"Indeed," continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes,
"if one were the editor of a column of--er advice to young girls, such
as I believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the
dress patterns, on the ladies' page of most of our newspapers--if one
were the editor of such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I
have been making this morning into a warning--never marry a man with a
passion for principles."

It drew a laugh, of course. Professorial jokes never miss fire. But
_the_ girl didn't laugh. She came to with a start--she had been staring
out the window--and wrote, apparently, the fool thing down in her
note-book. It was the only note she had made in thirty-five minutes.

All of his brilliant exposition of the paradox of Rousseau and
Robespierre (he was giving a course on the French Revolution), the
strange and yet inevitable fact that the softest, most sentimental,
rose-scented religion ever invented, should have produced, through its
most thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that
ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green
incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of
France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might
believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go
by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which
came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of
all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity
of the page she had opened her note-book to when the lecture began.

And then, with a perfectly serious face, she had written down his silly