One Saturday morning in the spring Lilian started downstairs. It was late, she was tired and vexed at her slothfulness. She had gone to bed the night before so tired that one night's rest was wholly insufficient. As she reached the foot of the stairs a girl came out of the bathroom with a kettle of water. She nodded to Lilian, went on, then turned. "Miss Coles, you are sure not to find anything hot for breakfast. Won't you come into my room? We are going to have breakfast there." Lilian hesitated. Something, perhaps an animating suggestiveness in the spring air that was sweeping through the windows, perhaps the mere yielding of tired flesh to kindly human influences, moved her to accept. Hester Grey's room looked over the fields and low hills. Two study tables had been put together and were covered with white embroidered cloths. A bowl of violets was on one table and a dish of strawberries on the other, while the more substantial provisions for the breakfast were on a side-table. This separation was due to an arbitrary distinction of Hester's, food taking precedence in her ideas according to its appeal to the eye. There were two girls in the window-seat and another in a steamer-chair. This one sprang up and insisted on giving Lilian the chair, tucking the pillow behind her with an unceremonious friendliness very grateful to Lilian. Then she began cutting bread, urging that some one else pass Lilian the olives. "Do you think you will want more sugar in your cocoa?" Hester asked Lilian. "Of course she will," said one of the girls in the window, without looking up from her book. "You never make it sweet enough." Lilian thought this was very rude, but Hester didn't seem to notice it. She carried a cup to Lilian, who looked at her curiously. Lilian had always had a thought of scorn in her opinion of this girl, whose erratic work, spasmodic brilliancy and general idleness were known to the whole college. Lilian knew that she would sit for hours on the stone wall of the Harriton burying ground doing nothing, even if examinations began the next day. No one ever seemed to be able to foretell whether she would get High Credit or a condition in any examination. Lilian had seen her absorbed in _Treasure Island_ the day before the English essays were due. Hester's essay on Keats was written in one night, so rumour said. It received the only High Credit. Lilian had read it, with something like astonishment at the feeling aroused in herself by the revelation of another girl's mind. She had come to have a feeling like reverence for this girl, realizing at last that some gifts of the spirit are not to be measured by so many hours of study, so many hours of exercise. And now this same girl was apparently concentrating her whole mind on the amount of sugar to be added to each cup.