Sparta assumed the colors and very much the significance
depicted on a bit of faded tapestry; when she thought of
it, it was to groan that so many of her young impressionable
years had been wasted there. She hoarded her years, now
that every day and every hour was suffused with its
individual pleasure or interest, or that keen artistic
pain which also had its value, as a sensation, in the
Quartier Latin. It distressed her to think that she was
almost twenty-one.

The interminable year that intervened between Elfrida's
return from Philadelphia and her triumph in the matter
of being allowed to go to Paris to study, she had devoted
mainly to the society of the Swiss governess in the Sparta
Seminary for young ladies--Methodist Episcopal--with the
successful object of getting a working knowledge of
French. There had been a certain amount of "young society"
too, and one or two incipient love-affairs, watched with
anxious interest by her father and with a harrowed
conscience by her mother, who knew Elfrida's capacity
for amusing herself; and unlimited opportunities had
occurred for the tacit exhibition of her superiority to
Sparta, of which she had not always taken advantage. But
the significance of the year gathered into the French
lessons; it was by virtue of these that the time had a
place in her memory. Mademoiselle Joubert supplemented
her instruction with a violent affection, a great deal
of her society, and the most entertainingly modern of
the French novels, which Brentano sent her monthly in
enticing packets, her single indulgence. So that after