Across the table was Mrs. Dudley, in flesh-pink and pearls. I thought of her dancing, in the leopard skin and the pointed crown; and it seemed to me that she was dead, a long time ago, and here she was, and she didn't dream it herself. Here and there were the others; they seemed to fill the table with their high voices and their tip-top speech and their strong, big white shoulders. They were so kind--but I wondered if otherwise they had ever been born at all, and what made them think that they had? Of them all, Antoinette was the best, because she was just sketched--yet. She could rub herself out and do it nearly all over again; and something about her looked anxious and hopeful, and as if it was waiting to see if that wasn't what she would do. Then I tried to look myself in the face. And it seemed to me as if I didn't find any of me there at all. I ate what they brought me; I answered what they said to me. But all the time they were all as far off as the other tables of folk, and the waiters, whom I didn't know at all. And all the while I looked around the big white room, and up at the oval of the ceiling, and--"This whole thing, and us with it, is sitting on the chests of the rest of them," I thought. I wondered about Rose. If she walked, she must have got home about the time I got to the opera. Rose! She was real, and she was awake. She had come all that way to get me to help her to wake the rest. Was that what he meant by digging like a devil? When we left the hotel, toward two o'clock, there was nothing to do but to motor on with the rest. When we reached the Massys', the time was already still, because it expected morning. The Dudleys and Mr. Baddy Dudley had come up with us. When at last I got the window open in my room, I was in time to see a little lift of gray in the sky beyond the line of trees on the terrace. "The new day," I said. "The new day. Cosma Wakely, have you got enough backbone in you to stand up to it?" It was surprising how little backbone it took the next afternoon. What I had to do was what I wanted to do. All the forenoon, no one was stirring. It was eleven before coffee came to our rooms. I had heard Mr. Dudley calling a dog somewhere about, so I had kept to my room for fear of meeting him. At one o'clock there were guests for luncheon. When they started back to town I told Antoinette that I wanted to go with them. I meant to get to Rose's meeting. "Nonsense!" she said. "Have you forgotten dinner? And the dancing?" I said that I was worried about my examinations, and that I wanted to get back. When I first came to the Massys' I would have told them the truth. The long ride down was like a still hand laid on something beating. I liked being alone as much as once I had dreaded it. We had been late in setting off. It was almost six o'clock when I reached the school. When I had eaten and dressed and was on my way to the hall, it was already long past the time that Rose had named for the meeting.