r heartlessly. "If you
have lived here so long, how can you judge of the changes which go on
in the world outside Petershof?"

"If I have lived here so long," he repeated, in the bitterness of his
heart.

Bernardine did not notice: she was on a subject which always excited her.

"I don't know so much about the political women," she said, "but I do
know about the higher education people. The writers who rail against
the women of this date are really describing the women of ten years ago.
Why, the Girton girl of ten years ago seems a different creation from
the Girton girl of to-day. Yet the latter has been the steady outgrowth
of the former!"

"And the difference between them?" asked the Disagreeable Man; "since
you pride yourself on being so well informed."

"The Girton girl of ten years ago," said Bernardine, "was a, sombre,
spectacled person, carelessly and dowdily dressed, who gave herself up
to wisdom, and despised every one who did not know the Agamemnon by
heart. She was probably not lovable; but she deserves to be honoured
and thankfully remembered. She fought for woman's right to be well
educated, and I cannot bear to hear her slighted. The fresh-hearted
young girl who nowadays plays a good game of tennis, and takes a high
place in the Classical or Mathematical Tripos, and is book learned,
without being bookish, and . . ."

"What other virtues are left, I wonder?" he interrupted.

"And who does not scorn to take a pride in her looks because she happens
to take a pride in her books," continued Bernardine, looking at the
Disagreeable Man, and not seeming to see him: "she is what she is by
reason of that grave and loveless woman who won the battle for her."

Here she paused.

"But how ridiculous for me to talk to you in this way!" she said. "It
is not likely that you would be interested in the widening out of
women's lives."

"And pray why not?" he asked. "Have I been on the shelf too long?"

"I think you would not have been interested even if you had never been
on the shelf," she said frankly. "You are not the type of man to be
generous to woman."

"May I ask one little question of you, which shall conclude this
subject," he said, "since here we are already at the Gasthaus: to which
type of learned woman do you lay claim to belong?"

Bernardine laughed.

"That I leave to your own powers of discrimination." she said, and then
added, "if you have any."

And that was the end of the matter, for the