She wore a pretty organdie gown, for she was as scrupulous in maintaining the tradition of dressing for dinner as in every other detail of her well-ordered existence. The study seemed rather bare, but there were a few rich rugs on the floor and on the flat couch, and large photographs of Greek sculptures on the walls. A tea table by the hearth was loaded with cups and saucers, cakes and sandwiches; and thin steam was beginning to come from a kettle hanging on an iron tripod. "Won't you stay and have some tea?" Edith Dareham asked, as Lilian turned away with the book. "Some of the girls are coming in to talk over our play for the freshmen next fall." "No, thank you, I don't drink tea, and--I don't believe in plays." With this bomb-like deliverance Lilian disappeared. Edith looked bewildered and rather pained. "The people evidently don't want your 'panis et circenses,'" mocked a voice close at hand, and a pretty head thrust itself beyond one of the bedroom portières. "Oh, Blanche dear, are you there? Won't you come out and help me make the tea?" Lilian hurried out of Merion, meeting groups of freshmen and sophomores. A few of them nodded indifferently to her, but the majority seemed not to heed her. As she crunched over the gravel toward Radnor, where more lights were appearing, she had a sharp feeling of discomfort, unrelieved by any sense of heroism. She was well constituted for martyrdom, but just now the performance of duty seemed a very ungracious task. Lilian was a victim of a world-old opposition, taking form in her in a conflict between a habit of thought imposed by training, and certain essential, though still latent, qualities of her nature. She was in a stage of intense admiration for Edith Dareham, unconsciously influenced by much in Edith that appealed to the undeveloped side of her character, though attributing her admiration wholly to the obvious traits revealed in Edith's fine conscientious work. Yet she felt an antagonism toward the fact that Edith gave encouragement, or at least tolerance, to certain features of college life that seemed very reprehensible to Lilian, according to the peculiar tenets of the religion in which she had been trained.