"We naturalize them at the docks and stations."

"But you--" I repressed a movement of impatience. "Didn't you marry
young?"

"Mrs. Baker and I began our married life in one room; cooked over the gas
jet, in tin pails. And if little Nelly is the equal of other women of her
family--but that is practice versus principle, my young friend; practice
versus principle."

He turned again to his letters, and I understood that the interview was
closed.

Right after lunch I started for Barnard. Helen has written so much about
the college that as soon as I struck the Boulevard I knew the solid brick
building with its trimmings of stone fasces. I turned into the cloistered
court on One Hundred and Nineteenth Street and paused a minute, looking up
at its Ionic porticoes and high window lettered "Millbank Hall."

Then I entered, and a page, small, meek and blue-uniformed, trotted ahead
of me through a beautiful hall, white with marble columns and mosaics,
sumptuous with golden ceiling, dazzling with light and green with palms,
to the curtained entrance of a dainty reception room.

"Stop a minute, Mercury," I said as he turned to leave; "where is Miss
Winship?"

He reappeared from an office beyond, replying:--

"Biol'gy lab'r'tory. What name?"