_WITHIN FOUR YEARS_ In the dry, warm darkness of a May evening two girls lay on the grass near the tennis-courts north of Taylor. It was in the days when the present athletic field was only a roadway and a damp hollow where dog-tooth violets grew. Radnor and Merion loomed across the campus, their few lighted windows betraying how little the spirit of study possessed the hour. All the light and brilliancy of the college seemed concentrated in Denbigh dining-room, whence, through wide open windows, came the laughter and songs of the supper the juniors were giving the seniors. There were sound and movement, too, in the obscurity under the windows. Now and then a hand and arm, or a head, rose from the shuffling, murmuring mass, and for a brief moment came into relief against the bright oblong of the window, the hand in its withdrawal seeming always to carry with it something very like a cup or a plate, which was received below with shrieks or even some boldly distinct remarks. One of the girls on the grass sat up suddenly, a stiffness of disapproval apparent in her attitude, even in the dim light from the library windows. "That is all a disappointment to me." She supplemented her remark by a quick movement of one arm in the direction of Denbigh. "Why?" The other girl turned, resting her head on her curved arm. "To think that college girls can be so frivolous, so silly. It isn't at all what I expected before I came." "You didn't suppose we talked in Greek all the time, did you, Lilian?" "Of course I didn't think absurdities, Clara. But I did think college girls would be dignified and serious, and wouldn't act like a rabble of street boys. And _that_, I think is immoral." She rose with her back to Clara, as from Denbigh came, full and strong, reënforced by the voices of the freshmen under the windows, the chorus: "Then here's to Bryn Mawr College, Drink her down, drink her down----" Clara West clasped her arms around her knees and rested her cheek on them, murmuring in a sort of ecstasy, "I love it all." Clara West was a quiet girl with odd impulses. One of these had been to ask Lilian Coles to sit with her for a while on the campus, as they happened to leave the library together. The oddity in this case was not that Clara was a sophomore and Lilian a freshman--class lines were then very loosely drawn. But Lilian was not the sort of girl every one would choose to sit on the grass with under the stars and listen to college songs. Lilian had accepted only because she was waiting for a reference book she wanted. It was this she now went in quest of, after bidding Clara a rather impatient good-night. As she stopped by the half-open door of one of the first floor studies in Merion, a tall girl with smooth, red-brown hair parted in a straight white line, swung herself around from her desk and smiled. "Oh, Miss Coles! You have come for the 'Augustan Poets'? I have just finished."