Of course she forgot all the facts so laboriously acquired within a short six months after she read her little essay on "Plato's Conception of the Beautiful" at the graduation exercises. (That effort, by the way, lay heavy on the neighborhood for weeks, but was pronounced a triumph. It was certainly a masterpiece of fearless quotation.)... Learning passed over Milly like a summer sea over a shining sandbar and left no trace behind, none whatever. It was the same way with music. Milly could sing church hymns in a pleasant voice and thumped a little heavily on the piano after learning her piece.... She used to say, years afterward,--"I have no gifts; I was never clever with books. I like life, people!" and she would stretch out her hands gropingly to the broad horizon. This year at the Ashland Institute helped to enlarge that horizon somewhat. And one other thing she got with the absurd meal of schooling,--a vague but influential something,--an "ideal of American womanhood." That was the way Mrs. Mason phrased it in her eloquent talks to the girls. The other teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,--the quality that the Institute prided itself on above all else. It was of a poetic shade, composed in equal parts of art, literature, and religion. Milly absorbed it at church, where the minister spoke almost tearfully about "the mission of young womanhood to elevate the ideals of the race," or more colloquially in Bible class as the duty of "being a good influence" in life, especially men's lives. She got it also in what books she read,--especially in Tennyson and in every novel, as well as in the few plays she saw. There it was embodied as Woman of Romance,--sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to reform, ennoble, uplift--men, of course,--in a word to make over the world. The idea of it had come down from the darkness of the middle ages,--that smelly and benighted period,--had inflamed all romance, and was now spreading its last miasmatic touch over the close of the nineteenth century. All this, to be sure, Milly never knew. She merely began to feel self-conscious, as a member of her sex,--a being apart from men and somehow superior to them, without the same appetites and low ideals, and with her own peculiar and sacred function to perform for humanity. Ordinarily this heavy ideal of her sex did not burden Milly. She obeyed her thoroughly healthy instincts, chief of which was "to have a good time," to be loved and petted by people. But occasionally in her more emotional moods, when she was singing hymns or watching the sun depart in golden mists, she experienced exalted sensations of the beauty and the glory of life--of _her_ life--and what it all might mean to Some One (a man).