She went on silently to the stove and set her bucket upon it. It contained thick vegetable soup, which, with soda crackers, constituted her dinner. She sat down to watch it, stirring it occasionally with a tin spoon. Twenty other girls were crowding around the stove. Em was among them. Zarelda saw the big red rose lolling in her girdle. She turned her eyes resolutely away from it, only to find them going back again and again. “Hey! Where ’d you get your rose at, Em Brackett?” cried one of the girls. “Jim Sheppard gave it to her,” trebled another, before Em could reply. “I see him have it pinned onto his flannel shirt before the whistle blew.” “_Jim Sheppard!_ Oh, my!” There was a subdued titter behind Zarelda’s back. She stirred the soup without lifting her eyes. “She went livid, though, an’ then she went white!” one of the girls who read yellow novels declared afterward, tragically. “Well,” said Matt Wilson, sitting down on a bench and commencing to eat a great slice of bread thinly covered with butter, “who went to the dance up at Stringtown las’ night?” All the girls but two flung unclean hands above their heads. There was a merry outcry of “I did! I did!” “Well, I didn’t,” said Matt. “My little lame sister coaxed me to wheel her down town, an’ then it was too late.” “Why wasn’t you there, Zarelda Winser?” cried Belle Church, opening her dinner-bucket and examining the contents with the air of an epicurean. For a second or two Zarelda wished honestly that she had a lame sister or an invalid mother. Then she said, quite calmly—“I didn’t have any body to go with. That’s why.” She turned and faced them all as she spoke. With a fine delicacy which was certainly not acquired by education, every girl except Matt looked away from Zarelda’s face. Matt, not having been to the dance, was not in the secret. But Zarelda did not change countenance. She sat calmly eating her soup from the bucket with the tin spoon. She took it noisily from the point of the spoon; it was so thick that it was like eating a vegetable dinner. “Didn’t have anybody to go with?” repeated Matt, laughing loudly. “I call that good. A girl that’s had steady comp’ny for a year! Comp’ny that’s tagged her closer ’n her shadder! An’ I did hear”—she shattered the shell of a hard-boiled egg by hammering it on the bench, and began picking off the pieces—“that your maw was makin’ you up a whole trunkful o’ new underclo’s—all trimmed up with tattin’ an’ crochet an’ serpentine braid—with insertin’ two inches wide on ’em, too. You didn’t have anybody to go with, aigh? What’s the matter with Jim Sheppard?” Zarelda set her eyes on the red rose, as if that gave her courage. “He took Em Brackett.” “Not much!” said Matt, turning sharply. “Honest? Well, then, he only took her because you couldn’t go an’ ast him to take her instid.”