The Professor’s daughter, who had not been born in Cesarea, but in the city of New York, took turns at viewing her father’s home in one of these threefold aspects. On that winter day of which we have already spoken, she might, if urged to it, have selected the least complimentary of the three terms. The day had been bleak, bright, and interminable. She had tried to take the morning walk to the post-office, which all able-bodied Cesareans penitentially performed six days in the week; and had been blown home in that state just so far from adding another to the list of “deaths from exposure” that one gets no sympathy, and yet so near to this result that one must sit over the register the rest of the morning to thaw out. After dinner she had conscientiously resumed her study of Herbert Spencer’s Law of Rhythm, but had tossed the book away impatiently,--she was metaphysical only when she was bored,--and had joined her mother at the weekly mending-basket. The cold, she averred, had struck in. Her brain was turning to an icicle--like that. She pointed to the snow-man which the boys in the fitting-school had built in front of the pump that supplied their dormitories with ice-water for toilet uses; this was carried the length of the street in dripping pails whose overflow froze upon one’s boots. There had been a rain before this last freeze, and the head of the snow-man (carefully moulded, and quite Greek) had turned into a solid ball of ice. This chilly gentleman rose, imposingly from behind a desk of snow. Manuscripts of sleet lay in his frozen hand. An old silk hat, well glazed with drippings from the elm-tree, was pitched irreverently upon the back of his head. “They say,” replied Mrs. Carruth complainingly, “that the snow-man is meant to take off one of the Professors.” “Do they? I should think he might be. Which one?” answered the Professor’s daughter. Her languid eyes warmed into merriment. “I call that fun.” “I call it irreverent,” sighed the Professor’s wife. “I call it profane.” “Now, Mother!” The young lady laid a green, theological stocking across her shapely knee, and pulled the toe through the foot argumentatively. “Don’t you think that is a little over-emphasized?” Mrs. Carruth lifted her mild, feminine countenance from that shirt of the Professor’s which she always found absorbing,--the one whose button-holes gave out, while the buttons stayed on. She regarded her daughter with a puzzled disapproval. She was not used to such phrases as “over-emphasis” when she was young. “Helen, Helen,” she complained, “you do not realize what a trial you are to me. If there is anything sacrilegious or heretical to be found anywhere, you are sure to--to--you are certain to find it interesting,” ended the mother vaguely.