ructor
had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.

A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her
taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving
beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened
to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her
arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a
lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking
the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of
expectant youth.

It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College.

The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with
axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious
girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American
Middlewest.

II

Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound
religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin,
and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the
Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the
wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young
men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and
Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not
altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals,
permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played
tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama,
went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of
the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.

In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more
eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances,
though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited
more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her
body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black
hair.

The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her
body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a
shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed;
a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness.
"Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive
were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rat