is beaten to call a mass meeting, and the boys gather here when they've
anything to talk over. There's no law against women sitting here, you
know. Only they never do. It isn't--oh, I hardly know how to put it--it
isn't just the thing--"

"Can't you break away, McCrea?" some one called.

The youth threw a withering glance in the direction of the speaker.

"I can conduct my own affairs," he said coldly.

But Kate had at last found a way to bring the interview to an end.

"I said I was new," she concluded, flinging a barbed shaft. "I thought
it was share and share alike here--that no difference was made between
men and women. You see--I didn't understand."

The C bench came to be a sort of symbol to her from then on. It was the
seat of privilege if not of honor, and the women were not to sit on it.

Not that she fretted about it. There was no time for that. She settled
in Foster Hall, which was devoted to the women, and where she expected
to make many friends. But she had been rather unfortunate in that. The
women were not as coöperative as she had expected them to be. At table,
for example, the conversation dragged heavily. She had expected to find
it liberal, spirited, even gay, but the girls had a way of holding back.
Kate had to confess that she didn't think men would be like that. They
would--most of them--have understood that the chief reason a man went to
a university was to learn to get along with his fellow men and to hold
his own in the world. The girls labored under the idea that one went to