"I know what men are. And you and I are no better." "But she may love." "Ah! there it is; she may. And that is what I meant when I said that it was my duty to keep her from making herself positively unattractive." "Greek need not do that," said Dr. Gaston, shortly. "It need not, but it does. Let me ask you one question: did you ever fall in love, or come anywhere near falling in love, with a girl who understood Greek?" "That is because only the homely ones take to it," replied the chaplain, fencing a little. But Anne was not taught Greek. After Cicero she took up algebra, then astronomy. After that she read aloud from a ponderous Shakspeare, and the old man corrected her accentuation, and questioned her on the meanings. A number of the grand old plays the girl knew almost entirely by heart; they had been her reading-books from childhood. The down-pouring light of the vivid morning sunshine and the up-coming white glare of the ice below met and shone full upon her face and figure as she bent over the old volume laid open on the table before her, one hand supporting her brow, the other resting on the yellow page. Her hands were firm, white, and beautifully shaped--strong hands, generous hands, faithful hands; not the little, idle, characterless, faithless palms so common in America, small, dainty, delicate, and shapeless, coming from a composite origin. Her thick hair, brown as a mellowed chestnut, with a gleam of dark red where the light touched it, like the red of November oak leaves, was, as usual, in her way, the heavy braids breaking from the coil at the back of her head, one by one, as she read on through _Hamlet_. At last impatiently she drew out the comb, and they all fell down over her shoulders, and left her in momentary peace. The lesson was nearly over when Rast Pronando appeared; he was to enter college--a Western college on one of the lower lakes--early in the spring, and that prospect made the chaplain's lessons seem dull to him. "Very likely they will not teach at all as he does; I shall do much better if I go over the text-books by myself," he said, confidentially, to Anne. "I do not want to appear old-fashioned, you know." "Is it unpleasant to be old-fashioned? I should think the old fashions would be sure to be the good ones," said the girl. "But I do not want you to go so far beyond me, Rast; we have always been even until now. Will you think _me_ old-fashioned too when you come back?" "Oh no; you will always be Anne. I can predict you exactly at twenty, and even thirty: there is no doubt about _you_." "But shall I be old-fashioned?" "Well, perhaps; but we don't mind it in women. All the goddesses were old-fashioned, especially Diana. _You_ are Diana." "Diana, a huntress. She loved Endymion, who was always asleep," said Anne, quoting from her school-girl mythology.