It was curious, it seemed to her, in how short a time the real High School dropped out of her life.  Miss Towne and the cooking teacher who had had so much to do with her adolescent development, became more or less dreamlike.  And though Lydia did try to call on Miss Towne at the High School, her days were very full and little by little she slipped away entirely from the old environment.

Except for flying visits home, John Levine spent the year at Washington.  He was returned to Congress practically automatically, at the end of his term.  Kent throve mightily as a real estate man.  He dashed about in a little “one lung” car with all the importance of nineteen in business for the first time.  He continued to call on Lydia at irregular intervals in order to boast, she thought, of his real estate acumen and of his correspondence with Margery and Olga, both of whom were now at boarding-school.

Lydia was taking a general course in college.  In a vague way, she was planning to become a teacher and partly because she had no aptitude for foreign languages, and partly because of the deep impression Miss Towne’s little lecture on slang had made on her, she decided to teach English.  She therefore took not only the required course in Freshman Composition, but an elective in Shakespeare, and was herded with fifty others into the classroom of a young instructor fresh from Harvard.  He was a frail looking young man, smooth shaven and thin, with large, light brown eyes behind gold rimmed eyeglasses.

Lydia was deeply impressed from the very first by the young man’s culture.  He could quote Latin and Greek quite as freely as he could French and German and his ease in quoting the latter seemed as great as in quoting Palgrave’s Lyrics, which Lydia was sure he could quote from cover to cover.

If his manner was a trifle impatient and condescending, this only served to enhance his impressiveness.  And he knew his Shakespeare.  Lydia entered under his guidance that ever new and ever old world of beauty that only the born Shakespeare lover discovers.

The Christmas recess had come and gone before Lydia became vaguely conscious that young Professor Willis called on her always to recite, whether he did on any other girl in the class or not.  She did not know that from the first day she had entered his class the young professor had been conscious of the yellow head in the furthest corner of the classroom.  It was a nobly shaped head bound round with curly yellow braids above a slender face, red cheeked yet delicate.  He was conscious too of the home-made suit and the cheap shirtwaists, with the pathetic attempt at variety through different colored neckties.  Little by little he recognized that the bashful young person had a mental background not shared by her mates, and he wondered about her.

It was early in January that he made an attempt to satisfy his curiosity.  The snowfall had been light so far and heavy winds had blown the lake clear of drifts.  Lydia often brought her skates to class with her and if the wind were favorable skated home after her last recitation.