"See yourself! My dear child, you hardly ever want to see yourself, if you are habitually neat and dressed sensibly. I see you've adopted the mannish style. That's a phase of vanity. You'll come back to the beautiful and natural before long." Mildred leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head. "I don't think so, Aunt Beatrice. I've settled the dress question once and for all. I've found a clean, tidy, convenient style of dress and I can't waste time thinking about altering it again." "You don't seem to mind wasting it on doing your hair," returned Aunt Beatrice, smiling, but not grimly, for she enjoyed logical fencing, even to her opponent's fair hits. "If I had beautiful hair like yours, I shouldn't need to," replied Mildred. "But you know how endy and untidy mine always was." Aunt Beatrice, embarrassed by the compliment, looked at her watch. "It seems as if we women can't escape our fate," she said. "Here we are gabbling about dress when we've plenty of important things to talk over. Miss Burt wrote to me that you were overworked, run down, nerves out of order, and all the usual nonsense. I'm thankful to find you looking remarkably well. I should like to know what this humbug about not being able to work means." "It means that--well, I simply can't," returned Mildred, earnestly this time. "I can't remember things." "You must be able to remember; unless your brain's diseased, which is most improbable. But I ought to take you to a brain specialist, I suppose." Milly changed color. "Please, oh please, Aunt Beatrice, don't do that!" Lady Thomson, in fact, hardly meant it; for her niece's appearance was unmistakably healthy. However, the threat told. "I shall if you don't improve. I can't understand you. Either you're hysterical or you've got one of those abominable fits of frivolity which come on women like drink on men, and destroy their careers. I thought we had both set our hearts on your getting another First." "But, Aunt Beatrice, they say I can't. They say I'm not clever enough." "Oh, that's what they say, is it?" Lady Thomson smiled in calm but deep contempt. "How do they explain the idiots who have got Firsts? Archibald Toovey, for instance?" Her eyes met her niece's, and both smiled. "Ah, yes! Mr. Toovey," returned Milly, who had met Archibald Toovey at the Fletchers', and converted his patronizing courtship into imbecile raptures. "But that quite explains your losing an interest in your work. Just for once, I should like to take you away before the end of term. We would go straight to Rome next Monday. We shall meet the Breretons there, and go fully over the new excavations and discoveries, besides the old things, which will be new, of course, to you. Then we will go on to Naples, do the galleries and Pompeii, and come back by Florence and Paris before Christmas. By that time you will be ready to settle down to your work steadily again and forget all this nonsense."