nob of
the sanctum door. Her hands were filled with those little cardboard
rhomboids, polyhedrons, prisms and so forth which the freshmen have to
make for their geometry work.

"I'm going to do it," she began breathlessly, "I'm going to tell my
mother. Perhaps it would please her more if--if you should write me a
note on paper with the name of the Monthly at the top, you know. She used
to be an editor when she was in college. In it say that the board gave me
the prize. I think it will please her."

"I shall be delighted," I exclaimed. Then something in the way she was
gazing down at those geometrical monstrosities (I never could endure
mathematics myself) made me want to comfort her.

"Why, child, it won't be necessary to sacrifice math entirely. You can
elect analytics and calculus to balance the lit and rhetoric. Cheer up."

She raised eyes brimming with tears. "My mother thinks that math has an
adverse tendency. She doesn't want me to take much science either. She
says that science deals with facts, literature with the impression of
facts."

"Oh," I remarked. You notice that I had found occasion to use the
foregoing expletive several times since first meeting Miss Maria Mitchell
Kiewit.

She nodded gloomily in acknowledgment of my sympathetic comprehension.
"Yes, once when I described lights in a fog as 'losing their chromatic
identity' instead of saying they 'blurred into the mist,' she asked me to
drop physics in the high school. She said it was ruinous, it was
destroying the delicacy of my perceptions."

"Doesn't your mother ever----" I hesitated, then decisively, "doesn't she
ever laugh?"

Maria dimpled suddenly. "Oh, yes, yes! She's my dearest, best friend, and
we have fun all the time except when she talks about my becoming a
writer. She said that now at college I could show if there was any hope
in me. She meant that this is my chance to learn to write. I--I----" She
paused and glanced at me dubiously from under her lashes. "I sent in that
story just to show her that I couldn't write. I was going to tell her I
had tried and failed."

"Oh!" Then I chuckled, and the freshman after a moment of half resentful
pouting joined in with a small reluctant laugh.

"It is funny," she said, "I think that maybe from your side of the affair
it is awfully funny. But----"

I turned the knob swiftly. "No but about it. I shall write that note this
minute, and you shall mail it home at once. That is the only right t