He wished her a good-afternoon. In a stately silence, he traversed the spacious corridor, stalked down the handsome stairways. For the moment, he could not get his thought back to the concrete; the sting of defeat possessed him, the bitterness that is the portion of the friend of women. And then, in this mood, shaking the dust of the High School from his feet, he encountered, of all inopportune people under the sun, Miss Flora Trevenna. He came upon the unhappy girl standing in a corner of the outer vestibule, beyond the great bronze doors; she stood alone, looking off down the twilight street. Her head turned at the sound of Charles's feet; recognition came hesitatingly into her glance, and she bowed, smiling remotely in the absent or reserved way which seemed to be characteristic of her. It was clearly on a second thought that she spoke suddenly, in her fluty voice:-- "Oh!--could you tell me whether Miss Wing is still in the building?" Pausing, his hat stiffly raised, the young man said that Miss Wing was. "You'll find her in her office--on the third floor at the front, you know." "Thank you." But, as he bowed and passed on, the Badwoman made no move to enter and ascend. She stood as he had found her, waiting, aside: a solitary and withdrawn figure, for the moment to the perceiving eye not untouched with pathos. But Charles, proceeding, could see in this figure only the witting cause of all the trouble. He had spoken kindly enough to Miss Trevenna: now suddenly all his accumulated and complex resentment seemed to gather and pour out. Couldn't the woman leave Mary alone, even on this day? But no--of course she couldn't! She who had claimed her Happiness over her mother's heart would see nothing amiss in seeking to scramble back to good repute by the same general route. It was her Higher Law to throw her blight over all who might assist her: over her friend, Mary Wing, no more than over her own young sisters, from whom (Judge Blenso said) people were already silently dropping away, now that it was known that the "free" Miss Flora came sometimes to the house. _Free!..._ Was not here, indeed, that underside of "Freedom," that true reverse of Taking My Happiness, which the New speakers never mentioned? This girl conceived freedom just as a Developed Ego would conceive it, as an order of things in which she should be "free," while everyone else, going on as usual, sacrificed and denied to uphold her comfort and support her illimitable selfishness. In her goings out and comings in, she would take no thought but for her Self. And there she stood, no leader of a new dawn, but a true enemy of the common good: a female Anti-Social, a lawless Egoette, who maintained that the world was ordered and the sun set in the heavens, that she only might indulge herself where her whim led.... On the corner the young man halted, shook himself slightly, and glanced up and down. A brief anxiousness crossed his face, followed by an air of irresolution.