It wasn't a formal 'call.' Calls at Newnham are usually made after ten p.m., when work is supposed to be over and one is yearning for bed. The second-year girl was a little bit of a thing--smaller than Lucy. A girl who looked as if she had shrunk--as if she had once been round, and plump, and bright-eyed, and soft-cheeked, and red-lipped as a girl ought to be at twenty. She was none of these things now. She was lean and angular; her eyes were dull, her lips were pale, and her cheeks had lost all their youthful roundness and rosiness, if they had ever had any. The roundness had gone into her figure, her back was quite round, her shoulders were bent and stooping, and her chest was narrow and flat like a board. She had been at Newnham two years, and she was twenty now, and wore glasses, but, alas! not 'sweet and twenty.' She looked exactly like a girl who had used up all her brains. 'I think you have made a mistake,' she said, as she knelt upon the ground unpacking Lucy's books, 'in taking Classics. You should take the Natural Science Tripos. Classics are a thing of the past. They are quite worn out. They will be superseded altogether shortly. Soon--very soon--Latin and Greek will not be compulsory in the examinations; we shall have more useful subjects. Life is so short--so very short' (she was just twenty)--'that we have no time for learning things that will not help us in the rush. Life is getting more of a rush every day, and Science is the only thing that can help us forward. There is no knowing where Science will lead us!' She clasped her hands, and gasped at the bare thought of it. 'No,' said Lucy, in a low-spirited way. She hadn't the least interest where Science was going to lead the girl on the floor--it wasn't likely to lead her very far--but she did object to see her pet Classics turned out of the box in that scornful way. 'You will learn all this trash,' the girl continued, opening the pages of Lucy's Euripides and letting the leaves drop through her fingers as if they were not of very much account, 'and you will pore over these rubbishy stories of a quite barbarous age--stories and fables and metamorphoses that, if they were written at the present time, would lay the writer open to a prosecution for perverting the public morals. You will soak your mind with all this nonsense and impurity, and you will think that you have attained culture. Oh, to think how girls waste their lives!' 'I'm sure Classics are ever so much nicer than Natural Science,' Lucy said with some spirit. 'Look at the dreadful subjects you have to study! and to sit side by side with men in lecture-rooms, and listen to lectures on things most women would blush to speak of! Oh, I wouldn't be a Natural Science student for the world!'