There, with a local labor leader and the editor of a Bohemian paper who were helping her organize her meeting for the following night, he found Vida Martin, a trim, strong woman of thirty, not yet at the height of her vivid powers. She handed Clark the first draft of a handbill. To his dismay it announced as the place of her meeting—Assembly Hall. “That’s gone to the printers,” she said casually. “I—I’m sorry,” said Clark. “I have misled you. My confidence in the University’s impartiality was misplaced. You must let me stand the difference in your printing bill. You have been refused the use of Assembly Hall.” Vida Martin smiled at him the smile of a wicked minx. “You didn’t mislead me a bit, dear Kenton Clark,” she said. “I have already engaged the Opera House for to-morrow night.” Dear Kenton Clark stared at the handbill. “Engaged the Opera House and printed Assembly Hall on your dodgers!” She nodded. “My æsthetic sense,” she explained. “I thought how nice it would look to have a cunning red line through ‘Assembly Hall’ and ‘Opera House’ stamped on in red with a rubber stamp. Don’t you love to use a rubber stamp?” As the guile of the agitator dawned on him he started to disapprove. “It’s just a shame,” she said, catching his expression, “for me to come contaminating the innocent professorial mind with the spectacle of fighting tactics.” He laughed. “The professorial mind isn’t wholly infantile. The University deserves what you’re going to give it. I shall announce your meeting in my classes.” “Have you something else to do when you lose your job? Do you know that one of your Regents, H. P. Denton, owes his appointment to Steve Treadley of the Manistee Button Factory?” “Rather than be controlled by considerations like that I _will_ lose my job!” Clark replied hotly. That was the mood in which he marched to his eleven o’clock lecture. After it, at noon, he came down the central walk amid the sweaters and corduroys and fresh-filled pipes of the gossiping throng which carries books in straps, books in green bags, and books in spilly armfuls. His friend Guthrie of the English Department overtook him. “What’s this about Vida Martin?” Guthrie inquired. “They say you’re lambasting the University because it won’t let her set up her soap-box in Assembly Hall.” “Subtract the cheap fling and you have the idea,” Clark answered. Guthrie shook his fine, big head. “Well,” he reflected, “you’re unmarried. But it isn’t a chip you have on your shoulder. It’s a log.” “John,” said Clark, “your education is hideously defective. You’ve got to meet Vida Martin and learn what a soapbox is. Come to lunch with her now.” Guthrie said he couldn’t because his wife was expecting him. “Telephone her and come,” insisted Clark. With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.