f the September term with the present January
one, she decided that she felt quite a hundred years older. Whether such
a swift and sudden growing-up was unalloyed bliss was a matter for
debate, but at any rate it gave her a certain feeling of self-reliance
that was rather gratifying. In the Patterson household she was in a
different world from that of the Hiltons. Paul and Minnie had been very,
very kind, but they treated her entirely as a child, and had never even
discussed her future in her presence. Paul, chivalrous towards women,
but old-fashioned in his ideas of their sphere, liked girls to be
brought up in cotton-wool, and thought the home provided quite a wide
enough field for their energies. He considered "careers" unfeminine, and
admired the mid-Victorian days, when the daughters of the house dusted
the drawing-room and arranged the flowers, paid calls, played tennis,
and helped at bazaars, but left college life and the professions to
their brothers.

Mrs. Patterson took just the opposite view of things. She was intensely
modern, and considered that every girl ought to be trained for some
special career as much as every boy. Her own daughters were studying
hard, Kitty for medicine, and Joan for secretarial work. She looked
forward to their future prospects with as much interest as to those of
her sons, Derrick, Stuart, and Godfrey. Having accepted Lesbia as an
inmate of the household, she tried to train her in her own particular
school of ideas. She was kind in her way, but not at all tender. Even to
her own children she would only bestow the merest peck of a kiss. She
was quite uncompromising with her young cousin, kept her remorselessly
to home preparation or piano practice, and demanded high standards in
respect of punctuality, exactitude of expression, and general alertness.

Though it kept her brains continually on the stretch, Lesbia found the
mental atmosphere bracing. She began to enjoy the intellectual
conversation round the breakfast- or supper-table. At first she was
quite at sea regarding the topics discussed, but after a while she grew
to understand and even sometimes to offer an opinion of her own. She had
never in her life before imagined that so many societies and committees
existed as those to which Mr. and Mrs. Patterson devoted a large part of
their energies.

This difference in the brain-stimulating activity of her new home could
not fail to express itself in Lesbia's school work. She was