the latter item. "I was
hostess two weeks ago."

"That's because you wrote an essay on the 'Eight Hour Day.' Lordie
thinks you will ask the professor-man intelligent questions; and show
him that St. Ursula's is not a common boarding-school where only
superficial accomplishments are taught, but one in which the actual
problems of--"

"And I did want to go shopping!" Patty mourned. "I need some new
shoe-strings. I've been tying a knot in my old ones every day for a
week."

"Here she comes," whispered Priscilla. "Look happy or she'll make you
translate the whole--Good morning, Miss Lord! We were just noticing
about the lecture. It sounds extremely interesting."

The two smiled a perfunctory greeting, and followed their teacher to the
morning's Latin.

Miss Lord was the one who struck the modern note at St. Ursula's. She
believed in militant suffragism and unions and boycotts and strikes; and
she labored hard to bring her little charges to her own advanced
position. But it was against a heavy inertia that she worked. Her little
charges didn't care a rap about receiving their rights, in the dim
future of twenty-one; but they were very much concerned about losing a
present half-holiday. On Friday afternoons, they were ordinarily allowed
to draw checks on the school bank for their allowances, and march in a
procession--a teacher forming the head and tail--to the village stores,
where they laid in their weekly supply of hair ribbons and soda water
and kodak films. Even had one acquired so many demerits that her weekly
stipend was entirely eaten up by fines, still she marched to the village
and watched the lucky ones disburse. It made a break in the monotony of
six days of bounds.

But every cloud has its silver lining.

Miss Lord preceded the Virgil recitation that morning by a discussion of
the lecture to come. The laundry strike, she told them, marked an epoch
in industrial history. It proved that women, as well as men, were
capable of standing by each other. The solidarity of labor was a point
she wished her girls to grasp. Her girls listened with grave attention;
and by eagerly putting a question, whenever she showed signs of running
down, they managed to stave off the Latin recitation for three quarters
of an hour.

The professor, a mild man with a Van Dyke beard, came and lectured
exhaustively upon the relations of employer and employed. His audience
listened with politely intelligent smiles, but with minds se