Her triumph was genuine.  When the play was over she was immediately surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager to congratulate her, to dance with her.  I too would have gone forward, but a sense of inadequacy, of unimportance, of an inability to cope with her, held me back, and from a corner I watched her sweeping around the room, holding up her train, and leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing, a classmate whom Ralph had brought home from Harvard.  Then it was Ralph’s turn:  that affair seemed still to be going on.  My feelings were a strange medley of despondency and stimulation....

Our eyes met.  Her partner now was Ham Durrett.  Capriciously releasing him, she stood before me,

“Hugh, you haven’t asked me to dance, or even told me what you thought of the play.”

“I thought it was splendid,” I said lamely.

Because she refrained from replying I was farther than ever from understanding her.  How was I to divine what she felt? or whether any longer she felt at all?  Here, in this costume of a woman of the world, with the string of pearls at her neck to give her the final touch of brilliancy, was a strange, new creature who baffled and silenced me....  We had not gone halfway across the room when she halted abruptly.

“I’m tired,” she exclaimed.  “I don’t feel like dancing just now,” and led the way to the big, rose punch-bowl, one of the Durretts’ most cherished possessions.  Glancing up at me over the glass of lemonade I had given her she went on:  “Why haven’t you been to see me since I came home?  I’ve wanted to talk to you, to hear how you are getting along.”

Was she trying to make amends, or reminding me in this subtle way of the cause of our quarrel?  What I was aware of as I looked at her was an attitude, a vantage point apparently gained by contact with that mysterious outer world which thus vicariously had laid its spell on me; I was tremendously struck by the thought that to achieve this attitude meant emancipation, invulnerability against the aches and pains which otherwise our fellow-beings had the power to give us; mastery over life,—­the ability to choose calmly, as from a height, what were best for one’s self, untroubled by loves and hates.  Untroubled by loves and hates!  At that very moment, paradoxically, I loved her madly, but with a love not of the old quality, a love that demanded a vantage point of its own.  Even though she had made an advance—­and some elusiveness in her manner led me to doubt it I could not go to her now.  I must go as a conqueror,—­a conqueror in the lists she herself had chosen, where the prize is power.

“Oh, I’m getting along pretty well,” I said.  “At any rate, they don’t complain of me.”

“Somehow,” she ventured, “somehow it’s hard to think of you as a business man.”

I took this for a reference to the boast I had made that I would go to college.

“Business isn’t so bad as it might be,” I assured her.