Adelle had no clear idea why she preferred Neuilly to the "Travel Class," except to be with Eveline Glynn and the two Paul girls. Paris and Rome were hazily mixed geographically in her ill-furnished mind, and culturally both were blank. Eveline had known girls who had stayed with Miss Comstock and they had given glowing accounts of their experiences. The Neuilly establishment, it appeared, was a place of perfect freedom, where the girls were chaperoned sufficiently to keep them out of serious mischief, but otherwise were allowed to please themselves in their own way. And there was Paris, which, according to Eveline, who had informed herself from many sources, was the best place in the world for a good time. Friends were always coming there, to buy clothes and to make excursions. Adelle could have her own car, in which the four would take motor trips, and there was the opera, etc. And lastly Society--real Society;--for it seemed that this was one of Miss Comstock's strong points. She knew people, and had actually put a number of her girls in the way of marrying titled foreigners. The California girls knew of a compatriot who had thus acquired a Polish title. In short, there was nothing of the boarding-school in Miss Comstock's establishment, except the fees, which were enormous--five thousand dollars to start with. * * * * * Thus Adelle left Herndon Hall in the beautiful month of June, having received her last communion in the little ivy-covered stone chapel from the hands of the bishop himself, smiled upon by Miss Thompson and the other teachers, who had three years before pronounced her "a perfect little fright," and kissed by a few of her schoolmates. She felt that she was coming into her own, thanks to her magic lamp--that life ahead looked promising. Yet she had changed as little fundamentally during these three years as a human being well could. She had passed from the narrowest poverty of the Alton side street to the prodigal ease of Herndon Hall, from the environment of an inferior "rooming-house" to companionship with the rich daughters of "our very best people,"--from an unformed child to the full physical estate of womanhood,--all within three short years; but she had accommodated herself to these great transitions with as little inward change as possible. Her soul was the soul of the Clarks, tricked out with good clothes and the manners and habits of the rich. Addie, it seemed, had at last arrived at her paradise in the person of her daughter, but it was a pale and inexpressive Addie, who made no large drafts upon paradise.