n't I light it?" asked Kathleen. "Half of the room is mine. I
wouldn't grumble if the case were reversed. She will soon grow used to
the light. I intend occasionally to read or study after hours. Don't
tell me it is against the rules. I know it. But circumstances, etc. I'll
see you to-morrow. I wish I were a junior. The freshmen I have met so
far are regular babies. I'm going to study hard next summer and see if I
can't pass up the sophomore year. There is nothing like having a modest
ambition, you know."

With this satirical comment the newspaper girl nodded a pert good night
and left the room.

No one spoke after she had gone.

"I must go to bed," said Grace, breaking the significant silence that
had fallen on the quartette. "Come, Anne, it's twenty minutes to eleven.
Good night, girls."

"What do you think of Miss West, Anne?" asked Grace a little later as
they were preparing to retire.

"I don't like to say," returned Anne slowly. "She's remarkably
bright--" Anne paused. Her eyes met Grace's.

"I know," nodded Grace understandingly. "We will try to keep a starboard
eye on her. She is going to find college very different from being a
newspaper woman." Grace smiled faintly. The word "woman," as applied to
Kathleen West, seemed wholly amusing.

"I don't think she showed particularly good taste in speaking as she did
of Mabel Ashe," criticized Anne, a moment later. "I didn't intend to say
that, but I might as well be perfectly frank with you, Grace."

"I was sorry she spoke as she did, too," agreed Grace. She did not add
that the newspaper girl's half slighting remarks about Mabel Ashe still
rankled in her loyal soul. It was chiefly to please Mabel that she and
her friends had hospitably received this stranger into their midst,
prepared to do whatever lay within their power to make her feel at home
with them. And she had dared to speak almost disparagingly of the girl
who was beloved by every student in Overton who knew her. In spite of
her resolution to keep a "starboard eye" on the freshman, Grace felt
infinitely more like leaving the ungrateful freshman to shift for
herself.

"Well, what about her?" Elfreda asked bluntly of Miriam, as she piled
the tea cups one inside the other.

"What about who?" returned Miriam tantalizingly.

"You know very well" declared Elfreda; "but, if I must be explicit, what
do you think of Miss West now?"

"What do you think?" counter-questioned Miriam.

"I think she has mo