After all there was nothing to do but go with the Jacksons, but Megan was not so deeply disappointed as her first fright had led Mr. Jackson to suppose. She could not explain to him what she had never fully admitted to herself, that she had come as much for China as for Bob. Megan had not looked to Mr. Jackson, and she would scarcely have looked to any one, the sort of girl who would become the wife of a medical missionary in China. She had been born and brought up in a small New England college town, but she had had winters in Boston and several trips to Europe, and because her father was for many years the president of the college she was used to a society of comfortable means and a most determined intellectuality. Bob lived in the same town, the son of an Episcopal rector with a large family. They had known each other always, gone to dancing class, picnics together, been completely indifferent companions, until quite suddenly, when she was seventeen, Megan fell in love with Bob, that is to say, she decided to focus on him all the ardors and enthusiasms, all the capacity for dreaming and questioning, of which she was capable. It was a secret passion of course and not a little desperate, because she knew with that part of her which in every sane person, and even in the young, remains the onlooker, that no one would take her seriously, least of all Bob, who was a good-looking young man, an excellent athlete, but full of common sense. And Megan did not really want Bob to be conscious of what she felt for him. She never wanted to realize him in an actual world in any rôle that he would be likely to play; it was enough for her to dance with him sometimes in a tense and beatific silence and to write a great many poems which she kept locked in a drawer in an envelope marked "in case of my death, please destroy."