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BOBBIE, GENERAL MANAGER
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hated boarding-school with all my heart and soul, I have always had a sneaking idea I might have done better at college. I always liked to study and when I became aware of the fact that Juliet—who, though the best and staunchest girl in the world, was never very brainy—was soaring above me in knowledge, I used to be a little envious. It may seem odd to you for a married woman to be trotting across a campus every other day to attend lectures in class-rooms, as if she were an undergraduate, but after my first plunge into that discourse on philosophy by Dr. Van Breeze I never missed a single lecture in the series. I went the next week and the next and the next; and also bolted bravely into a series of French lectures every Monday afternoon. I liked just to sit and breathe the air of those class-rooms. I liked the long line of blackboards covered with unintelligible words that belonged to a previous lecture, the row of felt erasers, the smell of dry chalk-dust. I liked sitting in those studious-looking chairs with a big arm on one side. It was as strange and foreign as a new country in those class-rooms, with the bare maple-tree branches grazing the window-pane, and in my ears the music of the French language which I hadn't heard since I left high school. I was a thousand, thousand miles away from the atmosphere of limousines and Edith, five hundred and two wedding presents, and a wedding-dress that cost two hundred dollars. It was like a distant echo from another world when I received an invitation for a bridge one day from a Mrs. Percival. It had completely escaped my mind that she was one of the individuals who had given me a dozen Dresden plates. Even if I had recollected I shouldn't