nd thumped a little heavily on
the piano after learning her piece.... She used to say, years
afterward,--"I have no gifts; I was never clever with books. I like
life, people!" and she would stretch out her hands gropingly to the
broad horizon.

This year at the Ashland Institute helped to enlarge that horizon
somewhat. And one other thing she got with the absurd meal of
schooling,--a vague but influential something,--an "ideal of American
womanhood." That was the way Mrs. Mason phrased it in her eloquent talks
to the girls.

The other teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and
moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the
new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,--the
quality that the Institute prided itself on above all else.

It was of a poetic shade, composed in equal parts of art, literature,
and religion. Milly absorbed it at church, where the minister spoke
almost tearfully about "the mission of young womanhood to elevate the
ideals of the race," or more colloquially in Bible class as the duty of
"being a good influence" in life, especially men's lives. She got it
also in what books she read,--especially in Tennyson and in every novel,
as well as in the few plays she saw. There it was embodied as Woman of
Romance,--sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to
reform, ennoble, uplift--men, of course,--in a word to make over the
world. The idea of it had come down from the darkness of the middle
ages,--that smelly and benighted period,--had inflamed all romance, and
was now spreading its last miasmatic touch over the close of the
nineteenth century. All this, to be sure, Milly never knew.

She merely began to feel self-conscious, as a member of her sex,--a
being apart from men and somehow superior to them, without the same
appetites and low ideals, and with her own peculiar and sacred function
to perform for humanity. Ordinarily this heavy ideal of her sex did not
burden Milly. She obeyed her thoroughly healthy instincts, chief of
which was "to have a good time," to be loved and petted by people. But
occasionally in her more emotional moods, when she was singing hymns or
watching the sun depart in golden mists, she experienced exalted
sensations of the beauty and the glory of life--of _her_ life--and what
it all might mean to Some One (a man).

When she undressed before the tiny mirror, she considered her attractive
young body with a delic