She watched a blue flame curl over the edge of an unburned coal and die down again. She well understood this desire and had even felt it herself. A few years before in Oxford, where she had stayed a month during her one trip abroad, she had longed for just such a life. She remembered how, on one of those summer afternoons in the long vacation, she had sat on the coping of a deserted quad and looked across the tall sunlit grass to a flowering white rosebush which clung and climbed over the grey stone tracery, and then had turned back to the worn inscriptions on the wall behind her in memory of those who had worked there many years before. For her the oak stairways up from the cloisters led to anchorites' cells where men worked through endless, still, summer days. She was very young then and only in Oxford during the long vacation. On her return she first saw Bryn Mawr and then she said, with entire conviction, that to be there would be very well. The long low buildings half covered with creepers suggested, as she saw these also deserted and on a summer day, her dream of life at Oxford. Disillusionment, since then, of course there had been. She had objected, more than a healthy girl with steady nerves should object, to the sounds of girlish talk and laughter, to the many mechanical details of college life, and only found the dream again when night had long come down in quietness and she saw the outline of halls and campus trees soft and still in the moonlight, all signs of newness gone and only a few lights here and there to suggest the silent student. Of late she had shrunk less from the rush and gayety of noise, her objection lying now more against a certain crudity in enjoyment which seems unavoidable at some stages--in either sex.