"Oh, Jim, you _are_ annoying! Dad, is there anything more irritating than a freshly hatched college graduate? Or more maddeningly complacent? Look at your self-satisfied son! There he sits, after having spent the entire day in enjoyment of his profession, and argues that I ought to be satisfied with an idle day in which I have accomplished absolutely nothing! I’m afraid your son is a pig." Jim laughed lazily: "The restless sex is setting the world by the ears," he said tormentingly. "All this femininist business, this intrusion into man’s affairs, this fidgety dissatisfaction with a perfectly good civilization, is spoiling you all." "Is that the sort of thing you’re putting into your wonderful novel?" she inquired. "No, it’s too unimportant——" "Dad! Let’s ignore him! Now, dear, if you feel as you do about a career for me at present, I really think I had better go to college. I do love pleasure, but somehow the sort of pleasure I’m supposed to enjoy doesn’t last; and it’s the people, I think, that tire one very quickly. It _does_ make a difference in dancing, doesn’t it?—not to hear an idea uttered during an entire evening—not to find anybody thinking for themselves——" "Oh, Steve!" laughed Jim, "you’re not expected to think at your age! All that society expects of you is that you chatter incessantly during dinner and the opera and do your thinking in a ballroom with your feet!" She was laughing, but an unwonted colour brightened her cheeks as she turned on him from the padded arm of John Cleland’s chair, where she had been sitting: "If I really thought you meant that, Jim, I’d spend the remainder of my life in proving to you that I have a mind." "Never mind him, Steve," said John Cleland. "If you wish to go to college, you shall." "How about looking after us?" inquired Jim, alarmed. "Dad, if my being here is going to make _you_ more comfortable," she said, "I’ll remain. Really, I am serious. Don’t you want me to go?" "Are you really so restless, Steve?" "Mentally," she replied, with a defiant glance at Jim. "This will be a gay place to live in if _you_ go off for four years!" remarked that young man. "You don’t mean that _you’d_ miss me!" she exclaimed mockingly. "Of course I’d miss you." "Miss the mental stimulus I give you?"—sweetly persuasive. "Not at all. I’d miss the mental relaxation you afford my tired brain——" "You beast! Dad, I’m _going_! And some day your son will find out that it’s an _idle_ mind that makes a girl restless; not a restless mind that makes her idle!" "I was just teasing, Steve!" "I know it." She smiled at the young fellow, but her grey eyes were brilliant. Then she turned and nestled against John Cleland: "I have made up my mind, darling, and I have decided to go to Vassar." Home, to John Cleland and his son, had come to mean Stephanie as much as everything else under the common roof-tree.