social game. They offered us coffee,
sandwiches and cake, and we brushed them away. The very thought of
food was repulsive to me, and this was not because I had reached that
point where the immeasurable yearning of the heart dwarfs all mean
desire. I was really hungry, but I had no mind to spoil the impression
which it was evident I had made; I had no mind to let Miss Todd see me
with a half-eaten sandwich poised in one hand and scattering crumbs
untidily, and in the other a cup of muddy, steaming fluid. She seemed
to have a like conception of the undignity of eating, for when she
declined the proffered feast it was with the air of one who never ate
at all, who never knew the pangs of appetite, but lived on something
infinitely higher. She even spurned the cake, and I was glad to let
her deceive me. I liked to coddle myself with the belief that she
never ate. I knew that she did not want me to see her eating, for then
I must have classed her with the mass of women--with Mrs. Ruffle, whom
I heard choking on a bit of nutshell; with her mother, who was standing
near us talking in a voice muffled in food; I must have slipped off the
cloud to earth.

But Gladys Todd was wise, with that innate wisdom of her sex in matters
of appearance when appearance is to be considered, and we held in
silence, loftily on our cloud. And looking back on that evening, my
recollection is of misty, nebulous things; not of a passing flow of
incident, but of a welling up of new thoughts as I sat awkwardly
pulling at my fingers and caressing my collar. Yet there were
incidents, too, of high importance to McGraw. Doctor Todd declared
that the evening was historical. Standing in the centre of a hushed
company, he announced that the year had broken all records for
matriculation; McGraw was growing; McGraw could not long be contained
within her present walls, and the world must soon realize that in
simple justice something must be done for her. The doctor was not cast
down by the fact that nothing had been done and that there was no sign
of anything being done. Hope was his watchword, and so hopefully did
he speak of the future that the collegiate Gothic quadrangles began to
rise in the imaginations of the company as dreams almost accomplished,
and so infectious was his confidence that his hearers caught the high
pitch of his enthusiasm, and when he had finished Boller sprang to a
chair, and, waving a coffee-cup, struck the first deep ton