“No matter what your name may be,” said Miss Wilson, much annoyed, “I forbid you to come here or to hold any communication whatever with the young ladies in my charge.”

“Why?”

“Because I choose.”

“There is much force in that reason, Miss Wilson; but it is not moral force in the sense conveyed by your college prospectus, which I have read with great interest.”

Miss Wilson, since her quarrel with Agatha, had been sore on the subject of moral force.  “No one is admitted here,” she said, “without a trustworthy introduction or recommendation.  A disguise is not a satisfactory substitute for either.”

“Disguises are generally assumed for the purpose of concealing crime,” he remarked sententiously.

“Precisely so,” she said emphatically.

“Therefore, I bear, to say the least, a doubtful character.  Nevertheless, I have formed with some of the students here a slight acquaintance, of which, it seems, you disapprove.  You have given me no good reason why I should discontinue that acquaintance, and you cannot control me except by your wish—­a sort of influence not usually effective with doubtful characters.  Suppose I disregard your wish, and that one or two of your pupils come to you and say:  ’Miss Wilson, in our opinion Smilash is an excellent fellow; we find his conversation most improving.  As it is your principle to allow us to exercise our own judgment, we intend to cultivate the acquaintance of Smilash.’  How will you act in that case?”

“Send them home to their parents at once.”

“I see that your principles are those of the Church of England.  You allow the students the right of private judgment on condition that they arrive at the same conclusions as you.  Excuse my saying that the principles of the Church of England, however excellent, are not those your prospectus led me to hope for.  Your plan is coercion, stark and simple.”

“I do not admit it,” said Miss Wilson, ready to argue, even with Smilash, in defence of her system.  “The girls are quite at liberty to act as they please, but I reserve my equal liberty to exclude them from my college if I do not approve of their behavior.”

“Just so.  In most schools children are perfectly at liberty to learn their lessons or not, just as they please; but the principal reserves an equal liberty to whip them if they cannot repeat their tasks.”

“I do not whip my pupils,” said Miss Wilson indignantly.  “The comparison is an outrage.”

“But you expel them; and, as they are devoted to you and to the place, expulsion is a dreaded punishment.  Yours is the old system of making laws and enforcing them by penalties, and the superiority of Alton College to other colleges is due, not to any difference of system, but to the comparative reasonableness of its laws and the mildness and judgment with which they are enforced.”

“My system is radically different from the old one.  However, I will not discuss the matter with you.  A mind occupied with the prejudices of the old coercive despotism can naturally only see in the new a modification of the old, instead of, as my system is, an entire reversal or abandonment of it.”