Her name was in newspaper headlines before she was out of her teens; and many and many a time since. She wished to be a doctor, and the Medical School would not take her in. And shortly this slim girl, with her sweetly-cut chin and ethereal eyes, had raised the whole State on the issue of principle thus thrown down: Did a woman have the right to study, or not? She stormed the courts for an injunction, she set the legislature by the ears for a special act. The story of her personal interview with the Governor, at the height of the disturbance, is often told to this day; but never by any friend of the Governor's. And then, when she was within a step of winning the long fight, her father died suddenly and she faced the immediate necessity of earning a living. Farther along, the author's eye found the particular passage that had been in his mind from the start, the part about the National League for Education Reform. Having recounted how the bequest of Rufus B. Zecker's millions had "assured the permanence and ultimate triumph of the League's programme," the generous "puff" went on:-- What the National League contemplates is nothing less than the remaking of our entire educational system, on the basis of a new perception of truth, namely: that education is, not learning at all, but purely the process of fitting the individual for effectual relations with his (or her) environment. With the League's propaganda to that end, under the brilliant leadership of Horace Gurney Ames, Miss Wing has been closely associated for the past seven years. Her work here has been, indeed, the dominant part of her career.... The dominant part of her life, he would better have written. And that was precisely the trouble. The sheets dropped from the young man's hands, and he gazed unwinking at the green translucence of his lamp. His mind skipped back to a day in early September, when Mary and her mother had come home from their two weeks in the metropolis--Mrs. Wing still looking rather crushed from the overwhelming rush of New York, Mary radiant with the hope that before long she might go back to New York, to stay there the rest of her life. For on that journey she had abruptly learned that the League directors had their eyes upon her with reference to their General Secretaryship, which was to become vacant next March. Undoubtedly, the brilliant Dr. Ames had sounded her pretty directly on this point. Undoubtedly, too, it would be another long step up for Mary, making her, in the educational world at least, a figure of national consequence. Once again, of course, Charles Garrott had been delighted. And yet it was clear to him now that his Modernity had first felt conservative reactions on that very day.