"Yes. I needed more time. Last year my eyes played me a horrid trick and I couldn't work at all. Not even write letters," said Esther grimly. She had fancied it was because of her inability to answer that Sydney had written so seldom. "I had in another way almost as good a year idling about Berlin and Paris. My dear girl, you've no notion of the possibilities of idleness! So I quite thought of staying at the British Museum this winter, even alone, and finishing what I was at." "Assyrian cylinders still?" "Always cylinders." This with a sudden sense of coldness. "The Deluge, and others. But I changed my mind." Never should any one, her former roommate least of all, know what had changed her mind. Actually this was a letter from Sydney Lodge, written in July and saying in effect, "I need you rather badly. How soon are you coming?" She had explained on a post-card that certain bricks and cylinders ought first to be deciphered and in the meantime had cabled for the rooms. She knew--it was one of the discoveries of this extraordinary afternoon--she knew Sydney's ways even to the point of prediction; that if she should say: "But my dear child I wrote you I had engaged the suite for us both," the young lady would answer with a brilliant smile of privilege and a new note--was it the sentimental?--in her voice: "Did you really? Well, I must have been thinking of something else when I read the letter." It was impossible not to laugh, but Esther covered the laughter with a sudden inspiration: "Oh, I say, don't you want to share my study?" "But Sydney?" cried poor Hilda, setting down her flowered teacup. "Sydney's engaged. One Lewis Mason." "Oh, dear!" Hilda answered flatly. "I'm rather sorry. I always believed in her, you know. She might have done things." "Presumably one can do things with a husband. He is supposed to help," replied Esther, throwing forward her general convictions in the grotesque struggle for loyalty. "Ah, she can't. And," added the girl, conclusively, "he won't." "How's that?" Hilda returned violently: "I know the beggar. She stayed a Sunday with Helen when I was there this summer and--he called in the evening. He's in politics, but quite respectable. I don't know why I shouldn't come, if you really want me: I'm taking my Ph. D., too, you know. Think it over. He's what they called," said Hilda with an explicit vagueness, "'_le parfait gentleman_.'" VI Esther looked around, when she went back to the emptiness, almost with a little shiver. This was the end then: _après tant de jours: après tant de fleurs_. She had just for a little while known the unacademic world, people who had seen something different in her face, something rather sweet and rather sensitive.