her and she should say to him.

But here arose the perplexity. It was her imagination of the thing that
she enjoyed rather than the thing itself. The wonderful scenes that her
own mind projected never came true. The ones that happened were
disappointing--irritating, and eventually and unescapably, downright
disagreeable to her. There was no getting away from it, the ideal lover
of her dreams, whose tenderness and chivalry and devotion were so highly
desirable, although he might wear the half-back's clothes and bear his
face and name, was not the half-back. She might dote on his absence, but
his presence was another matter.

The realization of this fact had been gradual. She wasn't fully
conscious of it, even on this March morning. But something had happened
this morning that made a difference. If she'd been ascending an
imperceptible gradient for the last three months, to-day she had come to
a recognizable step up and taken it. Oddly enough, the thing had
happened back there in the class-room as she stood before the
professor's desk and caught his eye wavering between herself and the
scrawny girl who wanted to ask a question about Robespierre. There had
been more than blank helpless exasperation in that look of his, and it
had taught her something. She couldn't have explained what.

To the half-back she attributed it to the month of March. "You're
ridiculous, I'm ridiculous, he's ridiculous." That was about as well as
she could put it.

She and the half-back had walked about a hundred yards in silence. Now
they were arriving at a point where the path forked.