ony.
Although Mrs. Euphemia Conroth was the professor's own sister he could
appreciate Lou's attitude in this emergency. While the girl was growing
up there had been times when it was considered best--usually because of
her studies--for Lou to live with Aunt Euphemia. Indeed, that good lady
believed it almost a sin that a young girl should attend the professor on
any of his trips into "the wilds," as she expressed it. Aunt Euphemia
ignored the fact that nowadays the railroad and telegraph are in Thibet
and that turbines ply the headwaters of the Amazon.

Mrs. Conroth dwelt in Poughkeepsie--that half-way stop between New York
and Albany; and she was as exclusive and opinionated a lady as might be
found in that city of aristocracy and learning.

The college in the shadow of which Aunt Euphemia's dwelling basked, was
that which had led the professor's daughter under the lady's sway.
Although the girls with whom Lou associated within the college walls were
up-to-the-minute--if not a little ahead of it--she found her aunt, like
many of those barnacles clinging to the outer reefs of learning in
college towns, was really a fossil. If one desires to meet the
ultraconservative in thought and social life let me commend him to this
stratum of humanity within stone's throw of a college. These barnacles
like Aunt Euphemia are wedded to a manner of thought, gained from their
own school experiences, that went out of fashion inside the colleges
thirty years ago.

Originally, in Lou Grayling's case, when she first lived with Aunt
Euphemia and was a day pupil at an exclusive preparatory school, it had
been drilled into her by the lady that "children should be seen but not
heard!" Later, although she acknowledged the fact that young girls were
now taught many things that in Aunt Euphemia's maidenhood were scarcely
whispered within hearing of "the young person," the lady was quite
shocked to hear such subjects discussed in the drawing-room, with her
niece as one of the discussers.

The structure of man and the lower animals, down to the number of their
ribs, seemed no proper topic for light talk at an evening party. It made
Aunt Euphemia gasp. Anatomy was Lou's hobby. She was an excellent and
practical taxidermist, thanks to her father. And she had learned to name
the bones of the human frame along with her multiplication table.

However, there was little about Louise Grayling to commend her among, for
instance, the erudite