They had so much quiet assurance for a mere little high school dancer. But he sat up and gave cold, critical attention to the movements of the wood nymph.

She swept her audience a grave, dignified bow, almost too dignified for a wood nymph, he thought. It gave the impression of an intellectual wood nymph, he thought, solemnly but sweetly performing some woodland ceremony.

Then she moved with the music, light as a thistledown blown by the wind, fanciful as sunlight playing with the leaves of the trees and sifting through branches to the shadowy moss in yellow, twinkling kisses. Her every movement was utmost grace, not the slightest pretense, but perfect self-control, perfect confidence in her own supple power. He watched her as the others did; as anyone would watch a beautiful instrument. As he grew less astonished at the beauty of the gliding movements, a perfect poetry of motion, he began to brood over that look on his old professor’s face. After all, he reflected, there was the child in every heart, for even an old man would be carried away with a pretty girl dancing. Nevertheless, he watched the whirling bit of feathery green as breathlessly as the rest of the audience, till she at last swept another low bow and glided out of sight and then he turned to see that old face beside him beaming with the same light it had worn when Professor Bowen came to congratulate him upon the honors he had won in high school.

It fell blankly upon the younger man. It brought bitterness to his soul. He was amazed. He couldn’t bear to find his idol but human after all. A mere dancing puppet, pretty, of course, but after all a puppet! And Professor Bowen! Devotee of art and science and literature! But before he could find words to express his disappointment, Professor Bowen spoke.

“She’s a wonderful little girl!” he said. “Brightest student we have had for years! She simply swept the honors away from everyone else.”

“In athletics, I suppose!” said the young man, his lip curling sarcastically.

Professor Bowen turned in surprise at the tone and looked his young friend in the face anxiously. That did not sound like his dear Cameron. Was the boy’s head swelling with all his honors?

“Not at all,” said Professor Bowen, adjusting his have-to-be-convinced tone of voice that he used in cases of resistant or lazy scholars. “She’s a wonder in any direction you take her. She’s a marvel of keenness in mathematics, quick as a flash in Latin, up in literature and the sciences. I never saw anything like it. She studies early and late, takes little or no time for recreation, and is as sweet and kindly with it all as you ever saw a girl. She was working so hard her health was breaking under it, and we insisted upon her giving some time to the development of her body. She struggled hard against it at first, but I had a long talk with her about it, how she would be no good at all if her body broke down, and finally convinced her; this is the result. She plunged into athletics with as much vim as anything else, and put her perfect self-control into tangible form for our pleasure.

“Of course this dancing business is merely to please the gymnasium teacher, but it shows what wonderful power the girl has. She’s the best all-around developed student I ever saw, with no exception,” the old man finished emphatically.

The younger man bit his lips. He was mortified that he had a rival in his dear old professor’s heart. A girl, too, a dancing girl!

“And what good will it all be to her,” said the young man, bitterly. “She may dance well and do difficult mathematical problems, and all that, but what will she accomplish? I don’t suppose she expects to earn her living by dancing or mathematics, either. She doesn’t look it. How will she be any better than other girls? I don’t know whether I believe much in higher education for women. It doesn’t prepare them for their lives as wives and mothers.”

He spoke with the intolerance of youth.

The old professor looked at the young man with keen pity in his eyes. To think that Cameron had got no further than that! He could not see the bitterness in the heart of his young idolater.

“No, she probably will never earn her living by her knowledge, for she will not need to do so.