Some time during the later part of the evening, she was induced by a young man in evening-dress, with restrained manners but a hardy eye, to descend the stairs, and, passing the hall-porter's little glass box and pushing at the outer swing-doors, to take a walk in the courtyard of the School. The McGrath is only part of a larger institution. In the forecourt are grass plots enclosed by low swinging chains, and, tall and dim, with many broad steps and Corinthian columns, the pediment of the great main portico towers over the court on the eastern side. The girl and her cavalier crossed the grass plots, ascended the steps, and stood within the gloom of the pillars. There, without warning, the young man suddenly stooped and kissed her. She knew that these things happened, and daily; but tears of misery and revulsion and shame started into her eyes. It seemed--she did not know what--a soilure, a coarseness, a bringing down of some lovely and to-be-dreamed-of thing to mere brutal demonstration. The young man was not even one of her companions of the McGrath; he was a medical student, he had told her, and so perhaps naturally insensible to the finer emotions. With a sudden pained "Oh!" she started from him, her hands crushed with horror against her pretty cheeks and mouth. She thought she heard him say, "Why, what's the matter?" but she was not sure; she was sure of nothing in this moment but of her own sense of miserable outrage. She left the young man calling softly behind her, ran quickly down the steps, and reached the dancing-room again. Near the door as she entered two men stood, looking on. Both were men of forty-four or forty-five, and one of them was Jowett, the McGrath Professor of Painting. His companion had just asked him a question; he tugged at a ragged and grey-streaked moustache before replying. "Art students? What becomes of 'em? God knows! You might as well ask what becomes of people who eat their meals in restaurants or little girls who learn to play the piano. They aren't a class. Perhaps one in a thousand or fifteen hundred comes to something, but the rest--well, what this place really is, if you want to know, is a sort of day nursery for the children of the well-to-do middle class." "You mean they marry and then drop it?" the other asked. Jowett tugged again at the unkempt moustache. He spoke patiently and wearily. "Oh yes; and co-educate their offspring; and by and by I suppose we shall have evolved a sort of intermediate sex, half women who make a hash of doing men's work, and half men who put flowers in their hair and talk about music. It always seems to me that these girls ought to be sewing or baking, and the men drinking beer and singing limericks in a canteen.--There's a girl, now----" The small creature dressed as a shepherdess had just run past. The eyes of both men followed her. Jowett continued.