were at the gate of the first camp now. Waldo threw over a bag of
mealies, and they walked on over the dewy ground.

"Have you learnt much?" he asked her simply, remembering how she had
once said, "When I come back again I shall know everything that a human
being can."

She laughed.

"Are you thinking of my old boast? Yes; I have learnt something, though
hardly what I expected, and not quite so much. In the first place, I
have learnt that one of my ancestors must have been a very great fool;
for they say nothing comes out in a man but one of his forefathers
possessed it before him. In the second place, I have discovered that
of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly
pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the
worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately
what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and
that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting
on the question, 'Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?'
I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a
small thimble, and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has
been for many years in one of those places carries the mark of the beast
on her till she dies, though she may expand a little afterward, when she
breathes in the free world."

"Were you miserable?" he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.

"I?--no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I
should have run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself
to the first Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her
soap-pot, if I had to live as the rest of the drove did. Can you form an
idea, Waldo, of what it must be to be shut up with cackling old women,
who are without knowledge of life, without love of the beautiful,
without strength, to have your soul cultured by them? It is suffocation
only to breathe the air they breathe; but I made them give me room. I
told them I should leave, and they knew I came there on my own account;
so they gave me a bedroom without the companionship of one of those
things that were having their brains slowly diluted and squeezed out of
them. I did not learn music, because I had no talent; and when the
drove made cushions, and hideous flowers that the roses laugh at, and
a footstool in six weeks that a machine would have made better in five
minutes, I went to my room. With