In East Onondaigua, where she lived, Hillbridge was looked on as an Oxford.
Magazine writers, with the easy American use of the superlative, designated
it as "the venerable Alma Mater," the "antique seat of learning," and
Claudia Day had been brought up to regard it as the fountain-head of
knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than
knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and
exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those
intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the
thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to
Hillbridge--whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend
who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University
professors--Claudia's spirit dilated with the sense of new possibilities.
The vision of herself walking under the "historic elms" toward the Memorial
Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in,
from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President's
reminiscences of the Concord group--this vividness of self-projection into
the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so
exquisite a moment.

It was in this mood that she opened the article on Keniston. She knew about
him, of course; she was wonderfully "well up," even for East Onondaigua.
She had read of him in the magazines; she had met, on a visit to New York,
a man who collected Kenistons, and a photogravure of a Keniston in an
"artistic" frame hung above her writing-table at home. But Professor
Wildmarsh's article made her feel how little she really knew of the master;
and she trembled to think of the state of relative ignorance in which, but
for the timely purchase of the magazine, she might have entered Hillbridge.
She had, for instance, been densely unaware that Keniston had already had
three "manners," and was showing symptoms of a fourth. She was equally
ignorant of the fact that he had founded a school and "created a formula";