Lena threw a haggard glance at her. "We won't talk about that," she said in that remote, sunken voice. "I haven't the strength to discuss it. To be perfectly frank, Kate, you mustn't visit me now. You see, I'm studying night and day for the inquisition." "The--" "Yes, inquisition. You see, it isn't enough that my thesis should be finished. I can't get my degree without a last, terrible ordeal. Oh, Kate, you can't imagine what it is like! Girls who have been through it have told me. You are asked into a room where the most important members of the faculty are gathered. They sit about you in a semicircle and for hours they hurl questions at you, not necessarily questions relating to anything you have studied, but inquiries to test your general intelligence. It's a fearful experience." She sank on her unmade cot, drawing a ragged sweater about her shoulders, and looked up at Kate with an almost furtive gaze. She always had been a small, meagre creature, but now she seemed positively shriveled. The pride and plenitude of womanhood were as far from her realization as they could be from a daughter of Eve. Sexless, stranded, broken before an undertaking too great for her, she sat there in the throes of a sudden, nervous chill. Then, after a moment or two, she began to weep and was rent and torn with long, shuddering sobs. "I'm so afraid," she moaned. "Oh, Kate, I'm so terribly, terribly afraid! I know I'll fail." Kate strangled down, "The best thing that could happen to you"; and said instead, "You aren't going about the thing in the best way to succeed." "I've done all I could," moaned her friend. "I've only allowed myself four hours a night for sleep; and have hardly taken out time for meals. I've concentrated as it seems to me no one ever concentrated before." "Oh, Lena, Lena!" Kate cried compassionately. "Can it really be that you have so little sense, after all? Oh, you poor little drowned rat, you." She bent over her, pulled the worn slippers from her feet, and thrust her beneath the covers. "No, no!" protested Lena. "You mustn't, Kate! I've got to get at my books." "Say another word and I'll throw them out of the window," cried Kate, really aroused. "Lie down there." Lena began again to sob, but this time with helpless anger, for Kate looked like a grenadier as she towered there in the small room and it was easy to see that she meant to be obeyed. She explored Lena's cupboard for supplies, and found, after some searching, a can of soup and the inevitable crackers. She heated the soup, toasted the crackers, and forced Lena to eat. Then she extinguished the lamp, with its poisonous odor, and, wrapping herself in her cloak threw open the window and sat in the gloom, softly chatting about this and that. Lena made no coherent answers. She lay in sullen torment, casting tearful glances at her benevolent oppressor.