resence in California at
all, and the incongruity of her school-teaching. Her pose was perfect,
and yet nothing could be more unconscious. Was that marvellous
spontaneity, that simple dignity, the regular thing among the men and
women Winifred belonged with? It made him feel left very far out to
think so. How incapable of effort for admiration she was, yet how
invariably admirable!

She caught him looking at her, in time. "What is it?" she said,
simply.

He colored with some confusion, but confessed a piece of his thought.
"I was wondering if you really do not care at all for admiration. Most
people would think they got the good of their living in being praised
a fraction as much as you've been. If that's impertinent I beg your
pardon; you asked me."

The portion of aristocrat's pride that was in Winifred was largely
concentrated in an objection to talking of herself or letting other
people do it; so she looked a little annoyed. She began with some
constraint:

"Yes--I care--at first--when it is the right one that praises. But
there is always a reaction of self-distrust. It seems humiliating,"
she went on more frankly, "to have been praised for having done some
common thing--solved a problem, or written a poem, or handled a
piano--a little more or less cleverly, when one comes to think what
education and art are. And _personal_ admiration--that always seems a
contemptible sort of folly, if you think of what great things there
are to do and be in the world, and the lives the great lonely souls
have lived."

"Your achievement seems little to you," said Will, with some gloom,
"because, I suppose, more always opens to you. To me, who have made
none--"

"Why, Will," she cried, with the most genuine dissent. "You have done
more than almost any one I know. Do you call it nothing to do a
college curriculum alone and under all sorts of hindrances? And I know
that it was done well and thoroughly."

"Oh, yes," he said, indifferently, tossing bits of clover into the
stream, "I could have passed an A. B. fast enough. But you know better
than I do, Winifred, that that's the least of a college course. I've
seen fellows that had to work their way through and had no spare time
or energy, and they always lacked a great deal of the college flavor;
the education didn't permeate 'em. Then there are other things--music,
art, social opportunities, capacity of expression--that are no slight
things to miss; they make up more of first