"Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you
were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a
lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone
impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for
a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU
know--sympathetic!"

His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him
to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried,
"Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted
on.

Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had
never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have
a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black
robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde
of grateful poor.

The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on
village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It
had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England,
Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which
she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.

She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim,
lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin.
She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy
exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat,
photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish,
and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out
of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace
of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of
girl students.

It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the
treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She
strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three
o'clock bell called her to the class in English history.

She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on
one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I
suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of
a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs
on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the
Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to