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“I have no faith in Nature any more. I want to have at least a finger in the pie myself. Nature don’t work in all cases. I’m afraid Nature can’t in his case.”

“Careful! He’ll hear you, my dear.”

“Where do we go now, Miss Powell?” asked Blakesly as they came to a halt on the opposite side of the campus.

“I think they are all going to the gymnasium building. Won’t you come? That is my dominion.”

They answered by moving off, Mrs. Blakesly taking Miss Powell’s arm. As they streamed away in files she said: “Isn’t he good-looking? We’ve known him for years. He’s all right,” she said significantly, and squeezed Miss Powell’s arm.

“Well, Lou Blakesly, you’re the same old irrepressible!”

“Blushing already, you dear! I tell you he’s splendid. I wish he’d take to you,” and she gave Miss Powell another squeeze. “It would be such a match! Brains and beauty, too.”

“Oh, hush!”

They entered the cool, wide hall of the gymnasium, with its red brick walls, its polished floor, and the yellow-red wooden beams lining the ceiling.

There were only a few people remaining in the hall, most of them having passed on into the museum. As they came to the various appliances, Miss Powell explained them.

“What are these things for?” inquired Mrs. Blakesly, pointing at the row of iron rings depending from long ropes.

“They are for swinging on,” and she leaped lightly upward and caught and swung by one hand.

“Mercy! Do you do that?”

“She seems to be doing it now,” Blakesly said.

“I am one of the teachers,” Miss Powell replied, dropping to the floor.

It was glorious to see how easily she seized a heavy dumb-bell and swung it above her head. The front line of her body was majestic as she stood thus.

“Gracious! I couldn’t do that,” exclaimed Mrs. Blakesly.

“No, not with your style of dress,” replied her husband.–“I have to pin her hat on this year,” he said to Ware.

“I love it,” said Miss Powell, as she drew a heavy weight from the floor and stood with the cord across her shoulder. “It adds so much to life! It gives what Browning calls the wild joy of living. Do you know, few women know what that means? It’s been denied us. Only the men have known

“‘The wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool silver shock
Of a plunge in the pool’s living water.’

I try to teach my girls ‘How good is man’s life, the mere living!'”

The men cheered as she paused for a moment flushed and breathless.

She went on: “We women have been shut out from the sports too long–I mean sports in the sun. The men have had the best of it. All the swimming, all the boating, wheeling, all the grand, wild life; now we’re going to have a part.”

The young ladies clustered about with flushed, excited faces while their teacher planted her flag and claimed new territory for women.

Miss Powell herself grew conscious, and flushed and paused abruptly.

Mrs. Blakesly effervesced in admiring astonishment. “Well, well! I didn’t know you could make a speech.”

“I didn’t mean to do so,” she replied.

“Go on! Go on!” everybody called out, but she turned away to show some other apparatus.

“Wasn’t she fine?” exclaimed Mrs. Blakesly to Ware.

“Beyond praise,” he replied. She went at once to communicate her morsel of news to her husband, and at length to Miss Powell.

The company passed out into other rooms until no one was left but Mrs. Blakesly, the professor, and Ware. Miss Powell was talking again, and to Ware mainly. Ware was thoughtful, Miss Powell radiant.

“I didn’t know what life was till I could do that.” She took up a large dumb-bell and, extending it at arm’s length, whirled it back and forth. Her forearm, white and smooth, swelled into strong action, and her supple hands had the unwavering power and pressure of an athlete, and withal Ware thought: “She is feminine. Her physical power has not coarsened her; it has enlarged her life, but left her entirely womanly.”