to town in your personality it sets my teeth on edge.  In fact, that’s the worst thing about Boston now—­the fuzzy ivy buds; there’s so much ivy!  When you can forget the buds, there are a great many things to make you happy.  I feel quite as if we were spending the summer in town and I feel very adventurous and very virtuous, like some sort of self-righteous bohemian.  You don’t know how I look down on people who have gone out of town.  I consider them very selfish and heartless; I don’t know why, exactly.  But when we have a good marrow-freezing northeasterly storm, and the newspapers come out with their ironical congratulations to the tax-dodgers at the Shore, I feel that Providence is on my side, and I’m getting my reward, even in this world.”  Bessie suddenly laughed.  “I see by your expression of fixed inattention, Molly, that you’re thinking of Mr. Durgin!”

Mary gave a start of protest, but she was too honest to deny the fact outright, and Bessie ran on: 

“No, we don’t sit on a bench in the Common, or even in the Garden, or on the walk in Commonwealth Avenue.  If we come to it later, as the season advances, I shall make him stay quite at the other end of the bench, and not put his hand along the top.  You needn’t be afraid, Molly; all the proprieties shall be religiously observed.  Perhaps I shall ask Aunt Louisa to let us sit out on her front steps, when the evenings get warmer; but I assure you it’s much more comfortable in-doors yet, even in town, though you’ll hardly, believe it at the Shore.  Shall you come up to Class Day?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mary began, with a sigh of the baffled hope and the inextinguishable expectation which the mention of Class Day stirs in the heart of every Boston girl past twenty.

“Yes!” said Bessie, with a sigh burlesqued from Mary’s.  “That is what we all say, and it is certainly the most maddening of human festivals.  I suppose, if we were quite left to ourselves, we shouldn’t go; but we seem never to be, quite.  After every Class Day I say to myself that nothing on earth could induce me to go to another; but when it comes round again, I find myself grasping at any straw of a pretext.  I’m pretending now that I’ve a tender obligation to go because it’s his Class Day.”

“Bessie!” cried Mary Enderby.  “You don’t mean it!”

“Not if I say it, Mary dear.  What did I promise you about the pericardiac symptoms?  But I feel—­I feel that if he asks me I must go.  Shouldn’t you like to go and see a jay Class Day—­be part of it?  Think of going once to the Pi Ute spread—­or whatever it is!  And dancing in their tent!  And being left out of the Gym, and Beck!  Yes, I ought to go, so that it can be brought home to me, and I can have a realizing sense of what I am doing, and be stayed in my mad career.”