"About the Atkinsons? They're very well, thank you.--Oh, don't break my head with the tongs and I will be good! I have a lovely tale to tell you, really, Eleanor. I met a man----" "Impossible!" interjected Eleanor. "Who's digressing now?" demanded Marjorie. A meek small voice from the gathering darkness said "Little Ellie," and then Marjorie went on; "a man whom you know quite well in the general if not in the particular--a handsome, well-groomed, middle-aged man with iron grey hair, serenest confidence in his own judgment and estimate of things, and--here you may perceive the rub, Lee--unconquerable prejudice against the essentially modern woman--in the abstract." "Ah!" breathed Eleanor, scenting the battle from afar. "In the concrete, I confess, she shows him to be 'not impregnable as a bulwark of archaism,' as Dr. Phillips would say." Marjorie was smiling at the fire, which was only half lighting the corner of the dim study. "Eleanor, from the moment that I first heard that man speak and open fire on the kind of thing the modern girl is going to become, I marked him for my prey. Oh! it was lovely," laughed she suddenly, rocking back and forth in an ecstasy of delighted amusement, "it was lovely to see the mighty fall." "Do tell me how it happened! What did you use on the poor man?" asked the eager Eleanor. "It wasn't force, hardly even force of argument. He did not know I was a Bryn Mawrtyr at first, and so he was led into jesting with me just as he would have with any mere society girl who was ready for badinage. When he fathomed my real character his face was an entertaining spectacle--a mixture of regret, astonishment, and--well,--annoyance, such as one is not always privileged to see. I saw he was preparing for driving me out of college by hot argument, so I got out my strategic tools and turned the conversation. "You know we have threshed this all out before so many times, and raged to each other about the quarter of the population who take us, without looking, for mannish boarding-school girls, as empty-headed as the women of ten centuries ago, but more silly because we pretend to be what we are not; and about the other quarter, who look upon us as grinds and blue-stockings, star-gazers impossible and undesirable to touch with a pole of any length! This man had a smattering of both those ideas, and was--is--bringing up his daughter on principles impossible to classify. He told me all about his plans for her before I quite got the conversation turned from the explosive topic, and I feel sure the poor child will find herself an anachronism in ten years.