A cursory, modern greeting was all that Augusta Barneson Coles vouchsafed her visitor.
"Is there anything I can do for you?" asked Augusta, drawing off her gloves, and with the greatest precision pulling out the fingers. When she had finished this operation she laid the gloves on the table. Augusta maintained, against all comers, that neatness alone was to be considered in dress, and showed herself consistent by appearing at a formal dinner party in an immaculate shirt waist and short skirt. In the obtrusive simplicity of the shapeless coat, the uncompromising hat, the well-hung but skimped skirt, the severely arranged tie, the colourless hair smoothed in defiance of the wind, the stout shoes and correct stockings, you perceived the care of one who had a character to preserve.
Ellen straightened herself and assumed a thrifty exactness in her speech, setting aside preamble and apology; for in talk with Augusta she felt that the amenities of life were worse than wasted, they were insulting.
"Yes, Augusta, tell me what you can say for women's colleges, as distinguished from other modes of training."
"They will redeem the world from its present deplorable condition by teaching women to live by ideas," was the succinct if sweeping assertion.
"I am afraid I don't understand," murmured Ellen.
"By removing them from the sordid pressure of the practical," Augusta went on, "and that at a critical period in the mind's development and bringing them into an atmosphere of pure ideas, till the concrete no longer exists for them."
This statement seemed somewhat nonsensical to Ellen, but she had come for information and persisted. "That's all very well, but to make it more personal. I can't express what my college education has meant to me. What has it meant to you?"
"Experience meetings of any sort are distasteful to me," answered Augusta brusquely, "they make impossible abstract thought and result in commonplaces of undisciplined sentiment. They bend the idea to the individual, not the individual to the idea."