"How are her a's?" asked Annie.
"Broader than the Atlantic. I think she wants to patronize me. She's a real Tyringham in that she thinks us college women very slow."
"Well, they do have a style," said Belle, sighing. "You can always tell one of Miss Alton's girls."
"Yes, there's no doubt about that," retorted Annie coolly. She had taken her education seriously and was disposed to look down upon the product of fashionable boarding schools.
"Cheer up! The worst is yet to come," declared Evelyn. "You'd better not encourage the idea here that we are different from young women of any other sort. I've got to live here! I'm going to be pretty lonely too, the first thing you know, after you desert me."
"You'll have plenty of chances to root for the college," suggested Belle. "You won't have anything like the time I'll have. In Virginia we have traditions that I've got to reconcile myself to, in some way; out here, you can start even."
"Yes, and we have the Tyringham type, and a few of the convent sort, and a few of the co-eds to combat."
"Well, there's nothing so radically wrong with the co-eds, is there?" asked Annie, who believed in education for its own sake.
"Only the ones that want to go in for politics and that sort of thing. There's a lady—I said lady—doctor of philosophy here in town who casually invited me to become a candidate for school commissioner a few weeks ago."
"I'm not sure that you oughtn't to have done it," said Annie, "assuming that you declined. It would have been a good stroke for alma mater."