and acknowledged their bows with the slightest inclination of her head, grey-haired and fine-looking. Three young ladies who were to Don three different arrangements of feminine eyes, noses and mouths, smiled politely and forgot him. A young man with a pince-nez—whom he recognised as an upper student of the university—shook his hand with a manner of condescending, for the moment only, to meet a Freshman as a social equal. Another man, prematurely bald, said deeply, "Glad to know you," and then startled him with a limp touch of indifferent fingers which he dropped like a wet fish. He recovered from his embarrassment to find himself sitting beside a girl whom he subsequently discovered to be the younger of Mrs. Kimball's two daughters.
She opened conversation with him, patronizingly, by asking him whether he was a college student, what "year" he was in, and what "course" he was taking; and leaning back in her chair with an unnecessary haughtiness that brought out a striking pose of her neck and head, she regarded him with a cool curiosity in which there was something inimical. He did not understand that she rather shone in her young circle as a girl who questioned the intellectual superiority of men—as evidenced in college students—and who prided herself on discouraging with sarcasms the masculine adoration which her beauty brought her. He replied to her with a divided attention, aware that Conroy and Margaret—for the "Richardson" was still a strange formality to his thought—had gone to the piano together, and that Conroy was preparing
