of conditions in the State, especially in
the rural districts. Professor Marshall's twenty years of popularity
with the more serious element of the State University students (that
popularity which meant so little to Sylvia, and which she so ignored)
had given him a large acquaintance among the class which it was
necessary to reach. He knew the men who at the University had been the
digs, and jays, and grinds, and who were now the prosperous
farmers, the bankers, the school-trustees, the leading men in their
communities; and his geniality, vivacity, and knack for informal
public speaking made him eminently fitted to represent the University
in the somewhat thankless task of coaxing and coercing backward
communities to expend the necessary money and effort to bring their
schools up to the State University standard.

If all this had happened a few years sooner, he undoubtedly would have
taken Sylvia with him on many of these journeys into remote corners
of the State, but Sylvia had her class-work to attend to, and the
Professor shared to the fullest extent the academic prejudice against
parents who broke in upon the course of their children's regular
instruction by lawless and casual junketings. Instead, it was Judith
who frequently accompanied him, Judith who was now undergoing that
home-preparation for the University through which Sylvia had passed,
and who, since her father was her principal instructor, could carry
on her studies wherever he happened to be; as well as have the
stimulating experience of coming in contact with a wide variety of
people and conditions. It is possible that Professor Marshall's
sociable nature not only shrank from the solitude which his wife
would have endured with cheerfulness, but that he also wished to take
advantage of this opportunity to come in closer touch with his second
daughter, for whose self-contained and occasionally insensitive nature
he had never felt the instinctive understanding he had for Sylvia's
moods. It is certain that the result was a better feeling between the
two than had existed before. During the long hours of jolting over
branch railroads back to remote settlements, or waiting at cheerless
junctions for delayed trains, or gaily eating impossible meals at
extraordinary country hotels, the ruddy, vigorous father, now growing
both gray and stout, and the tall, slender, darkly handsome girl of
fifteen, were cultivating more things than history and mathematics and
Eng