mercial value later on? She was sick with this long service
at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was
life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased
to the same service. Everything went to produce vulgar things,
to encumber material life.

Suddenly she threw over French. She would take honours in
botany. This was the one study that lived for her. She had
entered into the lives of the plants. She was fascinated by the
strange laws of the vegetable world. She had here a glimpse of
something working entirely apart from the purpose of the human
world.

College was barren, cheap, a temple converted to the most
vulgar, petty commerce. Had she not gone to hear the echo of
learning pulsing back to the source of the mystery?--The
source of mystery! And barrenly, the professors in their gowns
offered commercial commodity that could be turned to good
account in the examination room; ready-made stuff too, and not
really worth the money it was intended to fetch; which they all
knew.

All the time in the college now, save when she was labouring
in her botany laboratory, for there the mystery still glimmered,
she felt she was degrading herself in a kind of trade of sham
jewjaws.

Angry and stiff, she went through her last term. She would
rather be out again earning her own living. Even Brinsley Street
and Mr. Harby seemed real in comparison. Her violent hatred of
the Ilkeston School was nothing compared with the sterile
degradation of college. But she was not going back to Brinsley
Street either. She would take her B.A., and become a mistress in
some Grammar School for a time.

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly
round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure.
She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would
the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway
ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a
gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always
the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then,
from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of
amorphous, squalid activity.

No matter! Every hill-top was a little different, every
valley was somehow new. Cossethay and her childhood with her
father; the Marsh and the little Church school near the Marsh,
and her grandmother and her uncles; the High School at
Nottingham and Anton Skrebensky; Anton Skrebensky and the dance
in t