There was if anything less study this year than before. The older girls scouted the idea of studying anything. Most of them expected to leave school forever the next spring and under the auspices of their mothers to enter the marriage game. A few intended as a preliminary to travel in Europe, "studying art or music," But the minds of all were much more occupied with love than anything else. Although the sex interest was still entirely dormant in Adelle, she learned a great deal about it from her schoolmates. Those good people who believe in a censorship of literature for the sake of protecting the innocent American girl should become enrolled at Herndon Hall. There they might be occasionally horrified, but they would come out wiser mortals. Adelle knew all about incredible scandals. Divorce, with the reasons for it,--especially the statutory one,--was freely discussed, and a certain base, pandering sheet of fashionable gossip was taken in at the Hall and eagerly devoured each week by the girls, who tried to guess at the thinly disguised persons therein pilloried. Thus Adelle became fully acquainted with the facts of sex in their abnormal as well as more normal aspects. That she got no special personal harm from this irregular education and from the example of "the two Pols" was due solely to her own unawakened temperament. Life had no gloss for her, and it had no poetic appeal. She supposed, when she considered the matter at all, that sometime as a woman she would be submitted to the coil of passion and sex, like all the others about whom her friends talked incessantly. They seemed to regard every man as a possible source of excitement to a woman. But she resolved for her part to put off the interference of this fateful influence as long as possible. Sometime, of course, she must marry and have a child,--that was part of the fate of a girl with money of her own,--and then she should hope to marry a nice man who would not scold or ill-treat her or prefer some other woman--that was all. "Dell is just a lump of ice!" Irene Paul often said, putting her own plump arms about Adelle's thin little body; and while Adelle tried to wriggle out of the embrace she teased her by assuming the man's aggressive role. * * * * *