In response, an envelope with a monogram in the corner was slipped in under the door, and the bearer's footsteps tapped back into silence.
Slowly the girl crawled from her bed, but she did not at once take up the note. Instead, she walked over to the dresser, and, leaning on its polished top, gazed into the mirror at the reflection of her tear-stained face, with its mass of disarranged hair. It was not a happy face that she saw; and just at this moment it looked much older than it really was. The great brown eyes inspected it critically and relentlessly.
"Florence Baker," she said to the face in the mirror, "you are getting to be old and haggard." A prophetic glimpse of the future came to her suddenly. "A few years more, and you will not be even--good-looking."
She stood a moment longer, then, walking over to the door, she picked up the envelope and tore it open.
"Miss Baker," ran the note, "there is to be an informal little gathering--music, dancing, and a few things cool--at the Country Club this evening. You already know most of the people who will be there. May I call for you?--Sidwell."
Florence read the missive slowly; then slowly returned it to its cover. There was no need to tell her the meaning of the unwritten message she read between the lines of those few brief sentences. It is only in story-books that human beings do not even suspect the inevitable until it arrives. As well as she knew her own name, she realized that in her answer to that evening's invitation lay the choice of her future life. She was at the turning of the ways--a turning that admitted of no reconsideration. Dividing at her feet, each equally free, were the trails of the natural and the artificial. For a time they kept side by side; but in the distance they were as separate as the two ends of the earth. By no possibility could both be followed. She must choose between them, and abide by her decision for good or for ill.
As slowly as she had read the note, Florence dressed; and even then she did not leave the room. Bathing her reddened eyes, she drew a chair in front of the window and gazed wistfully down at the handful of green grass, with the unhealthy-looking elm in its centre, which made the Baker lawn. Against her will there came to her a vision of the natural, impersonated in the form of Ben Blair as she had seen him yesterday. Masterful, optimistic, compellingly honest, splendidly vital, with loves and hates like elemental forces of nature, he intruded upon her horizon at every crisis. Try as she would to eliminate him from her life, she could not do it. With a little catch of the breath she remembered that last night, when that man had done--what he did--it was not of what her father or Clarence Sidwell would think, if either of them knew, but of what Ben Blair would think, what he would do, that she most cared. Reluctant as she might be to admit it even to herself, yet in her inner consciousness she knew that this prairie man had a power over her that no other human being would ever have. Still, knowing this, she was deliberately turning away from him. If she accepted that invitation for to-night, with all that it might mean, the separation from Ben would be irrevocable. Once more the brown head dropped into the waiting hands, and the shoulders rocked to and fro in indecision and perplexity.