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preparing to expostulate, Miss de Vine caught sight of the English tutor and excused herself. Miss Gubbins was obliged to withdraw; Harriet observed with regret that she had untidy hair, an ill-kept skin and a large white safety-pin securing her hood to her dress.
    “Dear me!” said Miss de Vine, “who is that very uninspired young woman? She seems very much annoyed with my review of Mr. Winterlake’s book on Essex. She seems to think I ought to have torn the poor man to pieces because of a trifling error of a few months made in dealing, quite incidentally, with the early history of the Bacon family. She attaches no importance to the fact that the book is the most illuminating and scholarly handling to date of the interactions of two most enigmatic characters.”
    “Bacon family history is her subject,” said Miss Lydgate, “so I’ve no doubt she feels strongly about it.”
    “It’s a great mistake to see one’s own subject out of proportion to its background. The error should be corrected, of course; I did correct it—in a private letter to the author, which is the proper medium for trifling corrections. But the man has, I feel sure, got hold of the master-key to the situation between those two men, and in so doing he has got hold of a fact of genuine importance.”
    “Well,” said Miss Lydgate, showing her strong teeth in a genial grin, “you seem to have taken a strong line with Miss Gubbins. Now I’ve brought along somebody I know you’re anxious to meet. This is Miss Harriet Vane—also an artist in the relating of details.”
    “Miss Vane?” The historian bent her brilliant, short-sighted eyes on Harriet, and her face lit “This is delightful—Do let me saw how much I enjoyed your last book. I thought it quite the best thing you’d done—though of course I’m not competent to form an opinion from the scientific point of view. I was discussing it with Professor Higgins, who is quite a devotee of yours, and he said it suggested a most interesting possibility, which had not before occurred to him. He wasn’t quite sure whether it would work, but he would do his best to find out. Tell me, what did you have to go upon?”
    “Well, I got a pretty good opinion,” said Harriet, feeling a hideous qualm of uncertainty, aid cursing Professor Higgins from the bottom of her heart “But of course—”
    At this point. Miss Lydgate espied another old pupil in the distance and ran away. Phoebe Tucker had already been lost on the way across the lawn; Harriet was left to her fate. After ten minutes, during which Miss de Vine ruthlessly turned her victim’s brain inside out, shook the facts out of it like a vigorous housemaid shaking dust from a carpet, beat it, refreshed it, rubbed up the surface of it, relaid it in a new position, and tacked it into place with a firm hand, the Dean mercifully came up and burst into the conversation.
    “Thank goodness, the Vice-Chancellor’s taking himself off. Now we can get rid of this filthy old bombazine and show off our party frocks. Why did we ever clamour for degrees and the fun of stewing in full academicals on a hot day? There! he’s gone! Give me those anything-but-glad-rags and I’ll shove them into the S.C.R. with mine. Has yours got a name on it, Miss Vane? Oh, good girl! I’ve go three unknown gowns sitting in my office already. Found lying about at the end of term. No clue to owners, of course. The untidy little beasts seem to think it’s our job to sort out their miserable belongings. They strew them everywhere, regardless, and then borrow each other’s; and if anybody’s fined for being out without a gown, it’s always because somebody pinched it. And the wretched things are always as dirty as dish clouts. They use them for dusters and drawing the fire up. When I think how our devoted generation sweated to get the right to these garments—and these young things don’t care that for them! They go about looking all bits and pieces, like illustrations