"I went to England the year after the war, and stayed there until just a few months ago. I thought I would come home-back to this side, I mean."

"Well, I don't believe England would appeal to me much, either," said Isabelle. "Of course, just for a trip-a trip would be all right. I've never been on the ocean. Maybe I'd be seasick I don't know. They say you always get over it in a day or two, anyhow, and then you have the dandiest time. I wouldn't mind, anyhow. Do you think you'll go back there sometime?"

"I might. I haven't any definite plans. It doesn't do to look ahead too much," her mother said, with the faintest of sighs. "I have found that out. I am constantly finding it out."

"Well, you going to stay in N'York -where you are for a while, anyhow?"

"I dare say. It's a little place down on Long Island; I have a house. It's quite countrified and quiet

"Country? Good night!" Isabelle ejaculated, in amazed distaste. "I don't see how you stand it! It's so lonesome. But I guess you've got a machine,", she added, on a second thought. "It's not so worse if you can get away from it once in a while-go in the city, shopping and shows. What make is yours?"

"Oh, I haven't any. At my age one doesn't care for that sort of thing," said Mrs. Saffrans, mildly. "There is a little garden that I am expecting to have a great deal of fun with, watching things come up, and digging-" She paused, then asked a question in her turn, hopefully, perhaps a little wistfully. "You care for gardens? Flowers?"

“Oh, I—I guess gardens are all right," said Isabelle, uncertainly. A vague uneasiness which her Aunt Jane would immediately have recognized was creeping upon her. The conversation seemed to be leading nowhere in particular, the meeting itself promised nothing tangible. Isabelle was anything but fanciful; but she would have been less than

human, less than a young girl, not to have built up some fabric of expectation at the sight of her mother, and now it was tottering to a fall. The older woman was armored in a charm of manner that even Isabelle could feel; but she was armored, that was the difficulty! There was no penetrating those viewless defenses. It was disheartening and somehow disquieting.

"Yeah, I like gardens, all right," Isabelle asserted, desperately. "Only I should think you'd have a machine and drive yourself, you know; 'twouldn't be anything out of the way. Lots of people do, rather than pay a shuffoor-they want so much. A machine's the greatest convenience, even if it's only a little Ford. I always say it don't make any difference what it looks like; a Ford gets you there just the same as a Packard, and you should worry if people laugh at it, shouldn't you? I can drive-well, not every make, of course, but I could learn right off. Davy said he'd give me a job any day. Of course he was just joking, but he knows I can drive, all right. Oh, I forgot you didn't know! Davy's the garodge man here-Pete Davy. I guess garodges are something new here since your time."

"They are indeed," Mrs. Saffrans said, and glanced at a charming little trifle of a watch on her wrist and began to gather her wraps together. "Davy, did you say the man's name was? Would you mind calling him up and having him send one of his taxis for me, please? I think I had better be getting back to the station."

While Isabelle was upon this errand her aunt returned; from the doorway she surveyed the visitor with a doubtful face which reflected her strangely doubtful state of mind.

"You going, Ada?”

"Yes," said Mrs. Saffrans, agreeably, settling her furs and hat and a stray waving thread of pale gold-brown hair with small, feminine touches here and there. She faced the other, smilingly impregnable.

"Well You and Isabelle had your talk out?" queried Jane, expectantly. "Yes."

Jane came into the room. "I just feel like I ought to say, Ada," she began, hurriedly, lowering her voice-"I just feel you ought to know that I re'lize Isabelle's your child, and I don't want to come between you, or stand in her light, or anything. If you want to take her away, why, I re'lize it's your right, and I've always told her so, and—and maybe it would be to her advantage to see something outside of Acme-I re'lize that. I want to do my duty-"

You've

"You always have, Jane. been goodness itself to her," said the other, with earnestness. "You are much more of a mother to Isabelle than I have ever been, or could be, I am afraid. It is too late for me now. One seems to have only one chance— She broke off, then began again, not without effort. "Only one chance. I have lost mine. Isabelle has grown up without me. I am nothing but a stranger to her, as you say. I might have known-buf one has fancies As it is, I wouldn't think of taking her away from you. It would be too painful for you, and she herself wouldn't be happy. Would you, my dear?" she added, as the girl came slowly back. "We might not even get along with each other. That would be a calamity," Mrs. Saffrans ended, with her features arranged in a smile. In spite of it she looked for one instant an old woman-old and spiritless.

If in her words there sounded a note of loneliness, of aching disappointment, of poignant and consciously futile selfreproach, neither of the Redway women detected it. They heard her with a groping dissatisfaction, a groping sense of injury and impotence.

"Well, of course I wouldn't want to leave Aunt Jane for good," Isabelle murmured, “but a trip-a trip would be different" Something about her mother's gentle gaze daunted her; she stumbled into silence. Jane looked at her sister-inlaw in resentful bewilderment, aware that

she should have been relieved by Ada's renunciation, telling herself that she was relieved, yet all the while conscious of a formless exasperation. Isabelle was the apple of Jane's eye; everything that Ada intimated about the cruelty of separating them was true, yet, now that she declared no intention of separating them, now that she gave up the girl ungrudgingly, Jane found herself still unappeased, still baffled. There was something wrong somewhere. Ruthless and terrifying pronouncements from the Old Testament about retribution and the wages of sin went through her mind, trailed by doubts she felt affrightedly to be little short of blasphemous. But here was this Camille, this Magdalen, to all appearances impenitent yet unrebuked, rather dowered with the world's goods. in abundance, leading a varied and spacious life, enviable to look upon; and here was Jane Redway, an honest woman, a church member, who had always lived clean and kept the Commandments, here she was washing dishes in Acme! The finite human understanding was fairly balked by the spectacle; it seemed as if the Almighty were singularly negligent about exercising the prerogative of vengeance upon which He laid such emphasis. Jane averted her mind in horror from the impious criticism.

The two watched Pete Davy carry off the visitor after adieus awkward and constrained on their side, irreproachably friendly on hers. "I sha'n't forget about the furs!" were her last words to Isabelle, who, in a seizure of novel and maddening embarrassment, could manage only inarticulate sounds in response.

They watched her away, and Jane said: "She hasn't changed one bit. She was always like that."

Whatever this statement conveyed, Isabelle said, "Uh-huh," in a tone of entire understanding, that brought some measure of solace to the aunt. All at once Jane felt released from the selfimposed restrictions she had obeyed, after her fashion, for years. The child knew what manner of woman her

mother was, now; there need be no more rackings of conscience, no more vigilant inhibitions.

"She was always just that way," Jane said again, secure and vindicated.

"Yeah, kind of flossy. I made a grand hit with her, didn't I?" said Isabelle, in unhappy irony; she swallowed hard, winking back tears of chagrin. "I expect she was just a social butterfly, anyhow-before anything happened, I mean, of course. She's that style."

"What was that she said about her fur right at the last? Right when she was getting in the machine?"

Isabelle told her. "I'm not going to spend the whole five hundred on 'em, though. I didn't say so to her, but it wouldn't have made much difference if I had. She didn't take any interest. Just as long as I stay here in Acme and don't bother her, that's all she wants. You could see she was afraid of her life I'd take a notion to come tagging after her." "Well-but-five hundred dollars is a good deal for her to give you all in one lump, Is'belle," said her aunt, troubled. "She-she didn't say anything about the other-what she sends regular-?" Jane's apprehensions were writ at large in her look.

"Oh, you needn't to worry. She'll keep on with it," said Isabelle, with bitterness. "She'd give more than that to be sure she was good and shut of us. Five hundred isn't such a lot to her.. All the money she must spend!" She retreated from the other's side, as they stood together at the window, with a wry nose, in frank repugnance. "Mf! My, how your hair does smell of frying! -or maybe it's that old dress, I don't know

"Well, yours would, too, miss, if you stood over the stove three meals a day," Jane retorted, crisply, but without real rancor. These were the amenities of daily intercourse and lifelong habit, not to be taken seriously. But the next moment she burst out with petulance: "I do wish we could have a hired girlonly they're all so trifling! But some day I mean to quit and take a good rest, I don't care what happens. You see if I don't!"

"Oh, well-!" said Isabelle, philosophically, munching her gum and mentally disposing of the promised check.

Mrs. Saffrans had reached the station by this time; she was buying her single ticket. Neither of the other two women would have believed that there were tears in her eyes, too.

Y private profession being that of a university professor, I was naturally deeply interested in the system of education in England. I was therefore led to make a special visit to Oxford and to submit the place to a searching scrutiny. Arriving one afternoon at four o'clock, I stayed at the Mitre Hotel and did not leave until eleven o'clock next morning. The whole of this time, except for one hour spent in addressing the undergraduates, was devoted to a close and eager study of the great university. When I add to this that I had already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent a Sunday at All Souls with Colonel L. S. Amery, it will be seen at once that my views on Oxford are based upon observations extending over fourteen years.

At any rate, I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the British university is just as good a basis for reflection and judgment as that of the numerous English critics who come to our side of the water. I have known a famous English author arrive at Harvard University in the morning, have lunch with President Lowell, and then write a whole chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education in America. I have known another one come to Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do an entire book on the Decline of Serious Study in America. Or take the case of my own university. I remember Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGill and saying in his address to the undergraduates at 2:30 P.M., "You have here a great institution." But how could he have gathered this information? So far as I knew, he spent the entire morning with Sir Andrew Macphail in his house beside the campus,

smoking cigarettes. When I add that he distinctly refused to visit the Palæontologic Museum, that he saw nothing of our new hydraulic apparatus or of our classes in domestic science, his judgment that we had here a great institution seems a little bit superficial. I can only put beside it, to redeem it in some measure, the hasty and ill-formed judgment expressed by Lord Milner, "McGill is a noble university," and the rash and indiscreet expression of the Prince of Wales, when we gave him an LL.D. degree, "McGill has a glorious future."

To my mind these unthinking judg ments about our great college do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford should be the actual observation and real study based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.

On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make the following positive and emphatic state

ments.

Oxford is a noble university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest university in the world; and it is quite possible that it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of thought, which in America as yet we can emulate, but not equal.

If anybody doubts this let him go and