She accepted everything indiscriminately. This at last was Life. She was a real belle—the kind one reads about in novels; the only kind that was ever interesting as a heroine. And through it all, her blood was thumping in her veins in queer little jerks and starts—waiting for the hero. He had been standing against the wall with the other stags—looking at her continually—and as yet he had danced with no one. She felt as if she had to talk with him, to hear his voice and see his smiling, tender eyes bent on her, before she was really awake. All this excitement was making her feel as if she were moving in a dream—except that her feet hurt her in a most undream-like fashion. And now a disturbing thing happened. A man who had danced with her a great deal, she remembered, both that afternoon and the evening before, cut in on her. His name was Jim Dalton; he was a good looking boy of medium height, with blond, wavy hair plastered back in an attempt to make it look straight, and clear blue eyes that had a disconcerting habit of looking frankly into one’s own. Joy had rather liked him until she had learned that he was that unpardonable thing, a man who was “no one around college.” He was a nonentity—at least, he did not shine in any branch of college activities. Joy was too new to college ways to realize that there was nothing deplorable in this; that in so large a college there had to be the back-bone, the unknown quantities who made up “the college type”; she only knew that even Tom, because of his bustling, busy ways, was an important and committee’d man; and she was being rushed by _the_ big man of college; and the Jim Daltons didn’t matter. So when he cut in on her, she merely smiled mechanically, and as mechanically allowed her weary feet to be guided into a little corner away from the thickest press of the stags. “What have they done to you?” he demanded, looking at her make-up and through it until she would have blushed if she could have. “What do you mean?” she said coldly. “I mean that I can’t dance with you and put my arm around you without touching your bare skin. I mean that you are painted and rouged until you look like a typical model showing off some new undress creation. There isn’t a single natural thing left about you.” “Why! how dare you——” came stuttering from her red lips. “I say all this,” he continued doggedly, “because when you first came up here you were different. You didn’t look like the sort who gets herself up this way. You didn’t need to. With a lot of girls it’s the only way they can make any impression at all.” She stopped dancing, and stepped back from the circle of his arm. “Will you please take me back to Tom? I don’t care to dance with you any longer, if that’s the way you feel about me.” Great was the dignity of her delivery, but her under lip quivered as she stood there. His eyes softened. There was something very piteous in the quivering of that painted lip.