pal, Miss Lascelles, was an excellent intellectual woman,
of mingled aristocratic and _spirituelle_ antecedents. In another
country and nation she might have been a distinguished _dame de salon_.
As it was, she was sufficiently harassed and overworked in her double
office of decorous, authoritative chaperon and qualified guide,
philosopher, and friend to the girls under her charge. These might be
vestal virgins or nymphs of Minerva, but they were also girls, so long
as the world lasted--the most of them half curious, half friendly where
May was concerned. This was true even of the wonderful young American
who came and stayed with no other object in view than to say she had
kept her terms at St. Ambrose's, according to what was the sum total of
the ambition of many a young man at the great University. She _would_
call the Atlantic "the herring pond," and speak of "fixing" her hair;
still she was a girl like the rest of them. Miss Lascelles, with all the
other ladies in residence at Thirlwall Hall, the American included,
could not help wondering what the friends and guardians of a budding
beauty and helpless baby like Miss Millar intended by sending her to
live among a set of self-reliant, amply-occupied young women, who, as a
rule, knew exactly what they wanted to do and did it.

The whole place and system overwhelmed May. The hoary dignity of the old
colleges, receptacles of the concentrated learning of ages, the crowds
of capped and gowned tutors and professors, potent representatives of
the learning of the present, even the shoals of young men who were able
to care for none of these things, and to carry their responsibilities
lightly, all to be encountered in the course of a morning walk, struck
May with a sense of inadjustable disproportion, and of intolerable
presumption on her part in pretending to be a scholar. She was still one
of a household largely composed of women, as she had been at home, but
here the household was planted where it was an innovation, in the midst
of a colony of men, which constantly threatened to sweep over it and
submerge it.

The grown-up, independent, yet disciplined routine of Thirlwall Hall,
founded as closely as possible on the venerable routine of the men's
colleges, was widely, crushingly different from life in the Old Doctor's
House at Redcross. Morning chapel, the steady business of individual
reading, the attendance on the selected courses of lectures, with the
new experience of