he tree trunks and foliage
Janet saw one end of the mansion to which it led, and ventured timidly
but eagerly in among the trees in the hope of satisfying her new-born
curiosity. Try as she would, she never could get any but disappointing
and partial glimpses of a house which, because of the mystery of its
setting, fired her imagination, started her to wondering why it was that
some were permitted to live in the midst of such beauty while she was
condemned to spend her days in Fillmore Street and the prison of the
mill. She was not even allowed to look at it! The thought was like a
cloud across the sun.

However, when she had regained the tarvia road and walked a little way
the shadow suddenly passed, and she stood surprised. The sight of a long
common with its ancient trees in the fullness of glory, dense maples,
sturdy oaks, strong, graceful elms that cast flickering, lacy shadows
across the road filled her with satisfaction, with a sense of peace
deepened by the awareness, in the background, ranged along the common on
either side, of stately, dignified buildings, each in an appropriate
frame of foliage. With the essence rather than the detail of all this her
consciousness became steeped; she was naturally ignorant of the great
good fortune of Silliston Academy of having been spared with one or two
exceptions--donations during those artistically lean years of the
nineteenth century when American architecture affected the Gothic, the
Mansard, and the subsequent hybrid. She knew this must be Silliston, the
seat of that famous academy of which she had heard.

The older school buildings and instructors' houses, most of them white or
creamy yellow, were native Colonial, with tall, graceful chimneys and
classic pillars and delicate balustrades, eloquent at once of the racial
inheritance of the Republic and of a bygone individuality, dignity, and
pride. And the modern architect, of whose work there was an abundance,
had graciously and intuitively held this earlier note and developed it.
He was an American, but an American who had been trained. The result was
harmony, life as it should proceed, the new growing out of the old. And
no greater tribute can be paid to Janet Bumpus than that it pleased her,
struck and set exquisitely vibrating within her responsive chords. For
the first time in her adult life she stood in the presence of tradition,
of a tradition inherently if unconsciously the innermost reality of her
being a tra