n he had had in years. The girl was as quick as a cat,
and had a natural-born fencer's wrist.

During the summer vacation she kept up her practice with her father,
who remembered enough of his early training in Paris to be more than a
match for her, and in the autumn of her Sophomore year, at the annual
Gymnasium exhibition, she gave with the Commandant a public bout with
the foils in which she notably distinguished herself. The astonished
and long-continued applause for this new feature of the exhibition
was a draught of nectar to her embittered young heart, but she
acknowledged it with not the smallest sign of pleasure, showing an
impassive face as she stood by the portly captain, slim and tall and
young and haughty, joining him in a sweeping, ceremonious salute with
her foil to the enthusiastic audience, and turning on her heel with
a brusqueness as military as his own, to march firmly with high-held
head beside him back to the ranks of blue-bloomered girls who stood
watching her.

The younger girls in Alpha Kappa and Sigma Beta were seizing this
opportunity to renew an old quarrel with their elders in the
fraternities and were acrimoniously hoping that the older ones
were quite satisfied with their loss of a brilliant member. These
accusations met with no ready answer from the somewhat crestfallen
elders, whose only defense was the entire unexpectedness of the way in
which Sylvia was distinguishing herself. Who ever heard before of a
girl doing anything remarkable in athletics? And anyhow, now in her
Sophomore year it was too late to do anything. A girl so notoriously
proud would certainly not consider a tardy invitation, and it would
not do to run the risk of being refused. It is not too much to say
that to have overheard a conversation like this would have changed the
course of Sylvia's development, but of such colloquies she could know
nothing, attributing to the fraternities, with all an outsider's
resentful overestimation of their importance, an arrogant solidarity
of opinion and firmness of purpose which they were very far from
possessing.

Professor and Mrs. Marshall and Lawrence and Judith, up in the front
row of chairs set for the audience about the running track, followed
this exploit of Sylvia's with naively open pride and sympathy,
applauding even more heartily than did their neighbors. Lawrence, as
usual, began to compose a poem, the first line of which ran,

"Splendid, she wields her gleaming sw