One morning that autumn, Mrs. Adams finds Alice dressing for town in a plain dark dress. Wear more colour, she urges, and show those girls you are holding your head up. Alice has quit dressing at them. We rarely make people think what we want them to, she says; the only good in pretending is the fun of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody. The house is becoming a boarding-house. A young married couple will take one room, and a pleasant young man from the gas works, Mr. Will Dickson, will have her father's. Her mother mentions him with a hopeful glance, and Alice laughs: poor mama. Then Mrs. Adams breaks down. Alice gave bad advice when she backed her father in taking the old man's ninety-three hundred and fifty dollars. If he had only been half a man... From behind his door Adams says he hears her, all right.
Alice sits with her father, who is smoking his pipe in a new dressing-gown. They were pushed right to the wall, he says, and then something turned up. You never get back where you were, but you squirm out a little and keep going. He thinks the young should have the good times and the old the troubles. He asks about Russell. He never came again, Alice says; she said good-bye that night, before he knew about Walter. Adams says he must find some light job. He will not end his days as a landlady's husband, mending bureau drawers. Alice suggests there may be no such thing as a finish. All summer she feared something that would finish her. It happened, and she is going on. Since we have to go on, shouldn't we learn some sense about how? He tells her she is the smartest girl in the world.
In town, near the tobacconist's, she meets Russell face to face. He reddens and stammers that business keeps him busy; may he call some time? 'Yes, do!' she says, and walks briskly on, her face serene. She finds she is truly through with all that. For a moment she pictures the heroine of a French romance taking the veil in a cathedral, a faithless lover trembling behind a statue, and smiles at herself. Then she reaches the dark doorway of Frincke's Business College, which she has always seen as the end of youth and hope. She glances up and down the street and goes in. Halfway up, the shadows are heaviest. After that the stairway grows lighter, and the steps at the top are bright with sunshine from an open window.
