“I just love common workmen,” glowed Carol.

“Only you don’t want to forget that common workmen don’t think they’re common!”

“You’re right!  I apologize!” Carol’s brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement.  Her eyes mothered the world.  Stewart Snyder peered at her.  He rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him, and he stammered: 

“I know.  You get people.  Most of these darn co-eds——­Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people.”

“Oh—­oh well—­you know—­sympathy and everything—­if you were—­say you were a lawyer’s wife.  You’d understand his clients.  I’m going to be a lawyer.  I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes.  I get so dog-gone impatient with people that can’t stand the gaff.  You’d be good for a fellow that was too serious.  Make him more—­more—­you know—­sympathetic!”

His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on.  She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment.  She cried, “Oh, see those poor sheep—­millions and millions of them.”  She darted on.

Stewart was not interesting.  He hadn’t a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers.  She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor.

The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement—­tree-planting, town pageants, girls’ clubs.  It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England, Pennsylvania.  She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat.

She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin.  She stroked a satin pillow while she read.  About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room:  cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed.  Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante.  It was the only trace of Carol in the room.  She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students.

It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement.  But she suddenly stopped fidgeting.  She strode into the book.  She had fled half-way through it before the three o’clock bell called her to the class in English history.

She sighed, “That’s what I’ll do after college!  I’ll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful.  Be an inspiration.  I suppose I’d better become a teacher then, but—­I won’t be that kind of a teacher.  I won’t drone.  Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island?  Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books.  I’ll make ’em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!”