But in one sense we have wandered a long way from Beverly Ashby and
opening day at Leslie Manor, though all these people vitally concern her.

Leslie Manor stood in the centre of a wide, rolling, thickly wooded
estate encompassed by a holly hedge noted for miles around for its beauty
and its prickly barrier to freedom. The house had been restored and added
to in order to meet the demands of a school harboring sixty or seventy
girls, though it still retained its old lines of beauty and its air of
hominess.

Miss Woodhull's first concern had been "to make the place sanitary," the
last word spelled with italics, and to this end modern improvements and
conveniences had supplanted the old, easy-going expedients of domestic
economy. Everything in Leslie Manor became strictly modern and
up-to-date. The upper floors were arranged in the most approved single
bed-chambers or suites for the teachers and the seniors, the lower ones
were accurately divided into living, dining and reception rooms. In one
wing were the model recitation rooms and Miss Woodhull's office; in
another the undergraduate's rooms. Nor had the grounds been overlooked.
They were very trim, very prim, very perfectly kept and made one realize
this at every turn. It also made one wonder how the old owner would feel
could he return from his nameless grave at Appomatox and be obliged to
pace along the faultless walks where formerly he had romped with his
children across the velvety turf. But he and his were dead and gone and
the spirit of New England primness, personified in Virginia Woodhull,
spinster aged fifty-seven, now dominated the place.

It was lovely to look upon, and compelled one's admiration, though it
left some indefinable longing unsatisfied. It was so orderly it almost
made one ache.

Perhaps something of this ache unconsciously obsessed Beverly Ashby as
she sat upon one of the immaculate garden seats, placed at the side of an
immaculate gravel walk, and looked through a vista of immaculately
trimmed trees at the dozens of girls _boiling_ out of the door of the
wing in which most of the undergraduate's rooms were situated, for all
members of the under classes were housed in the south wing, the seniors
rooming in the more luxurious quarters of the main building. Not that the
seniors were the happier for their exaltation. They had enjoyed some
pretty merry hours in that old south wing, but with the advent of the
senior year were forced to live up t