d, with only an
equipment of good will, and hope to do them much good. Nor was she, she
now suspected, the person to attempt such a career. She fancied she saw
inherent weaknesses in her character which would preclude a successful
performance. She had been frightened, rather than inspired, by the women
in that room, particularly by the women of her own age. "What right have
you to come down here with your pearls and your simple gingham dress,"
she felt they were asking, "and get off a lot of this college stuff to
us?" What right indeed? She was convinced, in short, that she had been
embarked upon a hopeless piece of snobbery, and, finding the whole
business distasteful, it had not been difficult to discover her
unfitness.

The time had not been wasted, however. Not only had she satisfied
herself that a career of Uplift was not for her, but she had made a
friend into the bargain. Tom, she decided, had behaved beautifully
through it; and in her humbled state of mind the offence she had taken
at his acting in the charade became all the more odious. What a
mean-minded girl she could be, to be sure; yet how perfectly he had
risen above the situation. He had received her rudeness with an
instinctive fineness that gave freshness to the Biblical admonition
about the other cheek. He had returned good for evil, and in supporting
her through the ordeal of the Uplift Plan he had proved himself a tower
of strength.

Tom and she, a few days after the final lecture, had gone together to
the college book shop and picked out their present for Professor Sprig.
They had dawdled over the shelves, pulling down a book here and another
there, meeting every few minutes to show each other a possibility, and
then putting it back. The thing could, of course, have been done much
more quickly, but neither seemed in a hurry to find the right one, for
they both liked books, and the shop was well-stocked, and the clerks did
not descend like buzzards upon them. They at length selected a
rag-paper, wide-margined copy of Calverley's _Verses and Fly Leaves_ and
laughed at its inappropriateness for the physiologist. Still, they were
confident enough that Mr. Sprig knew his Calverley quite as well as
they, and that another copy would not be a burden. It had been a
delightful two hours, and Nancy, at dinner, began a detailed account of
it.

But Henry was not interested. "It seems to me that you are seeing a
good deal of Tom Reynolds, lately," was all tha