"Their men always seem a little--ladylike." Charles was talking at Catherine, through Henrietta. "Perhaps none of them wished to make a tour of the west this time of year. It isn't my idea of a good time, exactly." "Don't let him josh you, Catherine!" Henrietta flashed out, warmly. "Aren't they ladylike? Most of their men not creative enough to make a real place for themselves. They crawl into that snug and safe berth----" "I've thought the few I've met were much like academic men." Henrietta grinned at her thrust. "Haven't you, Cathy?" "You see," said Catherine, "Charles disapproves of the whole system, the establishment of a bureau." "Some one accumulates too much money and looks around for a conspicuous benevolence. Ah, a bureau of investigation! Then some little men hurry in, get jobs poking their noses into various things, and draw down neat salaries out of the surplus money. Mrs. Lynch is pleased. Little men are pleased." "Why isn't it a good way to get rid of the money?" Henrietta spoke cautiously, as if she suspected traps under the smooth surface. "Oh, it gets rid of it. But it's artificial. Not a response to some demand in society." "Charles, are you stuck-up, or jealous?" Henrietta glanced shrewdly from him to Catherine. "This is not personal, I assure you." Charles slipped into his grandiloquent, tolerant manner, as much as to add, "even if you, being a woman, can not understand its being impersonal." "Um. Aren't universities endowed with some of this surplus cash, too?" "Only to some extent. There you have an actual need." "In other words, the shoe is on the other foot, now." Henrietta laughed. "It's true enough there's an actual need." Catherine sat forward, eagerly. A sharp inner voice said: ridiculous to argue; he is attacking me, not the Bureau. Trying to belittle the thing I'm in, so that I'll have to shrink with it. But the voice was drowned in an uproar of her refusal to shrink, her insistence upon some justification. "Universities and colleges are a need, of course. But the very thing I'm working on, and Dr. Roberts, too, is the great gap between the human need and the pitiful offering on the part of the colleges. Why won't it do some good, if we can show up that gap?" "What will happen? You'll write a brochure, which won't be read by any of the people concerned. Change comes from within, slowly, like growth of a child." "In other words, Catherine, your job is foolishness, and you'd better be home making pies. You are too transparent, Charles. Don't you listen to him!" Henrietta jumped to her feet. "I must run along. Pies are fleeting, too. If you're interested in a thing, that's all that counts." Catherine rose, slowly. She wished Henrietta wouldn't go. Her blunt indifference to undercurrents had a steadying effect.