She admired her roses for a moment, tucked them into her belt, and then opened her magazine.  But her expression was more pensive than interested as she idled over its pages, looking now and then at a picture and reading only a paragraph or a stanza here and there.  Her thoughts were more with the scenes of the life she was leaving behind her, or flying on, with inquiry and indecision, into that whither she was bound.  Should she stay on the Pacific Coast where she was going to visit her father and mother in their new home, open an office in some city near them, and build up a practice there?  Or should she return to take the position which had been offered her in the faculty of the women’s medical college from which she had been graduated with high honors three years before?  After her graduation, a year’s work as interne in the women’s hospital had heightened the expectations of her friends; and the success with which she had then served as physician and superintendent of a branch dispensary and hospital in the slum district had made all who were watching her progress predict for her a brilliant career.

She had accepted the appointment to the college corps of instructors with the deepest gratification, and she looked forward longingly to the opportunities it would give her for special work and to the surety of advancement that would follow.  But her heart misgave her not a little as she thought of the great joy it would give her father and mother should she decide to stay near them in California, and of the grief that her mother would try to dissemble if she should return to the East.

Well, she would not decide the question now, and she put it from her as she cast a careless eye over her fellow travellers, let it rest for a moment on the two men in the section in front of her own and then turned to her book.  Alternately reading, looking at the passing landscape, and now and then lapsing into reverie, her attention was so withdrawn from her surroundings that she was not aware that one of the men in front had turned several times and allowed a casual glance to pass from her down the row of heads behind her.  Nor did she notice, when they returned from an hour’s absence in the smoker, that he sat down in the front seat of their section.

“You don’t mind riding backward?” commented his companion.

“I ’m not particularly stuck on it, but just now I want to look at that girl in the section behind us.  It’s good for the eyes to rest on such a splendid creature as she is.”

“I ’ll come over there with you and we ’ll study her together,” the other replied, as he changed his seat.

“Is n’t she a fine specimen?” said the first.  “She ’s five feet nine if she ’s an inch,—­I noticed her when she got on at Philadelphia,—­broad-shouldered and deep-chested and clear-skinned.  And that glow in her cheeks rivals the roses her friends gave her.  How old do you guess her, Wilson?”