beautiful. She had the highest rank but three
in her class last year."

Sylvia was overcome with astonishment by this knowledge of a fact
which had seemed to make no impression on the world of the year
before. "Why, how could you know that!" she cried.

Mrs. Draper laughed. "Just hear her!" she appealed to the young man.
Her method of promoting the acquaintance of the two young people
seemed to consist in talking to each of the other. "Just hear her! She
converses as she fences--one bright flash, and you're skewered against
the wall--no parryings possible!" She faced Sylvia again: "Why, my
dear, in answer to your rapier-like question, I must simply confess
that this morning, being much struck with Jerry's being struck with
you, I went over to the registrar's office and looked you up. I know
that you passed supremely well in mathematics and French (what a
quaint combination!), very well indeed in history and chemistry, and
moderately in botany. What's the matter with botany? I have always
found Professor Cross a very obliging little man."

"He doesn't make me see any sense to botany," explained Sylvia, taking
the question seriously. "I don't seem to get hold of any real reason
for studying it at all. What difference does it make if a bush is a
hawthorn or not?--and anyhow, I know it's a hawthorn without studying
botany."

The young man spoke for himself now, with a keen relish for Sylvia's
words. He faced her for the first time. "Now you're _shouting_, Miss
Marshall!" he said. "That's the most sensible thing I ever heard said.
That's just what I always felt about the whole B.A. course, anyhow!
What's the diff? Who cares whether Charlemagne lived in six hundred or
sixteen hundred? It all happened before we were born. What's it all
_to_ us?"

Sylvia looked squarely at him, a little startled at his directly
addressing her, not hearing a word of what he said in the vividness of
her first-hand impression of his personality, his brilliant blue eyes,
his full, very red lips, his boldly handsome face and carriage, his
air of confidence. In spite of his verbal agreement with her opinion,
his look crossed hers dashingly, like a challenge, a novelty in the
amicable harmony which had been the tradition of her life. She felt
that tradition to be not without its monotony, and her young blood
warmed. She gazed back at him silently, wonderingly, frankly.

With her radiantly sensuous youth in the first splendor of its
opening, w