In the meanwhile she had been reading far into her first-year text-books, underscoring and annotating, studying for hours upon such subjects as she did not understand, so that she might get hold of her work the readier when it came to class-room routine and lectures.

Hers was a temperament admirably suited to the study she had chosen--self-reliant, cool, and robust.
But it was not easy for her to go.

Never before had Blix been away from her home; never for longer than a week had she been separated from her father, nor from Howard and Snooky.

That huge city upon the Atlantic seaboard, with its vast, fierce life, where beat the heart of the nation, and where beyond Aunt Kihm she knew no friend, filled Blix with a vague sense of terror and of oppression.

She was going out into a new life, a life of work and of study, a harsher life than she had yet known.