Nahant knew Ernest no more in summer. His long vacation was always spent elsewhere in practical field work. He almost dropped out of the lives of those who had known him so well as a little boy. At the same time, he had enough social diversion. In the new set of which he now formed one there was always more or less going on. The sisters of some of his friends invited him to their dances. He seemed so heartily to enjoy his new popularity that Kate realized, with a certain pain, that he was drawing away from her; that he was departing far from that pleasant old West End life. There was an irony of fate in remembering that by using her influence in the direction of the new work which Ernest had undertaken, she had helped to send him farther away. [Illustration] XVII. When the die was finally cast, Miss Theodora wisely kept to herself her disappointment at Ernest's change of plan. Her life thus far had accustomed her to disappointments. What a pang she had felt, for example, some years after leaving it, when she heard that the old family house on the hill had become a boarding house! How disturbed she had been, walking up Beacon Street one day, to see workmen tearing down one of the most dignified of the old purple-windowed houses, once the home of intimate friends of hers, to make way for an uglier if more ornate structure! What an intrusion she felt the car tracks to be which run through Charles Street across Beacon Street, connecting the South and the West Ends of the city! Miss Theodora's Boston was not so large but that it could be traversed by any healthy person on foot; and she agreed with Miss Chatterwits when she exclaimed, "What in the world has the West End to do with Roxbury Neck?" Real trials, like Ernest's change of plan, Miss Theodora was able to bear with surprising equanimity. She had not even quailed when she made that discovery, hardest of all even for a sensible woman, that she was growing old. The first rude shock had come one day in a horse-car, when she heard an over-dressed young mother say to her little son in a loud whisper: "Give the old lady a seat." Before this Miss Theodora had certainly not thought of herself as old; but looking in the glass on her return home, she saw that the youth had vanished from her face. For though the over-dressed young mother might have said "oldish" more truly than "old," yet Miss Theodora realized that the change had come.