him so strongly. It was not the charm of
cleverness, for she was not clever in the usual sense; she said few
bright, quotable things, though her humor was keen. She had carried into
womanhood the good looks of her girlhood, and she was a person one
looked at twice. Her eyes were fine and expressive, and they faced the
world with an engaging candor. They had learned to laugh since we saw
her first--college and contact with the world had done that for her. Her
face was long, her nose a compromise of good models, her mouth a little
large, but offering compensations when she smiled in her quick,
responsive fashion. One must go deeper, Harwood reflected, for Sylvia's
charm, and it dawned upon him that it was in the girl's self, born of an
alert, clear-thinking mind and a kind and generous heart. Individuality,
personality, were words with which he sought to characterize her; and as
he struggled with terms, he found that she was carrying the burden of
the talk.

"I suppose," she was saying, in her voice that was deeper than most
women's voices, and musical and agreeable to hear,--"I suppose that
college is designed to save us all a lot of hard knocks; I wonder if it
does?"

"If you're asking me personally, I'll say that there are lumps on my
brow where I have bumped hard, in spite of my A.B. degree. I'm disposed
to think that college only postpones the day of our awakening; we've got
to shoot the chutes anyhow. It is so written."

She laughed at his way of putting it.

"Oh, you're not so much older that you can frighten me. People on the
toboggan always seem to be having a good time; the percentage of those
whose car jumps the track isn't formidable."

"Just enough fatalities to flavor the statistics. The seniors over there
have stopped singing; I dare say they're talking about life in large
capital letters."

"Well, there are plenty of chances. I'm rather of the opinion that we're
all here to do something for somebody. Nobody's life is just his own.
Whether we want it that way or not, we are all links in the chain, and
it's our business not to be the weakest."

"I'm an individualist," he said, "and I'm very largely concerned in
seeing what Daniel Harwood, a poor young lawyer of mediocre abilities,
can do with this thing we hear mentioned as life."

"Oh, but there's no such thing as an individualist; the idea is purely
academic!" and she laughed again, but less lightly. "We're all debtors
to somebody or something--