Ellen begged Marjorie to come upstairs with her and amuse her while she dressed; but Marjorie refused to talk, insisting on hearing all about Ellen's visits of the afternoon. She passed her comment on the characters in the narrative, comment genial, friendly, sympathetic, till Ellen came to Bertha Christie's part. On a sudden Marjorie's indignation blazed out. "Ellen, is it that you have failed to understand Bryn Mawr, or that you have willfully misunderstood? You have accepted the judgment of the outside world and have treated those freaks as representatives of Bryn Mawr. Have you forgotten how they were ignored, jeered at, anything but accepted by everybody but a few freshmen? They defied college spirit, mocked at common sense and still do. And the world sets them down as types! Bertha Christie with her menagerie of intimates intolerant of the commonplace! I could pity them if people like you didn't make them of so much importance." "Intolerant, maybe I am," in answer to a feeble protest from Ellen, "I'm rather proud of being intolerant of a set of sophisticated hermit-crabs, a few puling nuns who've gone to school to the melancholy Jacques. No wonder I hear queer things about Bryn Mawr when you go to them for ideas and pass by Edith and Evelyn and a host of others. It's enough to make one turn cynic. Tolerance! Tolerance of evil, breadth of mind it calls itself, is the most discouraging thing I meet with. And yet how absurd it all is. You, so well-balanced, so lofty in your aims, going to those geese to learn wisdom----" "They're not geese," protested Ellen at length, "they're unusually clever girls." "'A goose,' please remember," quoted Marjorie, regaining her temper with the reassertion of her sense of humour, "is none the less a goose, though sun and stars be minced to yield him stuffing! You'd better be off or you'll have to apologize to the Bishop for keeping him from his dinner." II Greatly to her astonishment Ellen found that she had fallen to the Bishop's care at dinner. She was not, however, easily appalled by distinguished people, and she chatted lightly to the stranger. His beautiful face, benignant and merry, set her completely at her ease,--the secure ease of the American woman, it seemed to him as he made mental notes of the effect produced by the exquisite dress, the vivacity and readiness, the almost boyish frankness, the worldly wisdom. And all the time he wondered why there recurred to him the thought of a serious nature, an intellectual nature, free from worldliness and triviality.