"Now and then--not always," she murmured. "It's like loving a thing and hating it, too. There are times when Euripides, and Housman's lyrics, and Thomas Hardy don't fit in with cooking and cotton stockings--when poetic and artistic visions of what-might-be tantalize like glimpses of a cloud-hidden moon. Why should one sharpen one's perception of beauties that are beyond one's reach? I should have been trained in domestic science or nursing, or selling fripperies to rich women, instead of being put through the cultural hotbed of a university. They meant well. But unless a girl has a ready-made: social background, or a decided talent, the so-called higher education is only a handicap." "Oh, come now. Hardly," Rod protested. "No? You don't know anything about people outside of your own comfortable, spoon-fed class, Rod. That's the trouble. I do. I know my own kind of people first-hand. Three years in the U.B.C. has taught me something about your kind. I've been an outsider--looking in. Money, clothes and manners. Manners are an asset; money is a necessity. If you've got both you can go anywhere, do anything. If you haven't, there's the deadline, and you can't cross. Pretty much everything that a university training fits one for, especially a girl, is across that deadline. It's rather depressing--sometimes." Rod was dumb for the moment,--because he was not stupid, and he knew what she said was true. He had seen the working out of those unpleasant truths during his own university career. He knew youngsters at McGill sweating and scraping through--boys with steel-bright minds, struggling against the fearful handicap of poverty. He had an inkling now of what old Mark Sherburne meant when he ironically retorted to some one across a dinner table that he didn't need brains--he could buy 'em by the gross. Rod hated the idea of Mary Thorn being embraced in such a category. He reviewed in one panoramic flash her situation and his own. He compared her with girls he knew. Isabel Wall, for instance. Less mind--oh, much less. Isabel was a doll-like creature still. An impractical, useless young woman, even if highly ornamental. Clothes, dances, parties, sports, and men about comprised Isabel's desire of and knowledge of life. Yet she had everything money could buy. She had the entrée everywhere. Mary had neither money nor more than a glancing acquaintance with those who had. He recalled with a touch of shame that although they had played together from childhood, despite the fact that they had lived within sight of each other for ten years, Mary had never set foot within Hawk's Nest. And he had a swift, disconcerting vision of how difficult it would be for her to get a foothold in the Norquay circle,--or its equivalent.