“What did you do with her?” demanded Honora.

“Bundled her up in her outside garments and dragged her out of doors between us and made her walk.  She could hardly stand at first.  We had to hold her up.  But we kept right on hustling her along, and after a time when the fresh air and exercise had got in their work, she could find the right word when she tried to speak to us.  Then we took her to a restaurant and ordered a beefsteak and some other things.  She wanted to go back to her room—­said she had more studying to do; but we made it clear to her at last that it wasn’t any use,—­that she’d have to stand or fall on what she had.  She promised us she wouldn’t look at a book, but would go to bed and sleep, and anybody who has the hardihood to wish that she wins her degree may pray for a good night for her.”

Honora was looking at her husband with a wide, shining gaze.

“How did you come to go to her, David?” she asked admiringly.  “She wasn’t in any of your classes.”

“Now, don’t try to make out that I’m benevolent, Honora,” Fulham said petulantly.  “I went because I happened to meet Wickersham on the Midway.  She’s been hiding, but he had searched her out and appealed to me to go with him.  What I did was at his request.”

“But she’ll be refreshed in the morning,” said Honora.  “She’ll come out all right, won’t she?”

“How do I know?” demanded Fulham.  “I suppose she’ll feel like a man going to execution when she enters that council-room.  Maybe she’ll stand up to it and maybe she’ll not.  She’ll spend as much nervous energy on the experience as would carry her through months of sane, reasonable living in the place she ought to be in—­that is to say, in a millinery store or some plain man’s kitchen.”

“Oh, David!” said Honora with gentle wifely reproach.

But Fulham was making no apologies.

“If we men ill-treated women as they ill-treat themselves,” he said, “we’d be called brutes of the worst sort.”

“Of course!” cried Kate.  “A person may have some right to ill-treat himself, but he never has any right to ill-treat another.”

“If we hitched her up to a plough,” went on Fulham, not heeding, “we shouldn’t be overtaxing her physical strength any more than she overtaxes her mental strength when she tries—­the ordinary woman, I mean, like Miss Vroom—­to keep up to the pace set by men of first-rate caliber.”

He went up to bed on this, still disturbed, and Honora and Kate, much depressed, talked the matter over.  But they reached no conclusion.  They wanted to go around the next morning and help Lena,—­get her breakfast and see that she was properly dressed,—­but they knew they would be unwelcome.  Later they heard that she had come through the ordeal after a fashion.  She had given indications of tremendous research.  But her eyes, Wickersham told Kate privately, looked like diseased oysters, and it was easy to see that she was on the point of collapse.