Many a night—like many another girl!—Dosia sat in the window of her shelving attic room, bathed in the golden moonlight, with her hair falling on her shoulders and her hands clasped before her, a picture for none to see. The warm summer odors of pine and hickory were around her. The tide of youth was so strong in her heart! In vain she tried to stem it. She longed inexpressibly for that outer world, of which she had read, where youth was a power. In an age of modern young womanhood, clever, self-satisfying, potential, Dosia belonged to the old régime where sentiment still holds sway. She wanted, indeed, to learn more about many things,—she longed to study music,—but she felt no inspiration and no desire for the life of an artist; she was, in fact, just a girl, who longed with vague indefiniteness, yet none the less intensely, for the joyous life of a girl; the pleasure of being sought, the excitement of shining, for music and dancing and little daily delights, and—love. She dimly discerned unknown glories that made her breath come quickly. Dosia dreamed of some one in the far future who would be very good and very noble, whose love would hold her to everything that was beautiful and right, with whom she would prove herself extraordinarily witty and brilliant and fascinating, and whose hand on hers would set her heart beating. She imagined pouring out her heart to him,—that heart which seemed to be forever shut in her breast now, with none to understand it, none to care,—going to him with all these doubts and self-convictions and hopes, and feeling the blessedness of his response. “You darling,” he would say, “don’t you know I was loving you all the time? We neither of us knew each other, to be sure, but the love was there all the same; it had existed since the beginning of the world.” She began to show the effects of that terrible atrophy which affects not only the mind but the very blood of girlhood, and which does not need iron as a curative power so much as a legitimate and healthy excitement. Even Mrs. Linden noticed that the girl looked thin and pale, and showed listlessness in place of energy, after several neighbors had openly commented on the fact; she said placidly that she was really worried about Dosia, and wished that she could have a change. And then one of those impossible, wonderful things happened which alter the whole surface of the earth. A rich aunt in Cincinnati wrote that Dosia was to go to New York to study music, and spend the winter with a married cousin, Lois Alexander, in one of the suburbs. Thus it came that Theodosia was journeying North, dressed in a new suit of blue serge, which had been sent from Atlanta, to fit her measure, with the rest of her traveling outfit. As she sat in the Pullman car, with her head in its little gray felt hat against the high back of the seat, and looked down at the tips of her new shoes, and then at the fingers of her new gloves, she felt like a princess.