When the heterogeneous mass of humanity which makes up a big college is got together and in close relation for ten months at a time, there is bound to be action and reaction. When New York society girls and missionaries’ daughters from India, and Boston Latin-school girls and native Japanese, and Westerners and Georgians and Australians and “Teacher Specials,” and very young preparatory-school girls, are all mixed up together, it inevitably happens that there is some friction and many unexpected and interesting results. One of these is that it not infrequently happens that a young woman leaves college an entirely different person from the girl who took her entrance examinations, and sometimes the change is for the better and sometimes for the worse, or it may be unimportant and relate only to the way she has got to wearing her hair, or the amount of extra money she considers necessary. At any rate, a noticeable change of some sort always operates in a girl during her four or five years’ stay at a college, and when she goes home “for good” her friends will criticise her from their different points of view, and will be sure to tell her whether she is improved or not. When Miss Eva Hungerford returned for her senior year at college, having been greatly disappointed in one of her friends, she determined to make no new ones, but to work very hard and keep a great deal to herself. She succeeded so well in her efforts that, after she had been there three months, she became aware that she knew absolutely none of the new students. They were an indistinguishable mass to her, with the exception of two or three noticeably pretty, and about the same number of extremely homely young women whose physique rendered them conspicuous. To her uninterested gaze the large majority seemed to be distressingly like all previous freshman classes, and endowed with the same modest amount of good looks and intellectual foreheads. But in college life it is a strange fact that while upper classes find it rather difficult to become acquainted among the lower ones, owing, of course, to the unwritten code which prevents a senior from appearing interested in any but those of her own class, yet the incoming students are allowed and take every opportunity of ingratiating themselves with upper-class girls, without injury to their dignity. But Miss Hungerford, who had surrounded herself with quite an impenetrable air of seniority, and who was so extremely handsome and distant-looking, by her appearance and bearing had exercised a rather chilling influence on young aspirants for an introduction, and was secretly very much looked up to and feared.