s imagination.
They work too hard, I suppose. It doesn't seem to come natural to them
yet as it does to men."

"There's no question of Mary's working too hard," the Lady Principal
said, bearing these hard sayings of Lady Anne's with composure. "She has
fine brains. Whatever she wants in an intellectual way she can come at
easily."

Mary, indeed, took her B.A. without over-much burning of the midnight
oil. Afterwards she always spoke with the tenderest affection of her old
school-days. She recalled with delight the spacious class-rooms, the old
garden with its great woodland trees, and the tiny rooms of the girls
who were in residence at the College, with their quaint and pretty
adornments--the place of so much young _camaraderie_ and soaring
ambition and happy emulation. "I can hardly remember that anyone was
ever unkind," she used to say long afterwards.

As a matter of fact, the band of elder students with whom Mary was
connected in her latter days at the College had a generous enthusiasm
for her beauty, taking it as in a sense a credit to themselves.

"You will be a living answer to them," said Jessie Baynes, who was small
and plain-looking, "when they say that learned women are always ugly."

And the whole of the class applauded her speech.

"I shall love to see you in your cap and gown," Jessie went on, firing
at the picture in her own imagination. "Very few of the men will be
taller than you, Mary. How they will shout!"

Jessie had no thought at all of her own lack of height and grace, as she
had no idea of how pleasant her little brown face was despite its
plainness. She was going to earn her living by teaching, and, what was
more, going to make living easier and pleasanter for her mother and her
young sister. To get her mother out of stuffy town lodgings to a seaside
cottage, which was an unattainable heaven to the mother's thoughts, to
educate Edie and give her a chance in life--these were the things that
filled Jessie's mind to the exclusion of fear whenever she thought of
her ordeal at the conferring of the University degrees. To be sure, she
trembled a little when she thought of the long, brilliantly lighted
Hall, and all the fine ladies, and the scarlet robes of the Senators,
and the young barbarians in the gallery, and all the thousands of eyes
fixed on the one little dumpling of a woman going up to receive her
degree. If she might only win the fellowship! She would not care what
ordeal she passed