When she was in her first year at the High School and he in his
last he walked home with her every day; and they regarded
themselves as engaged. Her once golden hair had darkened now to
a beautiful brown with red flashing from its waves; and her skin
was a clear olive pallid but healthy. And she had shot up into a
tall, slender young woman; her mother yielded to her pleadings,
let her put her hair into a long knot at the back of her neck and
wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.

When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each
found the other grown into a new person. She thought him a
marvel of wisdom and worldly experience. He thought her a marvel
of ideal womanhood--gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging
him, yet narrow to primness in her ideas of what she herself
could do, and withal charming physically. He would not have
cared to explain how he came by the capacity for such
sophisticated judgment of a young woman. They were to be married
as soon as he had his degree; and he was immediately to be
admitted to partnership in his father's woolen mills--the largest
in the state of Indiana.

He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his
sophomore and junior years. There appeared on the town's big and
busy stream of gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor--of
drinking and gambling and wild "tears" in Detroit. And it was
noted that the fast young men of Saint X--so every one called
Saint Christopher--were going a more rapid gait. Those turbulent
fretters against the dam of dullness and stern repression of even
normal and harmless gaiety had long caused scandal. But never
before had they been so daring, so defiant.