As she listens to her fellow students leave for a holiday break, Catherine, a fourteen-year-old girl who attends a "bad girls'" boarding school, suffers her roommate's antics, sick from illness and worry that she may be expelled. She has been accused of pushing another student out of a second-story window, and, while no one was seriously hurt, her punishment looks as if it will be severe. Once her roommate leaves, she falls asleep, and is woken a few hours later by the school janitor, Cooley, who has come to fix the room's radiator. As he enters, he produces a slice of cake for Catherine, as he knows that she will be given little food otherwise. He begins to talk with her about her predicament, and the conversation shifts toward her parents, who she reports do not treat her very well. Cooley reveals that Catherine's mother attended the same school herself once, and that he knew her during that time, to Catherine's shock. He continues to surprise her, ands tells her that her mother had a penchant for theft in her youth, and that she was generally a much different person than the lofty, distant woman Catherine describes her as. Catherine responds by relating a few stories of her mother's indifference to her suffering, which Cooley is sad to hear, but he acts kindly toward Catherine on the subject. The two share a toast, which Cooley makes to Tib's Eve, an expression he uses to refer to something that will never occur. Cooley leaves, and indicates that he never intended to fix the radiator, as he had come to comfort Catherine from the beginning.