Then Lilian had to think a little about the other girls in the room. They had always seemed to her commonplace, doing but indifferent work. At least they had won no distinction. She knew that the five were close friends, that they couldn't have the fullest enjoyment with her in the room, yet they were unaffectedly genial and hospitable to her. While she, with a perversity which shocked her, did not care if they did enjoy themselves a little less on her account. She wanted what they were giving her. It is a truism that some actions most important to ourselves or others often seem but pure whim. Hester could have given no reason--in fact, it was not her habit to await reasons--for asking Lilian Coles to take a walk with her that morning. And Lilian, to whom even tying her shoe was often occasion for a mental inquisition, did not care to explain to herself why she accepted the invitation with eagerness. She had intended to spend the morning in making a tabulation and synopsis of some second year English reading. But the pain of that unforgettable Sunday evening had wrought in Lilian a distrust of her own valuations, and she went with Hester willingly. The morning freshness was still in the air. Hester took Lilian through the woods where the starting leaves wreathed the grey tree-trunks and slim branches like trails of green smoke; to a wide bed of spring beauties; past the pond fringed with willows; across the fields to a stream that flung itself over the rocks with a sparkling abandon to the joy of spring. Lilian saw all these things; and she saw, too, the contrast between the rich black of new ploughed fields and the vivid green of winter wheat. She heard a bluebird singing above them. They went on to an old ruined mill, shadowed by tall dark pines whose roots were washed by a wide, shallow creek. Across the stream, there were woods. Here the girls sat under the pines and Hester read aloud from _Undine_. Gradually the wash and splash of the creek were transferred from Lilian's outward to her inward hearing and seemed to be singing to her of a spirit that was in the water. Suddenly she had a vision of the meaning of the old pagan ideals. She lay back on the grass and let her eyes look very far into the blue above the pines. It occurred to her that she would take some books home in vacation and read all the poems noted on the margins of her Horace. She understood now, she thought, something of the delight in that year's work which all the others in the class had expressed and which she had, in some way, missed. They stopped to rest again on the stone wall of the old burying ground in the woods, and Hester read from Chaucer following her own liking wholly. Lilian went back to her room with a new sense of the beauty of nature, and of the dignity of free, wholesome joyous human life.