“Those were fascinating expeditions—and whose was the glory? Mine was the glory. ’Twas I who invented them. ’Twas I who knew there was none so fitted for a so delicate absurdity as she we called Muddled Maud; and after her, none so fitted as the fair, the good-natured, the Emancipated; and together with them both, I. And I led them forth, and I led them back, and I said things should be thus and so, and straightway they were thus and so. And we enjoyed it, and clear air was in our lungs and life was in our veins, for we had each but eighteen years and were full of youth. But most of all ’twas fascinating because we were three of three widely differing manners of living and methods of reasoning. For I was not like Emancipated Eva, nor yet like Muddled Maud; and Emancipated Eva was not like me, nor yet like Muddled Maud; and Muddled Maud was not like Emancipated Eva, nor yet like me.
“To be sure, there were some things in my ordering which neither the one nor the other found enchanting. Why should the MacLane do all the ordering? they murmured between themselves, but they dared not openly revolt, so all went well.
“But now these are gone.
“The three of us were graduated from the Butte High School with the fifty-nine others of ninety-nine, and had each a fine white diploma, and went our ways.
“She who was like Cleopatra and Peg of Limmavaddy is teaching a school, according to the last that I heard, in the north of Montana; and she that was Emancipated Eva has long since gone to California, and is married, and keeps a house; and for me—I am here, far off from Butte, with you, Annabel Lee, some things having been done meanwhile.
“But though the two are gone, I warrant they have not forgotten. They have not forgotten the Butte High School, nor the class of ninety-nine, nor the tramps we went, nor their tyrant, me.
“And I daresay they all remember their Butte High School—she of the love-letters, she of the whiskey-flask, she the student of Albert Ross, she of the profanity, she of the malice, The Shad,—and all the nine-and-fifty, the young feminine persons and the young masculine persons. Some are married, and some are flown, and some of them are grown up and different, ‘and some of them in the churchyard lie, and some are gone to sea.’
“But whenever I’ve a fancy to shut my eyes and look back, I can see them all, a quaint company.
“Also, whenever I’ve a fancy to shut my eyes and look back to life when it was unspeakably brilliant in possibilities to look forward to, and was marked in parti-colored checks and rings, it fetches me to the days when I went to the Butte High School and studied geometry and Vergil. Only I’m glad I’m not there now.”
“What for?” said my friend Annabel Lee.