ne, thirteen? The
tide of girls would ebb and flow with every June and September; eighteen
to twenty-two would ring their changes through the terms, and she could
take her choice of the two methods of regarding them: she could insist
on a perennial interest in the separate personalities, and endure
weariness for the sake of an uncertain influence; or she could mass them
frankly as the student body, and confine the connection to marking their
class-room efforts and serving their meat in the dining-room. The latter
was at once more honest and more easy; all but the most ambitious or the
most conscientious came ta it sooner or later.

The youngest among the assistants, themselves fresh from college,
mingled naturally enough with the students; they danced and skated and
enjoyed their girlish authority. The older women, seasoned to the life,
settled there indefinitely, identified themselves more or less with the
town, amused themselves with their little aristocracy of precedence, and
wove and interwove the complicated, slender strands of college gossip.
But a woman of barely thirty, too old for friendships with young girls,
too young to find her placid recreation in the stereotyped round of
social functions, that seemed so perfectly imitative of the normal and
yet so curiously unsuccessful at bottom--what was there for her?

Her eyes were fixed on the hill-slope view that made her room
so desirable. It occurred to her that its changelessness was not
necessarily so attractive a characteristic as the local poets practised
themselves in assuring her.

A light knock at the door recalled to her the utter lack of privacy
that put her at the mercy of laundress, sophomore, and expressman. She
regretted that she had not put up the little sign whose "_Please do not
disturb_" was her only means of defence.

"Come!" she called shortly, and the tall girl in the green dress stood
in the open door. A strange sense of long acquaintance, a vague feeling
of familiarity, surprised the older woman. Her expression changed.

"Come in," she said cordially.

"I--am I disturbing you?" asked the girl doubtfully. She had a pile of
books on her arm; her trim jacket and hat, and something in the way she
held her armful, seemed curiously at variance with her tam-o'-shantered,
golf-caped friends.

"I couldn't find out whether you had an office hour, and I didn't know
whether I ought to have sent in my name--it seemed so formal, when it is
only a m