proportions. In her studies she was so far in advance of her different
classes that there was always a wide gap between her and the second
scholar. So fatal to all rivalry had she proved herself that she passed
under the school name of The Terror. She learned so easily that she
undervalued her own extraordinary gifts, and felt the deepest admiration
for those of her friends endowed with faculties of an entirely different
and almost opposite nature. After sitting at her desk until her head was
hot and her feet were like ice, she would go and look at the blooming
young girls exercising in the gymnasium of the school, and feel as if she
would give all her knowledge, all her mathematics and strange tongues and
history, all those accomplishments that made her the encyclopaedia of
every class she belonged to, if she could go through the series of
difficult and graceful exercises in which she saw her schoolmates
delighting.

One among them, especially, was the object of her admiration, as she was
of all who knew her exceptional powers in the line for which nature had
specially organized her. All the physical perfections which Miss Lurida
had missed had been united in Miss Euthymia Tower, whose school name was
The Wonder. Though of full womanly stature, there were several taller
girls of her age. While all her contours and all her movements betrayed
a fine muscular development, there was no lack of proportion, and her
finely shaped hands and feet showed that her organization was one of
those carefully finished masterpieces of nature which sculptors are
always in search of, and find it hard to detect among the imperfect
products of the living laboratory.

This girl of eighteen was more famous than she cared to be for her
performances in the gymnasium. She commonly contented herself with the
same exercises that her companions were accustomed to. Only her