for her
First in order to evade Aunt Beatrice; but the fever of it grew upon
her, either from the ambient air of the University or from a native
passion to excel in all she did. Her teachers were bewildered by the
mental change in Miss Flaxman. The qualities of intellectual swiftness,
vigor, pliancy, whose absence they had once noted in her, became, on the
contrary, conspicuously hers. Once initiated into the tricks of the
"Great Essay" style, she could use it with a dexterity strangely in
contrast with the flat and fumbling manner in which poor Milly had been
wont to express her ideas. But in the region of actual knowledge, she
now and again perpetrated some immense and childish blunder, which made
the teachers, who nursed and trained her like a jockey or a race-horse,
tremble for the results of the Greats Examination.

All too swiftly the date of the Schools loomed on the horizon; drew
near; was come. The June weather was glorious on the river, but in the
town, above all in the Examination Schools, it was very hot. The sun
glared pitilessly in through the great windows of the big T-shaped room,
till the temperature was that of a greenhouse. The young men in their
black coats and white ties looked enviously at the girl candidate, the
only one, in her white waist and light skirt. They envied her, too, her
apparent indifference to a crisis that paled the masculine cheek. In
fact, Mildred was nervous, but her nerves were strung up to so high a
pitch that she was sensitive neither to temperature nor to fatigue, nor
to want of sleep. And at the service of her quick intelligence and ready
pen lay all the stored knowledge of Milly the First.

On the last day, when the last paper was over, Tims came and found her
in the big hall, planting the pins in her hat with an almost feverish
energy. Although it was five o'clock, she said she wanted air, not tea.
The last men had trooped listlessly down the steps of the Schools and
the two girls stood there while Mildred drew on her gloves. The sun
wearing to the northwest, shone down that curve of the High Street which
all Europe cannot match. The slanting gold illumined the gray face of
the University and the wide pavement, where the black-gowned victims of
the Schools threaded their sombre way through groups of joyous youths in
flannels and ladies in summer attire. On the opposite side cool shadows
were beginning to invade the sunshine, to slant across the old houses,
straight-roofe