But Kate had at last found a way to bring the interview to an end.

“I said I was new,” she concluded, flinging a barbed shaft.  “I thought it was share and share alike here—­that no difference was made between men and women.  You see—­I didn’t understand.”

The C bench came to be a sort of symbol to her from then on.  It was the seat of privilege if not of honor, and the women were not to sit on it.

Not that she fretted about it.  There was no time for that.  She settled in Foster Hall, which was devoted to the women, and where she expected to make many friends.  But she had been rather unfortunate in that.  The women were not as cooeperative as she had expected them to be.  At table, for example, the conversation dragged heavily.  She had expected to find it liberal, spirited, even gay, but the girls had a way of holding back.  Kate had to confess that she didn’t think men would be like that.  They would—­most of them—­have understood that the chief reason a man went to a university was to learn to get along with his fellow men and to hold his own in the world.  The girls labored under the idea that one went to a university for the exclusive purpose of making high marks in their studies.  They put in stolid hours of study and were quietly glad at their high averages; but it actually seemed as if many of them used college as a sort of shelter rather than an opportunity for the exercise of personality.

However, there were plenty of the other sort—­gallant, excursive spirits, and as soon as Kate became acquainted she had pleasure in picking and choosing.  She nibbled at this person and that like a cautious and discriminating mouse, venturing on a full taste if she liked the flavor, scampering if she didn’t.

Of course she had her furores.  Now it was for settlement work, now for dramatics, now for dancing.  Subconsciously she was always looking about for some one who “needed” her, but there were few such.  Patronage would have been resented hotly, and Kate learned by a series of discountenancing experiences that friendship would not come—­any more than love—­at beck and call.

Love!

That gave her pause.  Love had not come her way.  Of course there was Ray McCrea.  But he was only a possibility.  She wondered if she would turn to him in trouble.  Of that she was not yet certain.  It was pleasant to be with him, but even for a gala occasion she was not sure but that she was happier with Honora Daley than with him.  Honora Daley was Honora Fulham now—­married to a “dark man” as the gypsy fortune-tellers would have called him.  He seemed very dark to Kate, menacing even; but Honora found it worth her while to shed her brightness on his tenebrosity, so that was, of course, Honora’s affair.