“It seems to me,” she said slowly, “that you and the natural sciences can get along admirably without each other. Why, child, you have lived!” she cried with sudden vehemence. She went over and shook her gently by the shoulder. “You are twenty-four and I am fifty! In four years you have crowded into your life more than I shall ever learn!” The girl looked at her wonderingly, puzzled. “Have you forgotten so soon what we heard this afternoon--that ‘life is everything, that all that you can learn in a hundred times the four years of your college course is but the least part of what life and nature can teach you?’” She pushed the girl toward the door. “When you are tired of living come back to me.” She stood and watched the girl, with the mystified, half-hurt look on her face, disappear down the corridor. When she had quite gone she went in and stood at the window for a long, long while looking out at the deepening shadows, and then she seated herself grimly at her desk and wrote to her publishers that they would have to delay the appearance of her book, as she felt she needed a vacation and would have to give up work on it for awhile. A SHORT CAREER She was so noticeably pretty and stylish, with that thorough-bred air of the young girl to whom life has always been something more or less of a social event, that she attracted a great deal of attention, though, of course, she very properly appeared to be oblivious of that fact. Even the baggage-master, when she caught his eye, hastened toward her and bestirred himself generally in a way that is not characteristic of baggage-men on the Boston and Albany, or any other road. She noticed vaguely that he seemed rather surprised when she gave him her four trunk-checks and he assured her with elaborate politeness that the train would stop at a certain small station without fail, to let off several hundred young women who wished to go directly to “the College.” When Miss Eva Hungerford, on the completion of an enthusiastic college career, wrote to her young Philadelphia cousin, Margaret Wright, that she ought to take a college course, it was quite in despair of really inducing that young lady to do so, and only in the vain hope of saving her from an early and ill-considered marriage with an extremely nice Harvard youth, who declared that he would cheerfully forego his senior year if her parents would give their consent.