Thus did Martin Cortright and Miss Lavinia meet on common ground and drift into easy friendship which it would have taken years of conventional intercourse to accomplish, while opposite, the talk between Sylvia and Bradford dwelt upon the new professorship and Sylvia’s roommate of two years, who, instead of being able to remain and finish the course which was to fit her for gaining nominal independence through teaching, had been obliged to go home and take charge, owing to her mother’s illness.

“Yes, Professor Jameson’s decision to give all his time to outside literary work was very sudden,” I heard Bradford say.  “I thought that it might happen two or three years hence; but to find myself now not only in possession of a salary of four thousand dollars a year (hardly a fortune in New York, I suppose), but also freed this season from being tied at Northbridge to teach in the summer school, and able to be at home in peace and quiet and get together my little book of the ’Country of the English Poets,’ seems to me almost unbelievable.”

“I have been wondering how the book was coming on, for you never wrote of it,” answered Sylvia.  “I have been trying all winter, without success, to arrange my photographs in scrap-books with merely names and dates.  But though, as I look back over the four months, everything has been done for me, even to the buttoning of my gloves, while I’ve seemingly done nothing for any one, I’ve barely had a moment that I could call my own.”

“I do not think that it is strange, after having been away practically for six years, that family life and your friends should absorb you.  Doubtless you will have time now that Lent has come,” said Bradford, smiling.  “Of course we country Congregationalists do not treat the season as you Anglican Catholics do, and I’ve often thought it rather a pity.  It must be good to have a stated time and season for stopping and sitting down to look at oneself.  I picked up one of your New York church papers in the library the other day, and was fairly surprised at the number of services and the scope of the movement and the work of the church in general.”

Sylvia looked at him for a moment with an odd expression in her eyes, as if questioning the sincerity of his remarks, and then answered, I thought a little sadly:  “I’m afraid it is very much like other things we read of in the papers, half truth, half fiction; the churches and the services are there, and the good earnest people, too—­but as for our stopping!  Ah, Mr. Bradford, I can hardly expect to make you understand how it is, for I cannot myself.  It was all so different before I went to boarding school, and we lived down in the house in Waverley Place where I was born.  The people of mamma’s world do not stop; we simply whirl to a slightly different tune.  It’s like waltzing one way around a ballroom until you are quite dizzy, and then reversing,—­there is no sitting down to rest, that is, unless it is to play cards.”