After these days of searching eyes she refused to look at any of her young male friends. She answered them crustily and turned away from them, but this did not serve to cure her nor to keep the young men away.
Always at such times William De Lisle's glorious presence drew near in the dusk, insubstantial and luminous as a cloud, and she set her teeth in fresh resolve to be wise and famous; to be worthy his look and his word of praise.
She had suitors constantly. Her dark haughty face, warm with blood, her erect and powerful figure excited admiration among the young men, and they courted her with the wholesome frankness of clean and vigorous manhood. The free and natural intercourse of the college kept the young people healthy as a home circle.
As the Doctor came to take a different place in her love, Rose became open to the advances of other men. Twice during the winter she felt the power of love touch her. In the first instance her eyes sought and found among her classmates a young man's physical beauty, and her imagination clothed him with power and mystery, and she looked for him each day, and life was less interesting and purposeful when he was not present.
She made no open advances, she scarcely needed to, for he also saw, and when he came to her and she flushed and trembled with weakness, it seemed as if her life had at last taken a fixed direction. For a few weeks the man was her ideal. She saw him before her constantly. She knew his smile, the lift of his eye-brows, the shape of his ears, the slope of his shoulders, the sound of his voice. She looked at him stealthily from her book. She contrived to sit where she could watch every motion. She walked down the street with him each day, half numb with her emotion.
But this ecstasy did not last. She felt eventually his shallowness and narrowness. He was vain and ungenerous. He grew sere and bare of grace and charm like the autumn elms, and at last he stood empty and characterless before her, and her eyes looked over and beyond him, into the blue sky again, and throughout it all she kept her place in her classes and no one was aware of her new ideal.
When she turned away from him he did not grow pale and lean. He grew a little vicious and said: "She is too cold and proud for my taste."
Her next suitor was a worthy young man who was studying law in the town. A fine, clean young fellow, who paid court to her with masterly address. He was older than she, and was a better scholar and brought to her less of the clotheshorse and more of the man than her freshly outgrown lover. Before spring began he had won great intimacy with her—almost an engagement.
He was adroit. He did not see her too much, and he came always at his best. He appealed to the most imaginative side of her nature. She glorified his calling as well as his person. He was less handsome than his predecessor, but he brought an ample and flowing phraseology, and a critical knowledge of farm-life as well as of town-life. Once he took her to the court-room to hear him plead.
He took her to the socials, and once to the theater. There was his mistake! The play made a most powerful impression upon her, more powerful than anything since the circus at Tyre.