ddenly withdrawn by the power of a
great educational institution and swept beyond her horizon was
disconcerting. She had not imagined she would feel this way. She
stood in the window watching them, and wiped away a furtive tear,
and then laughed to herself.

"Old fool!" she said softly to the window-pane. "The trouble with you
is, you'd like to be going to college yourself, and you know it! Now
put this out of your mind, and go to work planning how to make home
doubly attractive when they get back, so that they will want to spend
every minute possible here instead of being drawn away from it. They
love it. Now keep them loving it. That's your job."

When the two came back at noon, they were radiant and enthusiastic as
usual, albeit they had many a growl to express. One would have thought
to hear Allison that he had been running colleges for some fifty years
the way he criticized the policy and told how things ought to be run.
At first Julia Cloud was greatly distressed by it all, thinking that
they surely had made a mistake in their selection of a college, but it
gradually dawned upon her that this was a sort of superior attitude
maintained by upper-class men toward all institutions of learning,
particularly those in which they happened to be studying, that it was
really only an indication of growing developing minds keen to see
mistakes and trying to think out remedies, and as yet inexperienced
enough to think they could remedy the whole sick world.

The opening days of college were turbulent days for Julia Cloud. Her
children were so excited they could neither eat nor sleep. They were
liable to turn up unexpectedly at almost any hour of the morning or
afternoon, hungry as bears, and always in a hurry. They had so many
new things to tell her about, and no time in which to talk. They mixed
things terribly, and gave her impressions that took months to right;
and they could not understand why she looked distressed at their
flightiness. They were both taken up eagerly by the students and
invited hither and yon by the various groups and societies, which
frequently caused them to be absent from meals while they were being
dined and lunched and breakfasted. Of course, Julia Cloud reflected,
two such good-looking, well-dressed, easy-mannered young people, with
a home in the town where they could invite people, a car in which to
take friends out, and a free hand with money, would be popular
anywhere. Her anxiety grew as the