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Smith College Stories

by Josephine Daskam Bacon · English · Gutenberg #41858 · 391,799 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Smith College Stories

Author: Josephine Daskam Bacon


        
Release date: January 17, 2013 [eBook #41858]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SMITH COLLEGE STORIES ***

Transcriber's Note:

  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and un-italicized text by
  =equal signs=.




SMITH COLLEGE STORIES




     SMITH COLLEGE STORIES

     TEN STORIES BY
     JOSEPHINE DODGE DASKAM

     NEW YORK
     CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
     MCM




     _Copyright, 1900, by Charles Scribner's Sons_
     _D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston_




     _To my Mother, who sent me to college,
     I offer these impressions of it._

     _J. D. D._




PREFACE


If these simple tales serve to deepen in the slightest degree the
rapidly growing conviction that the college girl is very much like any
other girl--that this likeness is, indeed, one of her most striking
characteristics--the author will consider their existence abundantly
justified.

     J. D. D.




CONTENTS


          I

     _The Emotions of a Sub-guard_        1

          II

     _A Case of Interference_            37

          III

     _Miss Biddle of Bryn Mawr_          67

          IV

     _Biscuits ex Machina_               85

          V

     _The Education of Elizabeth_       123

          VI

     _A Family Affair_                  151

          VII

     _A Few Diversions_                 205

          VIII

     _The Evolution of Evangeline_      247

          IX

     _At Commencement_                  279

          X

     _The End of It_                    321




THE FIRST STORY

_THE EMOTIONS OF A SUB-GUARD_




I

THE EMOTIONS OF A SUB-GUARD


Theodora pushed through the yellow and purple crowd, a sea of flags
and ribbons and great paper flowers, caught a glimpse of the red and
green river that flowed steadily in at the other door, and felt her
heart contract. What a lot of girls! And the freshmen were always
beaten--

"Excuse me, but I _can't_ move! You'll have to wait," said some one.
Theodora realized that she was crowding, and apologized. A tall girl
with a purple stick moved by the great line that stretched from the
gymnasium to the middle of the campus, and looked keenly at Theodora.
"How did you get here?" she asked. "You must go to the end--we're not
letting any one slip in at the front. The jam is bad enough as it is."

Theodora blushed. "I'm--I'm on the Sub-team," she murmured, "and I'm
late. I--"

"Oh!" said the junior. "Why did you come in here? You go in the other
door. Just pass right in here, though," and Theodora, quite crimson
with the consciousness of a hundred eyes, pulled her mackintosh about
her and slipped in ahead of them all.

             Oh, _here's_ to Ninety-_yellow_,
             And her _praise_ we'll ever _tell_--_oh_,
     Drink her _down_, drink her _down_, drink her _down_,
               _down_, _down_!

the line called after her, and her mouth trembled with excitement. She
could just hear the other line:

     Oh, _here's_ to Ninety-_green_,
     She's the _finest_ ever _seen_!

and then the door slammed and she was upstairs on the big empty floor.
A member of the decorating committee nodded at her from the gallery.
"Pretty, isn't it?" she called down.

"Beautiful!" said Theodora, earnestly. One half of the gallery--her
half--was all trimmed with yellow and purple. Great yellow
chrysanthemums flowered on every pillar, and enormous purple shields
with yellow numerals lined the wall. Crossed banners and flags filled
in the intervals, and from the middle beam depended a great purple
butterfly with yellow wings, flapping defiance at a red and green
insect of indistinguishable species that decorated the other side. A
bevy of ushers in white duck, with _boutonnières_ of English violets
or single American beauties, took their places and began to pin on
crêpe paper sunbonnets of yellow or green, chattering and watching
the clock. A tall senior, with a red silk waist and a green scarf
across her breast, was arranging a box near the centre of the
sophomore side and practising maintaining her balance on it while she
waved a red baton. She was the leader of the Glee Club, and she would
lead the sophomore songs. Theodora heard a confused scuffle on the
stairs, and in a few seconds the galleries were crowded with the
rivers of color that poured from the entrance doors. It seemed that
they were full now, but she knew that twice as many more would crowd
in. She walked quickly to the room at the end of the hall and opened
the door. Beneath and all around her was the hum and rumble of
countless feet and voices, but in the room all was still. The Subs
lounged in the window-seats and tried to act as if it wasn't likely to
be any affair of theirs: one little yellow-haired girl confided
flippantly to her neighbor that she'd "only accepted the position so
as to be able to sit on the platform and be sure of a good place." The
Team were sitting on the floor staring at their captain, who was
talking earnestly in a low voice--giving directions apparently. The
juniors who coached them opened the door and grinned cheerfully. They
attached great purple streamers to their shirt-waists, and addressed
themselves to the freshmen generally.

"Your songs are great! That 'Alabama Coon' one was awfully good! You
make twice the noise that they do!"

The Team brightened up. "I think they're pretty good," the captain
said, with an attempt at a conversational tone. "Er--when do we
begin?"

"The Subs can go out now," said one of the coaches, opening the door
importantly. "Now, girls, remember not to wear yourselves out with
kicking and screaming. You're right under the President, and he'll
have a fit if you kick against the platform. Miss Kassan says that
this _must_ be a quiet game! She _will not_ have that howling! It's
her particular request, she says. Now, go on. And if anything happens
to Grace, Julia Wilson takes her place, _and look out for Alison
Greer_--she pounds awfully. Keep as still as you can!"

They trotted out and ranged themselves on the platform, and when
Theodora got to the point of lifting her eyes from the floor to gaze
down at the sophomore Subs across the hall in front of another
audience, the freshmen were off in another song. To her excited eyes
there were thousands of them, brilliant in purple and yellow, and
shouting to be heard of her parents in Pennsylvania. A junior in
yellow led them with a great purple stick, and they chanted, to a
splendid march tune that made even the members of the Faculty keep
time on the platform, their hymn to victory.

     _Hurrah!_ _hurrah!_ the _yellow_ is on _top_!
     _Hurrah!_ _hurrah!_ the _purple_ cannot _drop_!
     _We_ are Ninety-_yellow_ and our _fame_ shall never _stop_,
     _'Rah_, _'rah_, _'rah_, for the _freshmen_!

They sang so well and so loud and strong, shouting out the words so
plainly and keeping such splendid time, that as the verse and chorus
died away audience and sophomores alike clapped them vigorously, much
to their delight and pride. Theodora looked up for the first time and
saw as in a dream individual faces and clothes. They were packed in
the running-gallery till the smallest of babies would have been sorely
tried to find a crevice to rest in. A fringe of skirts and boots hung
from the edge, where the wearers sat pressed against the bars with
their feet hanging over. They blotted out the windows and sat out on
the great beams, dangling their banners into space. She could not see
the Faculty behind her, but she knew they were adorned with rosettes,
and that the favored ones carried flowers--the air where she sat was
sweet with violets. A group of ushers escorted a small and nervous
lady to the platform: on the way she threw back her cape and the
sophomores caught sight of the green bow at her throat.

             Oh, _here's_ to Susan _Beane_,
             She is _wearing_ of the _green_,
     Drink her _down_, drink her _down_, drink her _down_,
               _down_, _down_!

they sang cheerfully.

Just behind her a tall, commanding woman stalked somewhat consciously,
decked with yellow streamers and daffodils. The junior leader
consulted a list in her hand, frantically whispered some words to the
allies around her box, and the freshmen started up their tribute.

             Oh, _here's_ to Kath'rine _Storrs_,
             Aught but _yellow_ she _abhors_,
     Drink her _down_, drink her _down_, drink her _down_,
               _down_, _down_!

Miss Storrs endeavored to convey with her glance, dignity, amusement,
toleration of harmless sport, and a repudiation of the personality
involved in the song; but it is to be doubted if even she was
satisfied with the result. Theodora wished she had seen the President
come in. She had been told how he walked solemnly across the hall,
mounted the platform, unbuttoned his overcoat, and displayed two
gorgeous rosettes of the conflicting colors--his official and
exclusive privilege. And she had heard from the Team's retreat the
thunder of applause that greeted this traditional rite. She wondered
whether he cared who won: whether he realized what it was to play
against a team that had beaten in its freshman year.

A burst of applause and laughter interrupted her meditations. She felt
herself blushing--was it the Team? No: the sophomore Subs were
escorting to the middle of the floor a child of five or six dressed in
brightest emerald green: a child with a mane of the most remarkable
brick-red hair in the world. She wore it in the fashion of Alice in
Wonderland, and it grew redder and redder the longer one looked at it.
She held a red ribbon of precisely the same shade in her hand, and at
the middle of the floor the sophomores suddenly burst away from her
and ran quickly to their seats, revealing at the end of the ribbon an
enormous and lifelike green frog. The child stood for a moment
twisting her little green legs undecidedly, and then, overcome with
embarrassment at the appreciation she had evoked, shook her flaming
locks over her face, and dragging the frog with her, sometimes on its
side, sometimes on its head, fled to the sophomores, who bore her off
in triumph.

"They got her in Williamsburgh," said somebody; "they've been hunting
for weeks for a red-haired child, and that frog was from the drug
store--oh, my dear, how _perfectly_ darling!"

Alone and unabashed the freshman mascot took the floor. He was perhaps
four years old and the color of a cake of chocolate. His costume was
canary yellow--a perfect little jockey suit, with a purple band on his
arm adorned with Ninety-yellow's class numerals. He dragged by a
twisted cord of purple and yellow a most startling plum-colored
terrier, of a shade that never was on land or sea, with a tendency to
trip his master up at every step. In the exact middle of the floor the
mascot paused, rolled his eyes till they seemed in danger of leaving
their sockets, and then at a shrill whistle from the balcony pulled
his yellow cap from his woolly head and made a deep and courtly bow
to his patrons. But the storm of applause was more than he had been
prepared for, and with a wild look about the hall and a frantic tug at
the cord he dragged the purple and protesting animal to a corner of
the room, where a grinning elder sister was stationed for his comfort.

Theodora's heart beat high: theirs was the best! Everybody was
laughing and exclaiming and questioning; the very sophomores were
shrieking at the efforts of the terrier to drag the little darkey out
again; one member of the Faculty had laughed himself into something
very like hysteria and giggled weakly at every twitch of the idiotic
purple legs.

"It was Diamond Dyes," Theodora heard a freshman just above call out
excitedly, "and Esther Armstrong thought of it. They dyed him every
day for a week--"

The mascot and the dog had trotted up again, and as they ran back and
the animal gave a more than ordinarily vicious dart, the poor little
boy, yielding suddenly, sat down with exquisite precision on his
companion, and with distended eyes wailed aloud for his relative, who
disentangled him with difficulty and bore him away, his cap over his
ear and his little chocolate hands clutching her neck. In the
comparative silence that followed the gale of laughter some bustle and
conference was noticed on the sophomore side, and suddenly the leader
rose, lifting her green and red stick, and the front line of
sophomores and seniors intoned with great distinctness this thrilling
doggerel:

     I never saw a purple pup:
       I never hoped to see one:
     But now my mind is quite made up--
       I'd rather see than be one!

This was received favorably, and the gallery congratulated the
_improvisatrice_, while Theodora wondered if that detracted at all
from the glory of the freshmen! The chattering began again, and she
drummed nervously with her heels against the platform, while the
Centre, sitting next her, prophesied gloomily that Grace Farwell felt
awfully blue, and that Miss Kassan had said they were really almost
too slight as a team--the sophomores were so tall and big. Harriet
Foster had said that she was perfectly certain she 'd sprain her
ankle--then who would guard Martha Sutton? It was all very well for
Caroline Wilde to say not to worry about that--_she_ hadn't been able
to guard her last year! She was just like a machine. Her arm went up
and the ball went in; that was all there was to it. And Kate was as
bad. They might just as well make up their minds--

"Oh, hush!" cried Theodora, her eyes full of nervous tears; "if you
can't talk any other way, just keep still!"

"Very well," said the Centre, huffily, and then the chattering died
away as Miss Kassan made mysterious marks on the floor, and the
coaches took their places with halves of lemon and glasses of water in
their hands. A door opened, and in a dead hush the sophomore team
trotted in, two and two, the Suttons leading, bouncing the big ball
before them. There was such a silence that the thudding feet seemed to
echo and ring through the hall, and only when Martha suddenly tossed
it behind her at nothing and Kate from some corner walked over and
caught it did the red and green burst forth in a long-drawn single
shout: "Ninety-gre-e-e-e-e-n!"

Miss Kassan looked apprehensive, but no _'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!_ followed;
only,--

             Here's to _Sutton M._ and _K._
             And they'll _surely_ win the _day_,
     Drink 'em _down_, drink 'em _down_, drink 'em _down_,
               _down_, _down_!

Theodora set her teeth. "Humph! Will they?" she muttered savagely.

"Here they come!" cried the Centre, and they ran in, the big yellow
numerals gleaming effectively against their dark suits, their braids
bobbing behind them. Grace Farwell was quite pale, with one little
spot of red in each cheek, but Harriet Foster was crimson with
excitement, and the thick braids of auburn hair that fell over her
breast bumped up and down as she breathed. The thunder of recognition
died away, and they tossed the ball about nervously, with an eye on
Miss Kassan, who handed a ball to her assistant and took her place on
the line to watch fouls.

"All ready!" said the assistant. There was a shuffling about, a
confusion in the centre, a concentration of eyes. Harriet Foster took
her place by Martha Sutton and sucked in her under lip; Grace lined up
with Kate in the centre, clasping and unclasping her hands. Near her
stood a tall slim girl with green numerals on her sleeve. Her soft
dark hair was coiled lightly into a Greek knot--it seemed that the
slightest hasty movement must shake it over her sloping shoulders. It
grew into a clean-cut widow's peak low on her smooth white forehead;
below straight, fine brows two great, sad, gray eyes, wide apart,
wondered at life; her oval face was absolutely colorless and threw out
the little scarlet mouth that drooped softly at the corners. Her hands
lightly folded before her, she swayed a little and looked dreamily
over the heads of the others; she seemed as incongruous as a Madonna
at a bull-fight.

"Who is that lovely girl in the middle?" said some one behind
Theodora.

"That is a Miss Greer," was the reply. "She is one of the best--"

"Play!" called the assistant, and the big ball flew out of her hands
into Kate Sutton's. Kate gave an indescribable twist of her shoulder,
the ball rose in the air, passed over an utterly irrelevant scuffle in
the centre, and landed in Martha's hands. Martha balanced it a moment
and threw it into the exact middle of the basket, while the sophomores
howled and pounded and the freshmen looked blankly at one another.
They had not been accustomed to such simple and efficacious methods.

"One to nothing!" said the assistant, quietly. "Play!"

Theodora caught her breath. She dared not look at Grace, but she
stared hard at Harriet. What was Harriet thinking? Not that she could
have done anything--Martha was two inches taller and had the ball
tight in her hands two seconds after the assistant had tossed it--Ah,
what was that?

The ball had reached the floor and Grace had somehow gotten it. She
threw it to Virginia Wheeler, whose hands were just grazing it when
something shot like a flash of lightning upon her. She fell back and
some one slapped the ball from between her very finger-nails up, up
into the air, where Kate caught it, and a few short, sharp,
instantaneous passes got it into Martha's relentless hands. When it
dropped into the basket Alison Greer was looking beyond the tumult,
across the gallery, into the sky--white and unruffled. Theodora winked
and tried to think that some one else had swooped down from her place
six seconds before.

The sophomores were shouting yet. Some one said: "That's as pretty a
piece of team work as you'll often see, isn't it? Those twins have
eyes in the backs of their heads."

"Two to nothing--play!" said the assistant.

Theodora did not see the next goal won. Through a mist she stared into
the gallery. Her eye caught a face she knew, and she wondered angrily
how Miss Carew could smile so nonchalantly--it was her own class!
From the plume in her exquisite toque to the tip of her patent leather
toe she looked the visiting lady of leisure. The little lace
handkerchief dangling from her hand had a green silk monogram in the
corner--how dared she wear green? She nodded at a senior, across the
game, and fanned herself. The freshmen broke into a roar of delight
that ended in a long-drawn _A-a-a-a-h!_ There was a scuffle, a little
cry, a flash from Alison Greer's corner, and the assistant's "Three to
nothing--play!" was drowned in the sophomore shouts.

"You see the freshmen have no chance, really," said some one behind,
calmly, and as if it made little matter at best. "They are terribly
scared, of course, and they've never had the training of a big game.
The sophomores have been all through this before--they don't mind the
crowd. And then, they beat last year, and that gives them a tremendous
confidence. They're so much bigger, too--"

Theodora turned and stared at her. She was very pretty; she had a
bunch of violets as big as her head pinned to her dress, and her hands
were full of daffodils. That was like the Faculty! To take their
flowers and talk that way! "Horrid thing! _Horrid_ thing!" she
muttered, and the Centre, looking angrily at Miss Greer, assented.

"She's a perfect tiger! Look at her eyes! She knocked Virginia right
over--you couldn't stop her with a steam-engine--Oh! Oh! _Oh!_
_Ninety-yellow!_ _Rah, rah-a-a-a-ah!_"

Right out of their hands it had slipped, and the two girls slid across
the floor, fell, reached out, missed it, and gritted their teeth as
the Centres, with a long-practised manoeuvre, passed it rapidly from
hand to hand to Martha, whose long arm slid it imperturbably into the
basket.

"That Guard doesn't accomplish much," said somebody.

"Good heavens, how can she? Look at the girl! She lays it in
like--like that," was the answer, as the assistant called, "Five to
nothing--play!"

Theodora looked up at the purple and yellow gallery. The freshmen
stared as if hypnotized at their steady misfortune, their faces
flushed, their mouths tremulous: when the players ran to suck the
half-lemon or kneeled to tighten their shoes, their class-mates held
breath till they returned; when Grace got the ball or Virginia pushed
it aside, they started a cheer that faded into a sigh as Alison Greer
drove everything before her or Kate sent that terrible Sutton throw
to her sister. Theodora suddenly started. Just before the ball left
Kate, she threw up her left hand with the palm slightly spread, and
some instinct moved Theodora to glance at Martha. Her left hand went
up instantly as if to throw back a braid, but it waved toward the
right, and while Harriet braced herself for a jump the ball flew into
the air far off to the right and the instinctive motion toward Martha
left the way clear for one of Alison Greer's rushes and sudden,
birdlike throws. In a moment Martha had it, and as Harriet bent
forward to guard, and the ball toppled unsteadily on the edge of the
basket and fell off, in the midst of the hubbub and scuffle some one
pushed heavily on Harriet, four hands grasped the ball firmly,
somebody called, "Foul, foul!" and as five panting girls hurled
themselves against the wall and the assistant tossed up where it fell,
to make sure of fair play, Harriet dropped with her foot beneath her
and did not get up. Martha put the ball in from an amazing distance,
and in the storm of applause no one noticed the freshman Guard, till
the cry of, "Six to nothing--play!" found her still sitting there.

The ball was dropped, and they ran up to her. Two doctors hurried out;
she half rose, fell back and bit her lip. The freshmen craned out
over the gallery, the sophomores shook their heads; "Too bad, too
bad!" they murmured. Two freshmen made a chair, lifted Harriet quickly
and ran out with her, the doctors followed, and in the dead hush they
heard her voice as the door closed.

"I'm so sorry, girls--go right on--don't wait--"

"Plucky girl," said a man's voice. "It's a shame!"

The freshmen looked very blue; the team stood about in groups; the
sophomores waited politely at one side. Martha went over to Grace and
held her hand out: "I'm terribly sorry," she said earnestly, "it's too
bad. They say your Subs are very good, though."

Grace nodded, and ran over to the coaches, who walked aside with her
for a moment, talking earnestly. Presently they came over to the
platform and the Centre nudged Theodora enviously. "Go on!" she
whispered. "Grace wants you!"

Theodora gasped. "Not me--not me!" she objected feebly.
"Me--guard--Martha Sutton!"

"Go on!" said somebody, and they pushed her out.

"Come on, Theodora--hurry up, now!"

The people seemed to swim before her; for one dreadful moment she
longed for her home as she had never longed before. Her knees shook
and the clapping of the class sounded faraway. With her eyes on the
floor she moved out; halfway to the centre Virginia Wheeler stepped to
meet her and put her arm over Theodora's shoulder.

"Don't be scared, Theo," she said, "don't be scared, but help us
out--heaven knows we need it!"

"Watch Martha--don't take your eyes off her!" whispered the coach as
she handed the lemon to the new Guard.

As in a dream Theodora passed to the lower basket. Martha patted her
on the shoulder. "Hello!" she said in a bluff, friendly way, and then
the assistant called, "Six to nothing, play!" and threw the ball. It
dropped in the middle, and there was a terrible scrimmage for at least
four minutes, while the people swayed and sighed and clapped and
screamed, for the freshmen were getting terribly excited and rapidly
losing their self-control, as it became evident that their team was
struggling desperately and making one of the longest fights on record
for the ball they were determined to have. It was almost in the
basket, it tottered on the edge, it fell, and Kate Sutton caught
it--how, no one knew, for it was nowhere near her. The freshmen were
shrieking with rage, the sophomores clapping with triumph. Every eye
in the hall was fixed on Kate Sutton--every eye but Theodora's.

She watched Martha, and saw above her head that long brown hand wave
ever so slightly to the left as she tossed her hair back. She braced
herself, and just as Martha made a dash to the right, Theodora let her
go and flew to the left. She went too far, but even as Martha dashed
up behind her and put up her hands, Theodora jumped, caught the ball
with her left hand and with her right hit it a ringing blow that sent
it straight over to the other basket. It hit Alison Greer's head as
she rushed toward it, and while she was raising her hand Grace Farwell
snatched it from her shoulder, glanced desperately at the Home, who
had lost them two balls, and bounded across, throwing the ball before
her. The roar of delight from the freshmen was literally deafening,
and as Grace put it into the basket it seemed to Theodora that the
roof would surely drop.

"Six to one and the first half's up," said somebody, and Theodora was
pushed along with the Team--_her_ team--into the sanctum of their
rest. But as they neared the door, the applause became a song, and
before she quite understood what the verse was, it rang out above her
head:

             Here's to _Theo_dora _Root_,
             She's our _dandy_ substi_toot_,
     Drink her _down_, drink her _down_, drink her _down_,
               _down_, _down_!

Any one who has never been a subject of song to some hundreds of young
women cannot perhaps understand why the mention of one's name in
flattering doggerel should be so distinctly and immediately affecting.
But any one who has had that experience knows the little contraction
of the heart, the sudden hot tightening of the eyelids, the confused,
excited desire to be worthy of all that trust and admiration. It is to
be doubted if Theodora ever again felt so ideally, impersonally
devoted to any cause, so pathetically eager to "make them proud of
her."

In the little room the Team dropped on the floor and panted. The
coaches bustled in with water, shook the hand of the new Guard and
told her to lie flat and not talk. A strong odor of spirits filled the
room, and Theodora, turning her head languidly--for she felt very
tired all at once--saw that one of the juniors was rubbing somebody
with whiskey. Grace was nursing an elbow and excitedly asking
everybody to sit on Alison Greer: "She works her elbow right _into_
you! She runs you right down--"

"There, there!" said one of the juniors, "never mind, never mind,
Gracie! She's a slugger, if you like, but you've got to beat her!
Don't be afraid of her."

"It's no good," said the Home that had missed two balls, "we're too--"

"That's enough of that," interrupted the coach who was fanning
Virginia Wheeler. "You're playing finely, girls. Now all you've got to
do is to make up your five goals. Don't you see how low you've kept it
down? You did some fine centre work. Last year it was eight to
something the first half. You tried to put it in standing right under
the basket, Mary--stand off and take your time."

They trotted out to the music of the sophomore prize song. It was a
legacy from the seniors, who had themselves inherited it. It leaped
out at them--a mocking, dancing, derisive little tune to which
everybody kept time.

It was repeated indefinitely, and at every repetition it went faster
and more furious, and strangers who had not heard it laughed louder
and louder.

Grace smiled grimly. The Team remembered her words just before the
door opened.

"Girls, it isn't likely that we'll win, _but we can give 'em something
to beat_!"

And as the ball went back and forth and could not get free of the
centre, the sophomores realized that they had "something to beat." The
freshmen had somehow lost their fear; they smiled up at their friends
and grinned cheerfully at their losses, which is far better than to
try to look unconscious. A little bow-legged girl with a large nose
and red knuckles accomplished wonders in the centre, and won them
their second basket by stooping abruptly and rolling the ball straight
between Kate Sutton's feet to Grace, who sat upon it and threw it so
hard at Alison Greer that it bounded out of her hands and was promptly
caught by Virginia Wheeler and put into the basket. This feat of
Grace's was due entirely to her having quite lost her head, but it
passed as the most daring of manoeuvres, and received such wild
applause that Miss Kassan very nearly stopped the game.

"What _shall_ I do? This is terrible. I never _heard_ such noise as
the freshmen are making!" she mourned, with an apprehensive glance at
the platform. At that moment the ball soared high, fell, was sent up
again, and caught by a phenomenal leap on the part of the little
bow-legged girl, who got it into the basket before the Home knew what
was happening. The war broke out again, and Miss Kassan beheld two
members of the Faculty pounding with their canes on the platform.

"Did you see her jump? George! That was a good one! Did you see that,
Robbins?"

But Robbins was standing up in his interest and cheering under his
breath as Martha Sutton snatched a ball clearly intended for some one
else, quietly put it in the basket, and smiled politely at her
enthusiastic friends.

"Lord! What a Fullback she'd make!" he muttered, as Alison charged
down into the centre. The lavender shadows under her eyes were deep
violet now; her mouth was pressed to a scarlet line; her eyes were
fixed on the ball like gray stars. People seemed to melt away before
her: she never turned to right or left.

Theodora saw nothing, heard nothing but the slap of hands on the ball,
the quick breaths that slipped past her cheek. She knew that the
score was nine to five now; a little later it was nine to six. She
caught the eye of the girl in the toque: she was standing now, her
cheeks very red, and the little lace handkerchief was torn to shreds
in her hands.

"Does she really care?" thought Theodora, as she jumped and twisted
and doubled. Back on the senior side sat Susan Jackson, her eyes wide,
her lips parted; Cornelia Burt was breathing on her hands and chafing
them softly. "Nine to seven--play!" called the assistant.

Harriet sat near the fireplace, her bandaged foot on a bench before
her, her hands twisting and untwisting in her lap.

             _Here's_ to Harriet _Foster_,
             And we're _sorry_ that we _lost_ her,
     Drink her _down_, drink her _down_, drink her _down_,
               _down_, _down_!

sang the freshmen. Would Harriet have done better? Would she have--Ah!

"Ten to seven--play!"

And they were so near, too! They _were_ playing well--Grace and
Virginia were great--they could have done something if that stupid
Home--Oh!

Theodora leaped, missed the ball, but danced up in front of Martha
and warded off the girl who slipped in to help her. Martha uttered an
impatient exclamation and scowled. The freshmen howled and kicked
against the gallery, and as the freshman Home woke out of an apparent
lethargy and put the ball in neatly Theodora clapped and cheered with
the rest.

"Ten to eight--play!"

There was a scuffle, a fall, and a hot discussion. Two girls grasped
the ball, and the captains hesitated. Miss Kassan ran up, and in the
little lull Theodora heard from the platform:

"Oh, give it to the freshmen! They deserve it!"

"No, Miss Greer had it!"

"She knocked the girl off it, if that's what--" A rebellious howl from
the yellow gallery as Miss Greer bore off the ball, and a man's voice:

"Oh, nonsense! If you don't want 'em to howl, don't let 'em play! The
idea--to get 'em all worked up and then say: 'No, young ladies,
control yourselves!' How idiotic! I don't blame 'em--I'd howl
myself--Jiminy crickets! _Look_ at that girl! Good work! _Good
work!_"

"Eleven to eight--play!"

"Good old Suttie! Good girl! Ninety-gre-e-e-en!"

Theodora's mouth was dry, and she ran to the coach for a lemon. The
junior's hand shook, and her voice was husky from shouting.

"It's grand--it's grand!" she said quickly. "Martha's mad as a hatter!
See her braid!"

Martha had twisted her pale brown pigtail tightly round her neck, and
was calling with little indistinct noises to her sister. Adah Levy was
talking to herself steadily and whispering, "_Hurry now, hurry now,
hurry now!_" as she doubled and bent and worried the freshman Home out
of her senses. Grace Farwell was everywhere at once, and was still
only when she fell backwards with a bang that sickened the visiting
mothers, and brought the freshmen's hearts into their mouths. A great
gasp travelled up the gallery, and the doctor left her seat, but
before she reached the players Grace was up, tossed her head, blinked
rapidly, and with an unsteady little smile took her place by Alison
Greer. And then the applause that had gone before was mild in
comparison with the thunder from both galleries, and Miss Kassan
looked at her watch uneasily and moved forward.

Now everybody was standing up, and the men were pushing forward, and
only the gasps and bursts of applause and little cries of
disappointment disturbed the stillness--the steady roar had stopped.

Theodora knew nothing, saw nothing: she only played. Her back ached,
and her throat was dry; Martha's elbow moved like the piston of a
steam-engine; her arm, when Theodora pressed against it, was like a
stiff bar; she towered above her Guard. It was only a question of a
few, few minutes--_could_ they make it "eleven to nine"?

She must have asked the question, for Martha gasped, "No, you won't!"
at her, and her heart sank as Miss Kassan moved closer. The ball
neared their basket; the little bow-legged girl ducked under Alison's
nose and emerged with it from a chaos of swaying Centres, tossed it to
Grace, who dashed to the basket--

"_Time's up!_"

The freshmen shrieked, the Team yelled to its captain: "Put it in! put
it in!" The sophomore Guards had not heard Miss Kassan, and Grace
poised the ball. A yell from the freshmen--and she deliberately
dropped it.

"Time's up," she said, with a little break in her voice, and as Miss
Kassan hurried forward to stop the play she gave her the ball. Through
the tumult a bass voice was heard: "I say, you know, that was pretty
decent! I'm not sure I'd have done that myself!"

And as the assistant and Miss Kassan retired to compare fouls, and the
noise grew louder and louder, the freshman team, withdrawn near the
platform, heard a young professor, not so many years distant from his
own alma mater, enthusiastically assuring any one who cared to hear,
that "That girl was a dead game sport, now!"

For a moment the feeling against Grace had been bitter--the basket was
so near! But as the sophomores were openly commending her, and as Miss
Kassan was heard to say that the Team had played in splendid form and
had given a fine example of "the self-control that the game was
supposed to teach," they thought better of their captain with every
minute.

"Eleven to eight, in favor of Ninety-green--fouls even!" said Miss
Kassan, and the storm broke from the gallery. But before it reached
the floor, almost, Martha was energetically beating time, and above
the miscellaneous babble rose the strong, steady cheer of the
sophomores:

     'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!
     'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!
     'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!--Ninety-ye-e-e-e-llow!

"Quick, girls! quick!" cried Grace, for Miss Kassan was running toward
them with determination in her eye.

     'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!
     'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!
     'Rah, 'rah, 'rah!--Ninety-gre-e-e-e-n!

Then it was all a wild, confused tumult. Theodora had no distinct
impressions; people kissed her and shook her hand, and Kathie Sewall
carried Grace off to a swarm of girls who devoured her, but not before
Martha, breathless from a rapid ride around the floor on the unsteady
shoulders of her loyal team, had solemnly extended her hot brown hand
to the freshman captain and said, with sincere respect, "That was as
good a freshman game as ever was played, Miss Farwell--we're mighty
proud of ourselves! Your centre work was simply great! And--and of
course we know that that last goal was--was practically yours!"

Theodora had expected to feel so ashamed and sad--and somehow she was
so proud and happy! The sophomores last year had locked themselves in
for one hour and--expressed their feelings; but the freshmen could
only realize that theirs was the closest score known for years, and
that they had made it against the best team the college had ever seen;
that Martha had said that in fifteen minutes more, at the rate they
were playing, nobody knew what might have happened; that Miss Kassan
had said that except in the matter of noise she had been very proud of
them; and that Professor Robbins had called their captain a Dead Game
Sport!

It would not have been etiquette to carry Grace about the hall, but
they managed to convey to her their feelings, which were far from
perfunctory, and in their enthusiasm they went so far as to obey the
Council's earnest request that the decorations should remain
untouched. They cheered Theodora and Virginia and Harriet and the
bow-legged girl till you would have supposed them victorious; and when
Harriet told Grace, with a little gulp, that it was all up with her,
for her mother had said that a second sprained ankle meant no more
basket-ball, the little sympathetic crowd brightened, and all eyes
turned to Theodora, who breathed hard and tried to seem not to
notice. Could it be? Would she ever run out bouncing the ball in that
waiting hush?...

They were out of the Gym now, and only the ushers' bonnets, the green
and yellow flowers that the Council had _not_ controlled, the
crumpled, printed sheets of basket-ball songs, and the little mascots
posing for their pictures on the campus made the day different from
any other.

"Come and lie down," said somebody, regarding Theodora with a marked
respect. "You'll want to get rested before the dinner, you know."

And as Theodora stared at her and half turned to run after Grace, whom
Kathie Sewall was quietly leading off, the girl--she was in the house
with her--held her back.

"I'd let Grace alone, if I were you," she said. "She's pretty well
used up; she hurt her elbow quite badly, but she wouldn't say
anything, and Dr. Leach says she'll have to keep perfectly quiet if
she wants to be at the dinner--wants to! the idea! But she said _of
course_ you were to come. They say they're going to take some of the
Gym decorations down.--What! Why, the idea! _Of course_ you'll go!
You're sure to make the Team, anyhow, for that matter! I tell you,
Theodora, we're proud of you! It wasn't any joke to step in there and
guard Martha Sutton with a score of six to nothing!"

Theodora paused at the steps, her mackintosh half off, her hair
tangled about her crimson cheeks, her sleeve dusty from that last mad
slide.

"No," she said, with a wave of reminiscence of that sick shaking of
her knees, that shrinking from a million critical eyes. "No, it wasn't
any joke--not in the least!"

And she climbed up the stairs to a burst of applause from the freshmen
in the house and the shrill cry of her room-mate:

"Come on, Theo! I've got a bath-tub for you!"




THE SECOND STORY

_A CASE OF INTERFERENCE_




II

A CASE OF INTERFERENCE


"What I want to know," said the chairman of the committee, wearily,
"is just this. Are we going to give the _Lady of Lyons_, or are we
not? I have a music lesson at four and a tea at five, and while your
sprightly and interesting conversation is ever pleasing to me--"

"Oh, Neal, don't! Think of something for us! Don't you want us to give
it?"

"I think it's too love-making. And no one up here makes love. The
girls will howl at that garden scene. You must get something where
they can be funny."

"But, Neal, dear, _you_ can make beautiful love!"

"Certainly I can, but I can't make it alone, can I? And Margaret Ellis
is a stick--a perfect stick. But then, have it! I see you're bent on
it. Only I tell you one thing--it will take more rehearsing than the
girls will want to give. And I shan't do one word of it publicly till
I think that we have rehearsed enough together. So that's all I've got
to say till Wednesday, and I _must_ go!"

The door opened--shut; and before the committee had time for comment
or criticism, their chairman had departed.

"Neal's a trifle cross," suggested Patsy, mildly. "Something's the
matter with her," said Julia Leslie. "She got a note from Miss
Henderson this afternoon, and I think she's going to see her now. Oh,
I haven't the vaguest idea--What? No, I know it's not about her work.
Neal's all straight with that department. Well, I think I'll go over
to the Gym and hunt out a suit. Who has the key to the property box
now?"

The little group dissolved rapidly and No. 18 resumed its wonted
quiet. "There's nothing like having a society girl for a room-mate, is
there, Patsy?" said the resident Sutton twin, opening the door. She
and her sister were distinguishable by their room-mates alone, and
they had been separated with a view to preventing embarrassing
confusion, as they were incredibly alike. "Couldn't I make the Alpha
on the strength of having vacated this hearth and home eighteen times
by actual count for its old committees?"

"I've put you up five times, Kate, love, but they think your hair's
too straight. Couldn't you curl it?"

Kate sniffed scornfully. "I've always known that the literary
societies had some such system of selection," she said to the bureau.
"Now, in an idle moment of relaxation, the secret is out! Patsy, I
_scorn_ the Alpha, and the Phi Kappa likewise."

"I scorn the Phi Kappa myself, theoretically," said Patsy.

"Do you think they'll take in that queer junior, you know, that looks
so tall till you get close to her, and then it's the way she walks?"

"Dear child, your vivid description somehow fails to bring her to my
mind."

"Why don't you want her in Alpha? But be careful you don't wait too
long! You're both leaving me till late in the year, you know, and
then, ten to one, the other one gets me!"

"A little violet beside a mossy stone is a poor comparison, Katharine,
but at the moment I think of no other. I am glad you grasp the
situation so clearly, though."

"But, truly, I wonder why they don't take that girl--isn't her name
Hastings?--into Phi Kappa? She writes awfully well, they say, and I
guess she recites well enough."

The other Sutton twin sauntered in, and appearing as usual to grasp
the entire conversation from the beginning, rolled her sister off the
couch, filled her vacant place, and entered the discussion.

"But, my dear child, you know she won't make either society! She's too
indifferent--she doesn't care enough. And she's off the campus, and
she doesn't go out anywhere, and she is always alone, and that speaks
for itself--"

"Oh, I'm tired of talking about her! Stop it, Kate, and get some
crackers, that's a dear! Or I'll get them myself," and Patsy was in
the hall.

Kate shook her head wisely at the bureau. "Something's in the air,"
she said softly. "Patsy is bothered. So is Neal. And there are plenty
of crackers on the window-seat!"

Miss Margaret Sewall Pattison sauntered slowly down the stairs. For
one whose heart was set on crackers she seemed strangely indifferent
to the hungry girls standing about the pantry with fountain pens and
lecture books and racquets and hammocks under their arms. She walked
by them and out of the door, stood a moment irresolutely on the porch,
and then, as she caught sight of Cornelia Burt coming out of the
dormitory just beyond, she hurried out to meet her.

"Busy this hour, Neal?" she said.

"No," said Cornelia, briefly. "Where shall we go?"

"We can go to the property box and get some clothes," said Patsy, "and
talk it over there."

In the cellar of the gymnasium it was cool and dim. The beams rose
high above their heads, and a musty smell of tarlatan and muslin and
cheese-cloth filled the air. Patsy sat on an old flower-stand, and
pushed Cornelia down on a Greek altar that lay on its side with a
faded smilax wreath still clinging to it.

"What did she say to you, Neal?" she asked.

Neal looked at the floor. "She was lovely, but I didn't half
appreciate it. I was so bothered and--vexed. Pat, I didn't know the
Faculty ever did this sort of thing, did you?"

"I don't believe they often do," said Patsy. "Did she read that thing
to you, too?"

"Yes. Patsy, that's a remarkable thing. Do you know, when I went there
I thought she was going to call me down for taking off the Faculty in
that last Open Alpha. The girls say she hates that sort of thing. You
know she always says just what she thinks. And she said, 'I want to
read you a little story, Miss Burt, that happened to come into my
hands, and that has haunted me since.'"

"How do you suppose _she_ got hold of it?" queried Patsy.

"I don't know, I'm sure. I certainly shouldn't pick her out to exhibit
_my_ themes to!--I never saw them together."

"I think I saw them walking once--well, go on!"

"'For the _Monthly_?' said I.

"'No,' said she. 'I think the author would not consent to its
publication.' And then she read it to me. Pat, if that girl has
suffered as much as that, I don't see how she stays here."

"She's too proud to do anything else," said Patsy. "Go on."

"Then Miss Henderson said: 'I needn't tell you the value of this thing
from a literary point of view, Miss Burt.'

"'No,' said I, 'you needn't.'

"'Very well,' said she; 'then I'll tell you something else. Every word
of it is true.'

"'I'm sorry,' said I."

"Oh, Neal! I cried when she read it to me! I blubbered like a baby.
And she was so nice about it. But I hated her, almost, for disturbing
me so."

"Precisely. So I said: 'And what have you read this to me for, Miss
Henderson?' And then she told me that the girl in the story was
Winifred Hastings. She has always lived with older people and been a
great pet and sort of prodigy, you know, and was expected to do great
things here, and found herself lonely, and was proud and didn't make
friends, and got farther away from the college instead of nearer to
it, and all that. And I said, 'I suppose she's not the only one, Miss
Henderson.' And she looked at me so queerly. 'Mephistopheles said
that,' said she."

"Oh! Neal! How could you? I--why are you so cold and--"

"Unsympathetic? I don't know. We all have the defects of our
qualities, I suppose. Miss Henderson was quite still for a moment,
looking at me. I felt like a fly on a pin. 'Why do you try so hard to
be cruel, Miss Burt?' said she, finally. 'I think you have an immense
capacity for suffering and for sympathy. Is it because you are afraid
to give way to it?' And I said, 'Exactly so, Miss Henderson. I never
go to the door when the tramps come.'

"'Neither did I, once,' said she, 'but I found it was a singularly
useless plan. You've got to, some time, Miss Burt.'

"'That's what I've always been afraid of, but I'm putting it off as
long as I can,' said I.

"And then she told me that this was the first time that she had done
anything of this kind for a long while. 'I don't believe in helping
people to their places, as a rule,' she said. 'They usually get what
they deserve, I fancy. But this is a peculiar case. You suppose she is
not the only one, Miss Burt? I hope there are very few like her. I
have never known of a girl of her ability to lose everything that she
has lost. There are girls who are queer and erratic and somewhat
solitary and perhaps discontented, but they get into a prominence of
their own and you call it a "divine discontent," and make them
geniuses, and they get a good deal out of it, after all. There are
girls who are queer and quick-tempered, but good students, and devoted
to a few warm friends, and their general unpopularity doesn't trouble
them particularly. There are the social leaders, who don't
particularly suffer if they don't get into a society, who are popular
everywhere, and get the good time they came for. But Winifred Hastings
has somehow missed all these. She got started wrong, and she's gone
from bad to worse. She is not solitary by nature, and yet she is more
alone than the girls who like solitude, even. She is not naturally
reserved, and yet she is considered more so than almost any girl in
college. I believe her to have great executive ability. I consider
her one of the distinctly literary girls in her class,--and if there
is anything in essentially "bad luck," I do honestly believe that she
is the victim of it. Her characteristics are so balanced and opposed
to each other that she can't help herself, and she does things that
make her seem what she is not. Her real self is in this story. You can
see the pathos of that!'"

Neal drew a long breath. "Did she say that to you?" she concluded.

"No, not exactly. She told me that she was speaking to me as one of
the social influences of the college. I felt like a cross between
Madame de Staël and Ward McAllister, you know. And then she spoke of
the power we have, the girls like me, and how a little help--oh, Neal!
it _does_ mean a good deal, though! I can't make people take this girl
up, all alone! The girls aren't--"

"They are! They're the merest sheep! If you do it, they'll all follow
you. That is, if she's really worth anything. Of course, they aren't
fools."

"She sat on me awfully, though, Neal! I said, 'I suppose you think we
ought to have her in Alpha, Miss Henderson.' She gave me a look that
simply withered me. 'My dear Miss Pattison,' said she, in that
twenty-mile-away tone, 'I am not in the habit of suggesting candidates
for either of the societies: I must have made myself far from clear to
you.' And I apologized. But it's what she meant, all the same!"

"Of course it is. Well, I suppose she's right. It isn't everybody
would have dared to do that much. I respect her for it myself. You are
to launch her socially, I am to--"

"Neal Burt, I think you ought to be ashamed! Didn't Miss Henderson
tell you how Winifred Hastings admired you?"

"Yes. She said that I was the only girl in the college whose
friendship--Oh, dear! I wish she had gone to Vassar, that girl!
Heavens! It's half-past three! I must go this minute. Well, Patsy,
we're honored, in a way. I don't think Miss Henderson would talk to
every one as she has to us, do you?"

"No," said Patsy, gravely, "I don't. You know, Neal, just as I was
going, she said, 'Of course you realize, Miss Pattison, that only you
and I and Miss Burt have seen this story?' 'I understand,' said I.
'Perhaps I have done this because I understand Miss Hastings better
than she thinks,' she said. 'I--I was a little like her, myself, once,
Miss Pattison!'"

"Yes," said Neal, "she told me that."

"I don't see why Miss Henderson doesn't take her up herself, if she
understands her so terribly well," scowled Patsy. "She looks just like
the kind of girl to be devoted to one person and all that, you know.
Miss Henderson could go for walks with her and--"

"Too much sense!" said Neal, briefly. "She wants to get her in with
the girls. That sort of thing would kill her with the girls, and she
knows it."

"Oh, bother! Look at B. Kitts--she's a great friend of Miss
Henderson's, and look at yourself!"

"Not at all," Neal returned decidedly. "Biscuits was in with your set
long before she got to know Miss Henderson, and I knew Marion Hunter
at home before she came up here. It's all very well to chum with the
Faculty if you're in with the girls, too, but otherwise--as my friend
Claude says, Nay, nay, Pauline! Besides, Miss Henderson doesn't go in
for that sort of thing anyhow--she's too clever."

"Oh, well, I suppose it _is_ best for us to do it. I guess she's right
enough," said Patsy, rising as she spoke, "and I suppose we can do it
as well as anybody, for that matter."

They mounted the stone steps and came out into a light that dazzled
them. "There she is!" said Patsy softly, as a tall girl, plainly
dressed, walked quickly by them. Her face was strangely set, her mouth
almost hard, her eyes looked at them with an expression that would
have been defiant but for something that softened them as they met
Neal's. She bowed to her, hardly noticing Patsy's "Good afternoon,
Miss Hastings!" and hurried off to the back campus. Behind were two
freshmen loaded with pillows. "Isn't that Miss Hastings?" said one.

"Yes. She's going to leave college."

"Oh! Well, we can lose her better than some others I could mention,"
said the prettier and better dressed of the two. Then, catching sight
of Patsy and Neal, she stopped and blushed a little. "Did--did you get
my note, Miss Burt? Will you come?" she asked prettily. Neal smiled.

"Why, yes, I shall be pleased--at four on Saturday, I think you said?"
And then as the two moved on she added, "I heard you say something
about Miss Hastings: is it true she's going to leave?"

"Yes," said the other freshman, importantly. "Immediately, she told
Mrs. White. I'm in the house with her. I think she said next week.
She's disappointed in college, I guess. Well, I should think she would
be. She--"

"I trust the college has given her no reason to be," said Neal,
gravely. "I sometimes think her attitude--if that should happen to be
her attitude--somewhat justifiable." And before the freshman could
recover, Miss Burt and her friend were halfway across the campus.

Patsy sighed with admiration. "Oh, Cornelia, how I reverence you!" she
said. "I couldn't do that to save my soul. No. Once I tried it, and
the freshman laughed at me. I slunk away--positively slunk."

But Neal did not laugh. "I can't see what to do," she half whispered,
as if to herself. "Next week--next week! Why then, why then, it's all
over with her. She's thrown up the sponge!"

Patsy peered into Cornelia's face and caught her breath. "Why, Neal,
do you care? Do you really care?" she said. Neal looked at her
defiantly through wet lashes. "Yes, I do care. I think it's horrible.
To have her beaten like this!--I have to go now. Be sure to come to
Alpha to-night!"

"When Cornelia leaves, she leaves sudden," said Kate Sutton, from the
window. "Coming up?"

Patsy stamped slowly up the two flights, and rummaged in a very mussy
window-box for a silk waist. Her room-mate listened for some
expression of grief or joy to give the tone to conversation, but none
came; so she began on her own account.

"Martha says," indicating her twin, who was polishing the silver
things with alcohol and a preparation fondly believed by her to be
whiting, but which incessant use had reduced to a dirty gritty gum,
"Martha says she knows who's going in to-night."

"Oh, indeed?"

"Yes. She says it's Eleanor Huntington and Leila Droch. She knows for
certain."

"Great penetration she has--they've never been mentioned," returned
the senior, absent-mindedly, grabbing under the chiffonier for missing
hair-pins.

A shriek of triumph from the twins brought her to her knees.

"Aha! I told you they weren't in it! Perhaps you'll believe me again!
Perhaps I can't find out a thing or two!"

The twins shook hands delightedly, and Patsy, irritated at her slip,
grabbed again for the hair-pins, incidentally discovering a silver
shoe-horn and a fountain pen.

"Very clever you are--very," she remarked coldly. "Quite unusual, and
so young, too. No wonder your parents are worried!"

This was a bitter cut, for the twins were industriously engaged in
living down the report that the Registrar had in their freshman year
received a note from Mrs. Sutton imploring her to curb if necessary
their passion for study, which invariably brought on nervous
headaches. This was peculiarly interesting to their friends, who had
never remarked any undue application on their part and were, of
course, proportionately eager to caution them against it. They
squirmed visibly now and changed their tone abruptly.

"They say that Frances Wilde was terribly disappointed about making
Alpha--she'd much rather have got Phi Kappa," said Kate, with a
mixture of malice and humility.

Patsy was silent. Martha grinned and took up the conversation.

"But her heart would have been broken if she hadn't gotten in this
year," she returned amiably.

Patsy turned and glared at them, one arm in the silk waist.

"What utter nonsense!" she broke out. "As if it made any matter, one
way or the other! As if it made two cents' worth of difference! You
know perfectly well that it's no test at all--making a society. Look
at the girls who are in! It's a farce, as Neal says--" She stopped and
scowled at them defiantly. The twins gasped. This from a society girl
to them, as yet unelect! Even for a conversation with the Sutton
twins, with whom, owing to their own contagious example, truth was
bound to fly out sooner or later, this was unusual. It was odd enough
to discuss the societies at all with perfectly eligible sophomores who
might reasonably expect to enter one or another sometime and who were
nevertheless yet uncalled; but the twins discussed everything with
everybody, utterly regardless of etiquette, tradition, or propriety,
and their upper-classroom-mates had long ago given up any ideas of
reserve and discipline they might have held.

Martha gasped but promptly replied. "That's all very well for Cornelia
Burt," she said, with the famous Sutton grin. "Anybody who made the
Alpha in the first five and was known well enough to have been
especially wanted in Phi Kappa and even begged to refuse--"

"How did you know that, Martha Sutton?"

"Oh! how did I? The President confided it to me one day when he was
calling. As I say, Neal Burt and you can afford to talk; you can say
it's a bore and all that and make fun of the meetings--"

"I don't!"

"You do! I heard you growling about it to Neal. And Bertha Kitts said
she'd about as soon conduct a class prayer-meeting as Phi--Oh, not to
me, naturally, but I know the girl who heard the girl she said it to!
Heard her tell about it, I mean.

"It's all very well for you, but you'd feel differently if you were
out! It's just like being a junior usher. There are plenty of spooks
in, but there aren't many bright girls out. Everybody knows that lots
of the society girls are pushed in by their friends and pulled in for
heaven knows what--certainly not brains! But, just the same, you know
well enough that you can count on one hand all the girls in the
college that you'd think ought to be in and aren't. You don't know
anything about it, for you were sure of it and everybody knew it, but
the ones that aren't, they're the ones that worry! Why, I know
sophomores to-day that will cry all night if they don't get their
notes and their flowers and their front seat in chapel Monday!"

"Oh, nonsense!"

"Oh, nonsense, indeed! Won't they, Katie?"

"Sure!" returned her sister, placidly.

"I guess Alison Greer will cry all right, if she's not in!"

Patsy bit her lip and tapped her foot nervously. Then she shrugged her
shoulders and opened the door, turning to remark, "You don't seem to
be wasted away, either of you!"

"Oh, we! We're all right!" replied Martha, comfortably. "We never
expected it sophomore year, anyhow. Nothing proddy about us, you know.
Too many clever girls in the sophomore class, you see. But we expect
to amble in next year, we do. And violets from you. And supper at
Boyden's. Oh, yes! Don't you worry about us, Miss Pattison, we're all
right!"

Miss Pattison sighed: sighs usually ended one's conversations with the
twins, for nothing else so well expressed one's attitude.

"It's a pity you're so shrinking," she contented herself with
observing. "I'm afraid you'll never come forward sufficiently to be
known well by either society!" And she went down to get her mail.


II

There was a full meeting of the Alpha that Saturday night. The
vice-president was lobbying energetically in behalf of a sophomore
friend who would prove the crown and glory of the society, if all her
upper-class patroness said of her could possibly be true. There was
but one place open for the rest of the term, for the society had grown
unusually that year, and some conservative seniors had pressed hard on
the old tradition that sixty was a suitable and necessary limit, and
put a motion through to that effect, and every possible junior had
been elected long ago. So the vice-president was distinctly hopeful.
Amid the buzz and clamor of fifty-odd voices, the president slapped
the table sharply. "_Will_ the meeting please come to order!" she
cried. A little rustle, and the handsome secretary arose. "The regular
meeting of the Alpha Society was held--" and the report went on.

"Are there any objections to this report?" asked the president,
briskly. "Yes. It's far too long," muttered Suzanne Endicott,
flippantly. The president looked at her reproachfully, and added, "If
not, we will proceed to the election of new members--I mean the new
member. As you probably know, there is but one place left, according
to the recent amendment, and I think that we will vote as usual on the
three that are before us, and elect the one having the most
affirmative ballots. Are there any objections to this method?" There
were none. The vice-president glanced appealingly at the girl she was
not quite sure of and smiled encouragingly at the sophomore she had
successfully intimidated. The secretary rose again. "The names to be
voted on this evening are Alison Greer, '9-, Katharine Sutton, '9-,
Marion Dustin, '9-," she announced. "I may add that Miss Sutton has
the highest marks from the society, and that if we don't take her this
time there is very little doubt that Phi Kappa Psi will. They'll be
afraid to risk another meeting."

"That's true," said somebody, as the buzzing began again. "We're
carrying this point a little too far. I declare, it's harder to decide
on the people that aren't prods than anybody would imagine. We know we
want 'em sometime, but we put it off so long--"

"Kate Sutton's awfully bright! I think she should have been here
before. I've been trembling for fear we'd lose her by waiting so
long--"

"Still, Marion is _such_ a dear, and it's pretty late for a girl
that's been known so well for so long, without getting in, it seems to
me," said the vice-president, skilfully. "Why didn't she get in before
if she was so bright?"

"And there's Martha, too. They're just alike. I think Martha's a
little brighter, if anything. Shall we have to take 'em both?"

"No. The girls all say to give her to Phi Kappa, and tell 'em apart by
the pins!"

"Like babies!"

"How silly!"

"To be perfectly frank, Miss Leslie, I must say I don't think so.
Alison is an awfully dear girl, and all that, but I hardly think she
represents the element we hope to get into Alpha. I'm sorry to say so,
but--"

"The voting has begun," said the president. "Will you hurry, please?"

"Miss President," said Cornelia Burt, rising abruptly, "may I speak to
the society before the voting?"

"Certainly, Miss Burt," said the president. There was an instant hush,
and the girls stood clustered about the ballot-table in their pretty,
light dresses--a charming sight, Neal thought vaguely, as she hunted
for the words to say.

"I know perfectly well that what I am about to propose is quite
unconstitutional," she began, and to her own ears her voice seemed far
off. How many there were, and how surprised and attentive they looked!
They were no fools, as she had said. They represented the cleverest
element in the college, on the whole, and they had, naturally enough,
their own designs and inclinations--why should they be turned from
them in a moment?

"I know that no girl is eligible for voting upon until she has been
read two meetings before, and been properly put up for membership, and
all that," said Neal, quietly, with her eyes fixed on Patsy's, who
tried to evade them. Poor Patsy. She wanted Kate to get the society in
her sophomore year! "But I am in possession of certain facts that seem
to me to warrant the breaking through the constitution, if such a
thing can ever be done."

The silence had become intense. An ominous look of surprise deepened
on the girls' faces, and the president looked doubtfully at the
secretary.

"I think I am quite justified in believing that I have not the
reputation of a sentimental person," said Cornelia. She had herself
well in hand, now. The opposition that she felt nerved her to her
customary self-possession. A little grin swept around the room. She
was, apparently, quite justified.

"I have been in the Alpha as long as any one here," said Neal, quietly
still, "and in all this time I have never proposed any one for
membership in it. I have voted whenever I knew anything about the
person in question, and I have never blackballed but once. I think I
may say I have done my share of work for the society--"

There was a unanimous murmur of deep and unqualified assent. "You have
done more than your share," said the president, promptly.

"I mention these things," said Neal, "in order that you may see that I
recognize the need of some apology for what I am about to propose. I
want to propose the name of Winifred Hastings to-night, and have her
voted on with the rest. If it is a possible thing, I want her elected.
That she would be elected without any doubt, I am certain, if only I
could put the facts of the case properly before you. That she must be
elected, now, to-night, is absolutely necessary, for by another
meeting she will have left the college--left it for the lack of just
such recognition as membership in the society will give her."

Cornelia Burt was a born orator. Never was she so happy as when she
felt an audience, however small, given over to her, eyes and ears, for
the moment. She stood straight as a reed, and looked easily over their
faces, holding by very force of personality their attention. She spoke
without the slightest hesitation, yet perfectly simply and after no
set form. Insensibly the girls around her felt conviction in her very
presence: they agreed with her against their will, while she was
speaking.

"Before I go any farther, I want to tell you that Miss Hastings is no
friend of mine," said Neal. "I hardly know her. Only lately I have
learned the circumstances that led me to take this step. I feel that I
must do this thing. I feel that we are letting go from the college a
girl whose failure in life, if she fails, will be in our hands. We can
elect these others later: Winifred Hastings leaves the college next
week. And, speaking as editor of the college paper, I must say that
she carries with her some of the best literary material in the
college. You ask me why we have never seen it--I tell you, because she
is a girl who needs encouragement, and she has never had it. She can
do her best only when it is called for. Some of you may think you know
her--may think that she is proud and solitary and disagreeable: she
is not. _This_ is the real girl!"

And, stepping farther into the circle, Cornelia, by an effort of
memory she has never equalled since, told them, with the simplest
eloquence, the pathetic story of Winifred Hastings' life, as she had
written it. She did not comment--she only related. Her keen literary
appreciation had caught the most effective parts, and she had the
dramatic sense to which every successful speaker owes so much. Under
her touch the haughty, solitary figure of a scarcely known girl melted
away before them, and they saw a baffled, eager, hungry soul that had
fought desperately, and was going silently away--beaten.

Cornelia Burt had made speeches before, and she made them afterward,
to larger and more excited college audiences, but she never held so
many hearts in her hand as she did that night. She was not a
particularly unselfish girl, but no one who heard her then ever called
her egotistic afterward. Her whole nature was thrown with all its
force into this fight--for it was a fight.

Perhaps there is nowhere an audience less sentimental and more
critical than a group of clever college girls. They see clearly for
the most part, and, like all clever youth, somewhat cruelly. They
object to being ruled by any but their chosen, and however they
admired her, Cornelia was not their chosen leader. It was not because
her speech was able, but because it was so evident that she believed
herself only the means of preventing a calamity that she was striving
with all her soul to avert, that she impressed them so deeply.

For she did impress them. When she ended, it was very quiet in the
room. "I have broken a confidence in telling this," she said. "The
girl herself would rather die than have you know it, I'm sure, and
now--I feel afraid. It has been a bold stroke; if I have lost, I shall
never forgive myself. But oh! I _cannot_ have her go!"

She sat down quickly and stared into her lap. The spell of her voice
was gone, the girls looked at each other, and a tall, keen-eyed girl
with glasses got up. "I wish to say," she said, "that while Miss
Burt's story is terribly convincing, still this may be a little
exaggerated, and, at any rate, think of the precedent! If this should
be done very often--"

"But it won't be!" cried some one with a somewhat husky voice, and
Patsy rudely interrupted the speaker. Dear Patsy! She crushed her
handkerchief in her hand and said good-by to Kate: she would have
liked to put her pin in Kate's shirt-waist, and now--now Phi Kappa
would get her! When Patsy spoke, it was with the voice of eleven, for
she carried at least ten of the leading set in the Alpha with her.

"I think we are all very glad to realize that there won't be many such
cases--most people have compensations--we ought to be willing to break
the constitution again for such a thing, anyhow--and, Miss President,
I move that Miss Hastings be voted upon by acclamation!"

"I second the motion," said the vice-president, quickly.

"It is moved and seconded that Miss Hastings be voted upon by
acclamation," said the president. "All in favor--"

"Miss Hastings has yet to be proposed," said some one, after the vote.

The president looked at Cornelia.

"I propose Winifred Hastings, '9-, as a member of the Alpha Society,"
said Cornelia, with flaming cheeks and downcast eyes. She dared not
look at them. Were they going to punish her? She heard the motion
announced, she heard the name put up.

"All in favor please signify by rising," said the president, and only
when the Alpha rose in a body did Cornelia lift her eyes.

They were all looking at her, and she stepped a little back.

"I cannot thank you," she said, so low that they leaned forward to
hear. "It was no affair of mine, as I said. But--I think
you--we--shall never regret this election." And then they applauded so
loudly that the freshmen on the campus could not forbear peeping under
the blinds to see what they were doing. They saw only the president,
however, as she stepped back to the table and said with an air of
relief--for, after all, emotion is very wearing--"We will now proceed
to the literary programme of the evening!"

"But Neal, dear," said Patsy, as they settled themselves to listen,
"do you think she'll stay? (Oh, Neal! I'm so proud of you!)"

"Shut up, Patsy!" said Neal, rudely. Then, as she thought of what Miss
Henderson had told her of Winifred Hastings: "You are the only girl
whose friendship"--she blushed. Then, assuming a bored expression, she
looked at the girl who was reading. "I fear there's no doubt she
will!" said Cornelia Burt.




THE THIRD STORY

_MISS BIDDLE OF BRYN MAWR_




III

MISS BIDDLE OF BRYN MAWR


"I wouldn't have minded so much," explained Katherine, dolefully, and
not without the suspicion of a sob, "if it wasn't that I'd asked Miss
Hartwell and Miss Ackley! I shall die of embarrassment--I shall! Oh!
why couldn't Henrietta Biddle have waited a week before she went to
Europe?"

Her room-mate, Miss Grace Farwell, sank despairingly on the pile of
red floor-cushions under the window. "Oh, Kitten! you didn't ask them?
Not really?" she gasped, staring incredulously at the tangled head
that peered over the screen behind which Katherine was splashily
conducting her toilet operations.

"But I did! I think they're simply grand, especially Miss Hartwell,
and I'll never have any chance of meeting her, I suppose, and I
thought this was a beautiful one. So I met her yesterday on the campus
and I walked up to her--I was horribly scared, but I don't think I
showed it--and, said I, 'Oh, Miss Hartwell, you don't know me, of
course, but I'm Miss Sewall, '9-, and I know Henrietta Biddle of Bryn
Mawr, and she's coming to see me for two or three days, and I'm going
to make a little tea for her--very informal--and I've heard her speak
of you and Miss Ackley as about the only girls she knew here, and I'd
love to have you meet her again!'"

Miss Farwell laughed hysterically. "And did she accept?" she inquired.

Katherine wiped her face for the third time excitedly. "Oh, yes! She
was as sweet as peaches and cream! 'I shall be charmed to meet Miss
Biddle again, and in your room, Miss Sewall,' she said, 'and shall I
bring Miss Ackley?' Oh, Grace, she's lovely! She is the most--"

"Yes, I've no doubt," interrupted Miss Farwell, cynically; "all the
handsome seniors are. But what are you going to say to her to-day?"

Katherine buried her yellow head in the towel. "I don't know! Oh,
Grace! I don't know," she mourned. "And they say the freshmen are
getting so uppish, anyway, and if we carry it off well, and just make
a joke of it, they'll think we're awfully f-f-fresh!" Here words
failed her, and she leaned heavily on the screen, which, as it was old
and probably resented having been sold third-hand at a second-hand
price, collapsed weakly, dragging with it the Bodenhausen Madonna, a
silver rack of photographs, and a Gibson Girl drawn in very black ink
on a very white ground.

"And if we are apologetic and meek," continued Miss Farwell, easily,
apparently undisturbed by the confusion consequent to the downfall of
a piece of furniture known to be somewhat erratic, "they'll laugh at
us or be bored. We shall be known as the freshmen who invited seniors
and Faculty and town-people to meet--nobody at all! A pretty
reputation!"

"But, Grace, we couldn't help it! Such things will happen!" Katherine
was pinning the Gibson Girl to the wall, in bold defiance of the
matron's known views on that subject.

"Yes, of course. But they mustn't happen to freshmen!" her room-mate
returned sententiously. "How many Faculty did you ask?"

"I asked Miss Parker, because she fitted Henrietta for college, at
Archer Hall, and I asked Miss Williams, because she knows Henrietta's
mother--Oh! Miss Williams will freeze me to death when she comes here
and sees just us!--and I asked Miss Dodge, because she knows a lot of
Bryn Mawr people. Then Mrs. Patton on Elm Street was a school friend
of Mrs. Biddle's, and--oh! Grace, I _can't_ manage them alone! Let's
tell them not to come!"

"And what shall we do with the sandwiches? And the little cakes? And
the lemons that I sliced? And the tea-cups and spoons I borrowed? And
that pint of extra thick cream?" Miss Farwell checked off these
interesting items on her fingers, and kicked the floor-cushions to
point the question.

"Oh! I don't know! Isn't there any chance--"

"No, goosey, there isn't. See here!" Grace pulled down a letter with a
special delivery stamp from the desk above her head, and read with
emphasis:

     Dear Kitten,--Just a line to say that Aunt Mary has sent for
     me at three days' notice to go to Paris with her for a year.
     It's now or never, you know, and I've left the college, and
     will come back to graduate with '9-. So sorry I can't see you
     before I go. Had looked forward to a very interesting time,
     renewing my own freshman days, and all that. Please send my
     blue cloth suit right on to Philadelphia C. O. D. when it comes
     to you. I hope you hadn't gotten anything up for me.

         With much love,
             HENRIETTA BIDDLE.

     Bryn Mawr, March 5.

"I don't think there's much chance, my dear."

"No," said Katherine, sadly, and with a final pat administered to the
screen, which still wobbled unsteadily. "No, I suppose there isn't.
And it's eleven o'clock. They'll be here at four! Oh! and I asked that
pretty junior, Miss Pratt, you know. Henrietta knew her sister. She
was in '8-."

"Ah," returned Miss Farwell, with a suspicious sweetness, "why didn't
you ask a few more, Katherine, dear? What with the list we made out
together and these last extra ones--"

"But I thought there wasn't any use having the largest double room in
the house, if we couldn't have a decent-sized party in it! And think
of all those darling, thin little sandwiches!--Oh well, we might just
as well be sensible and carry the thing through, Gracie! But I am just
as afraid as I can be: I tell you that. And Miss Williams will freeze
me stiff." The yellow hair was snugly braided and wound around by now,
and a neat though worried maiden sat on the couch and punched the
Harvard pillow reflectively.

"Never mind her, Kitten, but just go ahead. You know Caroline Wilde
said it was all right to ask her if she was Miss Biddle's mother's
friend, and there wasn't time to take her all around, and you know how
nice Miss Parker was about it. We can't help it, as you say, and
we'll go and get the flowers as we meant to. Have you anything this
hour?"

With her room-mate to back her, to quote the young lady herself, Miss
Sewall felt equal to almost any social function. Terrifying as her
position appeared--and strangely enough, the seniors appalled her far
more than the Faculty--there was yet a certain excitement in the
situation. What should she say to them? Would they be kind about it,
or would they all turn around and go home? Would they think--

"Oh, nonsense!" interrupted Grace the practical, as these doubts were
thrust upon her. "If they're ladies, as I suppose they are, of course
they'll stay and make it just as pleasant for us as they can. They'll
see how it is. Think what we'd do, ourselves, you know!"

They went down the single long street, with the shops on either side,
a red-capped, golf-caped pair of friends, like nine hundred other
girls, yet different from them all. And they chattered of Livy and
little cakes and Trigonometry and pleated shirt-waists and basket-ball
and Fortnightly Themes like all the others, but in their little way
they were very social heroines, setting their teeth to carry by storm
a position that many an older woman would have found doubtful.

They stopped at a little bakery, well down the street, to order some
rolls for the girl across the hall from them, who had planned to
breakfast in luxury and alone on chocolate and grape-fruit the next
morning. "Miss Carter, 24 Washburn," said Grace, carelessly, when
Katherine whispered, "Look at her! Isn't that funny? Why, Grace, just
see her!"

"See who--whom, I mean? (only I hate to say 'whom.') Who is it,
Kitten?"

Katherine was staring at the clerk, a tall, handsome girl, with masses
of heavy black hair and an erect figure. As she went down to the back
of the shop again, Katherine's eyes followed her closely.

"It's that girl that used to be in the Candy Kitchen--don't you
remember? I told you then that she looked so much like my friend Miss
Biddle. And then the Candy Kitchen failed and I suppose she came here.
And she's just Henrietta's height, too. You know Henrietta stands very
straight and frowns a little, and so did this girl when you gave
Alice's number and she said, 'Thirty-four or twenty-four?' Isn't it
funny that we should see her now?--Oh, dear! If only she _were_
Henrietta!"

Grace stared at the case of domestic bread and breathed quickly. "Does
she really look like her, Kitten?" she said.

"Oh yes, indeed. It's quite striking. Henrietta's quite a type, you
know--nothing unusual, only very dark and tall and all that. Of course
there are differences, though."

"What differences?" said Grace, still looking intently at the domestic
bread.

"Oh, Henrietta's eyes are brown, and this girl's are black. And
Henrietta hasn't any dimple, and her hands are prettier. And
Henrietta's waist isn't so small, and she hasn't nearly so much hair,
I should say. But then, I haven't seen her for a year, and probably
there's a greater difference than I think."

"How long is it since those seniors and the Faculty saw Henrietta?"
said Grace, staring now at a row of layer chocolate-cakes.

Her room-mate started. "Why--why, Grace, what do you mean? It's two
years, Henrietta wrote, I think. And Miss Parker and Miss Williams
haven't seen her for much longer than that. But--but--you don't mean
anything, Grace?"

Grace faced her suddenly. "Yes," she said, "I do. You may think that
because I just go right along with this thing, I don't care at all.
But I do. I'm awfully scared. I hate to think of that Miss Ackley
lifting her eyebrows--the way she will! And Miss Hartwell said once
when somebody asked if she knew Judge Farwell's daughter, 'Oh, dear
me--I suppose so! And everybody else in her class--theoretically! But
practically I rarely observe them!' Ugh! She'll observe me to-day, I
hope!"

"Yes, dear, I suppose she will. And me too. But--"

"Oh, yes! But if nobody knows how Miss Biddle looks, and she was going
to stay at the hotel, anyway, and it would only be for two hours, and
everything would be so simple--"

Katherine's cheeks grew very red and her breath came fast. "But would
we dare? Would she be willing? Would it be--"

"Oh, my dear, it's only a courtesy! And everybody will think it's all
right, and the thing will go beautifully, and Miss Biddle, if she has
any sense of humor--"

"Yes, indeed! Henrietta would only be amused--oh, so amused! And it
would be such a heavenly relief after all the worry. We could send her
off on the next train--Henrietta, you know--and dress makes such a
difference in a girl!"

"And I think she would if we asked her just as a favor--it wouldn't
be a question of money! Oh, Katherine! I could cry for joy if she
would!"

"She'd like to, if she has any fun in her--it would be a game with
some point to it! And will you ask her, or shall I?"

They were half in joke and half in earnest: it was a real crisis to
them. They were only freshmen, and they had invited the seniors and
the Faculty. And two of the most prominent seniors! Whom they hadn't
known at all! They had a sense of humor, but they were proud, too, and
they had a woman's horror of an unsuccessful social function. They
felt that they were doomed to endless joking at the hands of the whole
college, and this apprehension, though probably exaggerated, nerved
them to their _coup d'état_.

Grace walked down the shop. "I will ask her," she said.

Katherine stood with her back turned and tried not to hear. Suppose
the girl should be insulted? Suppose she should be afraid? Now that
there was a faint hope of success, she realized how frightened and
discouraged she had been. For it would be a success, she saw that.
Nobody would have had Miss Biddle to talk with for more than a few
minutes anyhow, they had asked such a crowd. And yet she would have
been the centre of the whole affair.

"Katherine," said a voice behind her, "let me introduce Miss Brooks,
who has consented to help us!"

Katherine held out her hands to the girl. "Oh, thank you! _thank_
you!" she said.

The girl laughed. "I think it's queer," she said, "but if you are in
such a fix, I'd just as lief help you as not. Only I shall give you
away--I shan't know what to say."

Grace glanced at Katherine. Then she proved her right to all the
praise she afterward accepted from her grateful room-mate. "That will
be very easy," she said sweetly. "Miss Biddle, whom you will--will
represent, speaks very rarely: she's not at all talkative!"

Katherine gasped. "Oh, no!" she said eagerly, "she's very statuesque,
you know, and keeps very still and straight, and just looks in your
eyes and makes you think she's talking. She says 'Really?' and 'Fancy,
now!' and 'I expect you're very jolly here,' and then she smiles. You
could do that."

"Yes, I could do that," said the girl.

"Can you come to the hotel right after dinner?" said Grace,
competently, "and we'll cram you for an hour or so on Miss Biddle's
affairs."

The girl laughed. "Why, yes," she said, "I guess I can get off."

So they left her smiling at them from the domestic bread, and at two
o'clock they carried Miss Henrietta Biddle's dress-suit case to the
hotel and took Miss Brooks to her room. And they sat her on a sofa and
told her what they knew of her alma mater and her relatives and her
character generally. And she amazed them by a very comprehensive grasp
of the whole affair and an aptitude for mimicry that would have gotten
her a star part in the senior dramatics. With a few corrections she
spoke very good English, and "as she'd only have to answer questions,
anyhow, she needn't talk long at a time," they told each other.

She put up her heavy hair in a twisted crown on her head, and they put
the blue cloth gown on her, and covered the place in the front, where
it didn't fit, with a beautiful fichu that Henrietta had apparently
been led of Providence to tuck in the dress-suit case. And she rode up
in a carriage with them, very much excited, but with a beautiful color
and glowing eyes, and a smile that brought out the dimple that
Henrietta never had.

They showed her the room and the sandwiches and the tea, and they got
into their clothes, not speaking, except when a great box with three
bunches of English violets was left at their door with Grace's card.
Then Katherine said, "You dear thing!" And Miss Brooks smiled as they
pinned hers on and said softly, "Fancy, now!"

And then they weren't afraid for her any more.

When the pretty Miss Pratt came, a little after four, with Miss
Williams, she smiled with pleasure at the room, all flowers and tea
and well-dressed girls, with a tall, handsome brunette in a blue gown
with a beautiful lace bib smiling gently on a crowd of worshippers,
and saying little soft sentences that meant anything that was polite
and self-possessed.

Close by her was her friend Miss Sewall, of the freshman class, who
sweetly answered half the questions about Bryn Mawr that Miss Biddle
couldn't find time to answer, and steered people away who insisted on
talking with her too long. Miss Farwell, also of the freshman class,
assisted her room-mate in receiving, and passed many kinds of pleasant
food, laughing a great deal at what everybody said and chatting
amicably and unabashed with the two seniors of honor, who openly raved
over Miss Biddle of Bryn Mawr.

As soon as Katherine had said, "May I present Miss Hartwell--Miss
Ackley?" they took their stand by the stately stranger and talked to
her as much as was consistent with propriety.

"Isn't she perfectly charming!" they said to Miss Parker, and "Yes,
indeed," replied that lady, "I should have known Netta anywhere. She
is just what I had thought she would be!"

And Miss Williams, far from freezing the pretty hostess, patted her
shoulder kindly. "Henrietta is quite worth coming to see," she said
with her best and most exquisite manner. "I have heard of the Bryn
Mawr style, and now I am convinced. I wish all our girls had such
dignity--such a feeling for the right word!"

And they had the grace to blush. They knew who had taught Henrietta
Biddle Brooks that right word!

At six o'clock Miss Biddle had to take the Philadelphia express. She
had only stopped over for the tea. And so the girls of the house could
not admire her over the supper-table. But they probably appreciated
her more. For after all, as they decided in talking her over later, it
wasn't so much what she said, as the way she looked when she said it!

But only a dress-suit case marked H. L. B. took the Philadelphia
express that night, and a tall, red-cheeked girl in a mussy checked
suit left the hotel with a bunch of violets in her hand and a
reminiscent smile on her lips.

"We simply can't thank you; we haven't any words. You've helped us
give the nicest party two freshmen ever gave, if it is any pleasure to
you to know that," said Katherine. "And now you're only not to speak
of it."

"Oh, no! I shan't speak of it," said the girl. "You needn't be afraid.
Nobody that I'd tell would believe me, very much, anyhow. I'm glad I
could help you, and I had a lovely time--lovely!"

She smiled at them: the slow, sweet smile of Henrietta Biddle, late of
Bryn Mawr. "You College ladies are certainly queer--but you're smart!"
said Miss Brooks of the bakery.




THE FOURTH STORY

_BISCUITS EX MACHINA_




IV

BISCUITS EX MACHINA


B. S. Kitts--this was the signature she had affixed in a neat clerical
backhand to all her written papers since the beginning of freshman
year; and she had of course been called Biscuits as soon as she had
found her own particular little set of girls and settled down to that
peculiar form of intimacy which living in barracks, however
advantageously organized, necessitates. She had a sallow irregular
face, fine brown eyes surrounded with tiny wrinkles, a taste for
Thackeray, and a keen sense of humor. It was the last which was
subsequently responsible for this story about her.

She was quite unnoticed for two or three years, which is a very good
thing for a girl. During that time she quietly took soundings and laid
in material, presumably, for those satiric characterizations which
were the terror of her undergraduate enemies and the concealed
discomfort of those in high places. During her junior year she began
to be considered terribly clever, and though she was never what is
known as a Prominent Senior, she had her little triumphs here and
there, and in the matter of written papers she was a source of great
comfort to those whom custom compels to demand such tributes.

She was the kind of girl who, though well known in her own class, is
quite unobserved of the lower classes, and this, if it deprived her of
the admirations and attentions bestowed on the prominent, saved her
the many worries and wearinesses incident to trying to please
everybody at once--the business of the over-popular. She had a great
deal of time, which may seem absurd, but which is really quite
possible if one keeps positively off committees, is neither musical
nor athletic, and shuns courses involving laboratory work. It is of
great assistance also in this connection to elect English Literature
copiously, when one has read most of the works in question and can
send home for the reference books, thus saving an immense amount of
fruitless loitering about crowded libraries.

Biscuits employed the time thus gained in a fashion apparently
purposeless. She loafed about and observed, with _Vanity Fair_ under
one arm and an apple in the other hand. She was never the subject or
the object of a violent friendship; she was one of five or six clever
girls who hung together consistently after sophomore year, bickering
amicably and indulging in mutual contumely when together, defending
one another promptly when apart. The house president spoke of them
bitterly as blasé and critical; the lady-in-charge remarked
suspiciously the unusual chance which invariably seated them together
at the end of the table at the regular drawing for seats; the
collector for missions found them sceptical and inclined to ribaldry
if pushed too far; but the Phi Kappa banked heavily on their united
efforts, and more than usually idiotic class meetings meekly bowed to
what they themselves scornfully referred to afterward as "their
ordinary horse-sense."

One of the members of this little group was Martha Augusta Williams.
Sometimes she retired from it and devoted herself to solitude, barely
replying to questions and obscurely intimating that to _ennui_ such as
hers the prattle of the immature and inexperienced could hardly be
supposed even by themselves to be endurable; sometimes she returned to
it with the air of one willing to impart to such a body the mellow
cynicism of a tolerant if fatigued _femme du monde_. In the intervals
of her retirement she wrote furiously at long-due themes, which took
the form of Richard Harding Davis stories--she did them very well--or
modern and morbid verses of a nature to disturb the more conservative
of those who heard them. At any expression of disturbance Martha would
elaborately suppress a three-volume smile and murmur something about
"meat for babes;" a performance which delighted her friends--especially
Biscuits--beyond measure. Her shelves bristled with yellow French
novels, and on her bureau a great ivory skull with a Japanese paper
snake carelessly twined through it impressed stray freshmen
tremendously. She cut classes elaborately and let her work drop
ostentatiously in the middle of the term, appearing at mid-years with
ringed eyes and an air of toleration strained to the breaking point.
She slept till nine and wandered lazily to coffee and toast at
Boyden's an hour later, at least three times a week, with an air that
would have done credit to one of Ouida's noblemen.

And yet, in spite of all this, Martha was not happy. The disapproval
of the lady-in-charge, the suspicions of the freshmen, the periodical
discussions with members of the Faculty, who "regretted to be obliged
to mark," etc., "when they realized perfectly that she was capable,"
etc.,--all these alleviated her trouble a little, but the facts
remained that her own particular set would never treat her seriously,
and that her name was Martha Augusta Williams. Fancy feeling such
feelings, and thinking such thoughts, and bearing the name of Martha
Augusta Williams! It is, to say the least, dispiriting. And nobody had
ever called her anything else. Harriet Williams was called,
indifferently, Billie and Willie and Sillie. Martha Underhill took her
choice of Mattie, Nancy, and Sister. A girl whose name was Anna
Augusta. Something had been hailed as Gustavus Adolphus from her
freshman year on; but below _her_ most daring flights of fiction must
ever appear those three ordinary, not to say stodgy, names. That alone
would have soured a temper not too inclined to regard life with favor.

Martha might have lived down the name, but she was assured that never
while Bertha Kitts remained alive would she be able to appear really
wickedly interesting. For Biscuits would tell the Story. Tell it with
variations and lights and shades and explanations adapted to the
audience. And it never seemed to pall. Yet it was simple--horribly
simple.

Martha had invited a select body of sophomores to go with her to the
palm-reader's. There were two clever ones, who vastly admired her
Richard Harding Davis tales, two curious ones, who openly begged for
her opinions and thrilled at her epigrams on Love and Life and
Experience, and, in an evil hour, the Sutton twins, whom she admitted
into the occasion partly to impress them, and partly so that if
anything really fascinating should come to light, Kate Sutton could
impart it to her room-mate, Patsy Pattison.

When they were assembled in the palm-reader's parlor, Martha gravely
motioned the others to go before her, and they took their innocent
turns before the little velvet cushion. The Twins were admirably
struck off in a few phrases, to the delight of their friends, and the
palm-reader's reputation firmly established. In the case of one of the
curious girls, peculiar and private events were hinted at that greatly
impressed her, for "how _could_ she have known _that_, girls?" The
clever girls were comforted with fame and large "scribbler's crosses,"
also wealthy marriages and social careers, but they looked enviously
at Martha, nevertheless, and she smiled maternally on them, as was
right. There remained only the other quiet little girl, and she
modestly suggested waiting till another day, "so there'll be lots of
time for yours, Miss Williams;" but Martha smiled kindly and waved
her to the seat, suggesting that hers might not be a long session,
with an amused glance at the empty, little pink palm.

The palm-reader turned and twisted and patted and asked her age, and
finally announced that it was a remarkable hand. The dying interest
revived, and even Martha's eyebrows went up with amazement as the seer
spoke darkly of immense influence; tact to the _n_th degree; unusual
amount of experience, or at the least, "intuitional discoveries;" two
great artistic means of expression; previous affairs of the heart, and
an inborn capacity for ruling the destinies of others--marked
resemblance to the hands of Cleopatra and Sara Bernhardt. It was hands
like that that moved the world, she said. The sophomores regarded
their friend with interest and awe, noted that she blushed deeply at
portions of the revelation, recollected her Sunday afternoon
improvisations at the piano and her request for a more advanced course
in harmony, and attached a hitherto unfelt importance to her heavy
mails.

Martha may have regretted her politeness, but she smothered her
surprise, sank, with an abstracted air, upon the chair before the
cushion, and with a face from which all emotion had been withdrawn
and eyes which defied any wildest revelation to disturb their settled
_ennui_, awaited the event. The palm-reader glanced at the back of the
slim hand, noted the face, touched the finger tips.

"How old are you, please?" she asked. Martha wearily announced that
she was twenty-one. She was conscious of its being a terribly ordinary
age. The palm-reader nodded. "Ah!" she said easily. "Well, come to me
again in a year or two. I can't really tell much now."

Martha gasped at her. "You can't _tell_ much!"

The palm-reader took her hand again. "There's nothing much to tell!"
she explained. "The hand isn't really developed yet--it's the opposite
from the last young lady's, you might say."

She became conscious of a cold silence through the room, and added a
few details. "There's a good general ability; no particular line of
talent, I should say; orderly, regular habits; a very kind heart; I
can't see any events in particular; you've led a very quiet life, I
should say; fond of reading; I shouldn't say you'd met many people or
travelled much"--she scrutinized the hand more closely--"you'll
probably develop a strong religious feeling--"

She stopped and smiled deprecatingly. "It is really impossible to say
very much," she said, "just now. It's what we call an immature hand!"

For months after that Martha woke in the night and tried to forget the
nightmare of a terrible figure that led her to an amphitheatre of
grinning enemies, and leered at her: _It's what we call an Immature
Hand!_ She could have suppressed the others, but the Sutton twins were
beyond earthly and human suppression. It seemed to her that she never
met them or passed them in a corridor without hearing their jovial
assurance: "Oh, Martha Williams is all right! Why, the idea! She's as
kind a girl as ever lived--she's nothing like that story. Gracious,
no! She's never been to Paris--she lives in Portland. Why, her
father's a Sunday School Superintendent! Oh, bother! She's as good as
Alberta May, every bit! She has a strong religious--" and somebody
passed on, assured--heavens, perhaps admiring her character! At such
times Martha would read furiously in her French novels or regard the
skull pensively or sit up all night, which annoyed her room-mate and
the lady-in-charge. Her room-mate was an absolutely unimportant
person, and does not come into the story at all.

It is now time to revert to the Twins. When they appeared in the
house, two solemn-eyed, pigtailed imps from Buffalo, they were packed
away together in a double room on the third floor, and except for
their amazing resemblance, were absolutely unnoted. The matron
uneasily fancied a certain undue disturbance on the third floor, the
evening of their arrival, but on going to that level she found all as
still as the grave, and immediately went back downstairs. It is only
due to her, however, to say that she never again made such an error.
From that time on any abnormal quiet in the house was to her as the
trumpet to the war-horse; and she mounted unerringly to the
all-too-certain scene of action. Their plans for the first year were
rather crude, though astonishingly effective at the time. It was they
who invented the paper bag of water dropped from the fourth floor to
burst far below, and waken the house with the most ghastly hollow
explosion; it was they who let a pair of scissors down two flights to
tap against the pane of an unfortunate enemy in the senior class, and
send her into convulsions of nervous and, as they said, guilty fear.
It was they who stuck new caramels to their door-knob, and oblivious
to the matron's admonitions of the hour, waited till in exasperation
she seized the knob, when they met her disgust with soap and
apologies; it was they who left the gas brightly burning and the door
temptingly ajar at 10.15, so that the long-suffering woman pounced
upon them with just recrimination, only to find her stored-up wrath
directed against two night-gowned figures bowed over their little
white beds, as it were two Infant Samuels. It is doubtful if a
devotional exercise ever before or since has roused such mingled
feelings in the bosom of the chance spectator.

It was they who beyond a shadow of doubt won the basket-ball game for
the freshmen--an unprecedented victory--by their marvellous intuition
of each other's intentions and their manner of being everywhere at
once and playing into each other's hands with an uncanny certainty.
This gave them position and weight among their mates, which they duly
appreciated. They were the recognized jesters of the class, and their
merry, homely faces were sure of answering grins wherever they
appeared.

When they returned sophomore year more alike than ever, with happy
plans for the best double room on the second floor, they were met by
quite another kind of grin: its owner, Mrs. Harrow, would have perhaps
described it as firm and pleasant--the Twins referred to it bitterly
as hypocritical and disgusting.

"No, Martha, no. It's no use to coax me--I can't have it. I cannot go
through another such year. If you wish to remain in the house, you
must separate. You can have No. 10 with Alberta Bunting, and Kate can
go in with Margaret--she says she is perfectly willing, rather than
give up the room, and Helen is not coming back till next year. Now, I
don't want to have to argue about it; I think you are better apart."

No one ever accused Mrs. Harrow of tact. Her placid firmness was
almost the most exasperating thing about her. Her decisions, if
apparently somewhat feather-beddish, ranked, nevertheless, with those
of the Medes and Persians, and the Twins walked haughtily away--beaten
but defiant.

Of course it never occurred to them to leave the house, and Kate,
after a time, grew quite contented, for Miss Pattison was eminently
pleasant and tactful, kept the room in beautiful order, and spent a
great deal of time in the Dewey with her sister, an instructor in the
college, and her great friend Cornelia Burt, who was off the campus.
This left the room to the Twins, who were almost as much together as
of yore. But Martha was in quite another case. In her the insult of a
dictated separation rankled continually, and her hitherto mild
contempt for Mrs. Harrow deepened into a positively appalling enmity.
Circumstances unfortunately assisted her feeling, for beyond a doubt
Alberta May Bunting was not adapted to her new room-mate.

She was a wholesome, kindly creature, with high principles and no
particular waist-line. She drank a great deal of milk, and was a
source of great relief to her teachers, her recitations being
practically perfect. From her sophomore year she had been wildly, if
solidly, addicted to zoölogy, and to her, after hours spent in the
successful chase of the doomed insect, the grasshopper was literally a
burden, for she slew him by the basketful. She rendered the
surrounding territory frogless in her zeal for laboratory practice,
and in her senior year it was rumored that stray cats fled at her
approach: "She'll cut me up in my sleep," said Martha, gloomily, "and
soak me in formaline in the bath-tub--the idiot!"

For, although the "h'Arrow-that-flyeth-by-day-and-the-terror-that-
walketh-by-night," as Martha Williams, in a burst of inspiration, had
named her, could not, of course, have known it, Sutton M., as she was
most commonly called, loathed and despised bugs, reptiles, and
crawling and dismembered things generally, more than aught else
beside. She regarded an interest in such things as an indication of
mild insanity, and as a characteristic of Alberta May's such a
predilection assumed the proportions of a malignant insult.

"It's bad enough to have her drink milk like a cow, and eat graham
crackers like a--like a _steam-engine_," she confided to her
sympathetic sister, "and smell like a whole biological laboratory, and
glower at me, and bobble her head like a China image whenever I open
my mouth, and call me Mottha, which I despise, and say, 'Why, the
_idea_! Why, Mottha, the _idea_! What _do_ you _mean_, Mottha?'
without putting little bottles of Things all around, and my having to
upset them. My gym suit made me sick to put on for a week because I
upset some nasty little claws all pickled in something per cent.
alcohol on the sleeve, and I kept thinking the legs were walking on
me--ugh! they were leggy claws!"

The h'Arrow-that-flyeth-by-day had fondly hoped that Alberta would "do
Martha Sutton a world of good," because of her exemplary, regular
habits and her calm, sensible nature, but this consummation, though
devoutly to be wished, was fated never to be witnessed. Everyone heard
the wails and gibes of Sutton M., but to few or none were the woes of
Alberta May made known. But that she must have had them, her attitude
at the time of the crisis conclusively proved.

The Twins, in the course of their mysterious loitering, overheard a
somewhat sentimental discussion between Evelyn Lyon and an extremely
stiff and correct young man from Amherst, as to whether chivalry and
openly expressed devotion to the fair were not disappearing from the
earth. "Men like shirt-waists and golf-shoes," Evelyn had been heard
to murmur, with a glance at her fluffy chiffon and bronze slippers,
and the senior had protested that they did not, and that emotion, if
controlled, was as deep as in the balcony-serenade days. "In fact,"
said he, finally, "Estabrook and I will serenade you Wednesday
night."

"You would never dare," said Evelyn, with a glance at his eye-glasses
and collar, which for height and circumference might have been a cuff.
"You'd be afraid the girls would laugh." The senior looked nettled.
"Expect us at ten on Wednesday next," said he. "It won't necessarily
be the Glee and Banjo Club, you understand, but it will be a real,
old-fashioned serenade." Then, as Evelyn smiled maliciously, he added,
"Only you must appear at the casement, and throw flowers, you
know--that's what they did." Evelyn frowned, but agreed. "At the end
of the song, I will," she said, with visions of the night-watchman
hasting to the scene.

The Twins were unaccountably strolling about as the senior left the
house, and wondered with great distinctness and repetition why on
earth Evelyn should say she'd be in 14 at the front when of course
she'd be in the East corner on the first floor. "She has some game
up," shrieked Martha, and Kate called back, "Of course she has--some
one will be awfully left, that's all!"

The senior listened, grinned, muttered that women told everything they
knew, and went his way. On next Wednesday night, the entire house
being congregated in the hall near No. 14, where Evelyn, not to be
found wanting in case they _should_ get through a verse, was sorting
carnations, a husky burst of song enlivened the East corner, a
mandolin and a guitar having raced through a confused prelude under
the spur of a youth hopping with nervousness and sputtering as he
punched the mandolin-player: "Hang it all, Pete, get along, get along!
He'll be here in a minute--whoop it up, can't you?"

A muffled baritone began, standing so close to the window with a light
in it that its owner could have touched the sill with his shoulder:

     Last night the nightingale waked me,
     Last night when all was--

The shade went up, the window followed, and the eyes of the musicians
beheld, below an audience of house-maids, the only people at present
on that side of the house, an enormous woman, with gray hair in
curling-kids, and a blanket-wrapper which added to her size, grasping
a lamp in her hand and regarding them with a mingling of amazement,
irritation, and authority that caused their blood to curdle and their
voices to cease. Pattering feet, a lantern turned on them, and a
voice: "'Ere, 'ere, what you doing? H'all h'off the campus after
ten--get along, now!" completed their confusion, and they left, with
an attempt at dignity and a slowness which they had occasion to curse;
for as they passed the front of the house, from out of the air above
their heads, apparently, two sweet and boyish voices, a first and
second soprano, lifted up to the fresh October sky an ancient and
beautiful hymn:

     Some_times_ a _light_ sur_pri_ses
     The _Chris_tian _while_ he _sings_,
     It _is_--

A window banged forcibly, and the minstrels stood upon no order but
fled to their carriage and rattled out of town.

Evelyn Lyon, with set teeth and artistically loosened hair, rushed
down the hall behind Martha Sutton, who made the room she was aiming
for, slammed the door, realized that the key was lost, and dragged the
first piece of furniture that came to hand against it. This was
Alberta May's desk, and upon it were the collected results of her
vacation work at Wood's Holl. Six jars upset under the impact of
Evelyn's weight, a dozen mounted cross-sections jingled in the dark, a
pint bottle of ink soaked a thick and beautifully illustrated
note-book; and as the Terror-that-walketh-by-night headed Evelyn to
her door and mounted a flight to quell the rising tumult, Sutton M.,
with a hysterical sob, for she was tingling with a delicious
excitement, huddled the desk back into the corner, hoped none of the
bugs were around the floor, and dropped into bed, wondering how ever
Alberta May could sleep through such a night.

And now--though perhaps you may have imagined that there was never
going to be any story--now we are coming to it, and though it is
short, all the characters appear. Alberta May, with an ugly brick-red
flush, told Sutton M. that she need never speak to her again, for no
answer would be forthcoming, and that she must have her things out of
the room before night. Martha was really horribly frightened, and
begged to be allowed to copy the note-book and hire some one to make
the slides and re-pickle the scattered Things; but Alberta May merely
shook her head, replied that she accepted apologies but could not
speak again, and kept her word, for she never noticed Martha from then
till the 22d of June.

The h'Arrow-that-flyeth-by-day gave Martha an address that reduced her
to a pulp, and having sent the Twins off to cry in each other's arms
till dinner-time and got the doctor for Evelyn, who had sprained her
ankle in the rush, she sat down to a cup of tea and council.

To her entered Biscuits, and they talked of odds and ends till Mrs.
Harrow had grown a little calm. The girls in the house accused
Biscuits of a hypocritical and unnatural interest in the h'Arrow:
Biscuits denied this, alleging that she was merely ordinarily
courteous and saw no occasion for treating her like a dog, which
somewhat strong language was addressed with intention to a few of her
friends who certainly did not display any undue consideration in their
manner to the lady in question. She was wont to add calmly that she
saw no sense in having those in authority hate you when a little
politeness would so easily prevent it. And many times had she
successfully interceded for the offender and gained seats for guests
and obtained the parlor for dancing purposes on nights not mentioned
in the bond. On these accounts she made an unusually fine house
president in her senior year, and though as a sophomore she had been
but suspiciously regarded by that officer, she made as firm a bond as
is perhaps possible between powers so hostile as those with which she
struggled.

To-day she listened sympathetically as Mrs. Harrow held forth,
concluding with,--

"Now, Bertha, something _must_ be done. I hate dreadfully to make a
change, so early in the year, too, but Alberta is decided, and says
that she will leave the house to-morrow unless Martha leaves to-night.
And Alberta is perfectly justified: nobody could be expected to put up
with it. I don't know whom to put her with: she certainly can't be
trusted with her friends, and I can't feel that I have any right to
put her anywhere else. I hate to have to admit that I can't manage
them--Miss Roberts insists that they're fine girls and will outgrow it
all, and I have great respect for her opinion, and yet--think of that
disgraceful performance last night! It would have done credit to a
boarding-school! I was so disgusted--"

"Yes, indeed, and I've talked to them, Mrs. Harrow, and told them just
how the house feels about it, but don't you think that it was rather
boarding-schoolish in Evelyn? She started it all, you know."

"Oh, well, of course. Evelyn shouldn't have--but then she is a good,
quiet girl, and--Oh, not that I would excuse her!"

"Certainly not," said Biscuits, briskly. This was good management on
her part, for Evelyn had one friend in the house to the Twins' ten,
though a favorite with Mrs. Harrow.

"Now, Mrs. Harrow, I've got an idea, and truly, I think it would
work," she added persuasively. When she had unfolded the idea, the
lady-in-charge could hardly believe her ears.

"Why, Bertha Kitts, you must be crazy! Nothing could induce me to
think of it for a moment--nothing! It would be the worst possible
influence!"

Biscuits argued gently. Her three years of consistent good sense and
politeness stood in her favor, and though Mrs. Harrow had no sense of
humor whatever, she was enabled to perceive a certain poetic justice
in the plan set before her.

"You know, Mrs. Harrow," she concluded, "that at bottom they're both
nice girls! They're awfully irritating at times, and of course you
feel that they've both occasioned a great deal of trouble; but they're
both honorable, and I'm sure it will be all right: truly, I'd be
willing to take the responsibility--if I can get them to consent to
it!"

"Very well," said Mrs. Harrow, unwillingly, "you know them both better
than I do, Bertha, of course, and it certainly couldn't be any worse
than it is! But at the first outbreak I shall take the matter into my
own hands, and act very severely, if necessary!"

Biscuits went directly upstairs and sought out Martha Williams, who
lounged on the couch with Loti in her hand and a bag of chocolate
peppermints in her lap. Her room-mate, observing that Biscuits glanced
at the clock as she entered, murmured something about getting a
History note-book and obligingly disappeared.

"That's a good harmless creature," observed Biscuits, approvingly.

"Yes, she's in very good training," the creature's room-mate returned.
"Have a peppermint?"

"Pity _she_ can't room with Alberta May," said Biscuits, lightly;
"_she'd_ give her no trouble!"

"Lord, no!" Martha agreed; "she wouldn't trouble a fly!"

Biscuits wandered about the room and absent-mindedly picked up a sheaf
of papers.

"Themes back?" she inquired. Martha nodded.

"'Me see 'em?" Martha shrugged her shoulders in a manner to be envied
of the Continent.

Biscuits opened at a poem that caught her eye, and read it. Martha's
eyes were apparently fixed on _Madame Chrysanthème_, but they wandered
occasionally to Biscuits' face as she read. The poem was called,--

         THE LIFTING VEIL

     Do you love me now?
     Ah, your mouth is cold!
     Yet you taught me how--
     Are we growing old?

     Did you love me then?
     Ah, your eyes are wet!
     If the memory's sweet,
     Why will you forget?

     Could you love me still?
     Hush! you shall not say!
     Love is not of will--
     Shall I go away?

     Dare you love me now?
     Let me burn my ships!
     I, myself, am not so sure--
     Am I worth your lips?

"Um--ah--yes," said Biscuits, "sounds something like Browning, doesn't
it?"

Martha looked only politely interested.

"Do you think so?" she said impersonally.

"Yes. I like that line about the ships," added Biscuits, tentatively;
"it--er--seems to--er--_imply_ so much!"

Martha looked enigmatically at the skull. "Does it?" she asked.

Biscuits caught a glimpse of a long, hastily written story, and
gasped.

"Why, Martha, did you really hand _that_ in?" she demanded.

"Certainly I did," said Martha; "why not?"

"Because it's really shocking, you know," Biscuits replied. "What
_did_ she say?"

Martha hesitated, but a twinkle slipped into her eye and she smiled as
she replied. "Look and see," she said.

Biscuits turned to the last page, passing many an underlined word or
phrase by the way, and read in crimson ink at the bottom: _Mallock has
done this better: you are getting very careless in your use of
relatives._ At which Biscuits smiled wisely and reassured herself of
an announcement she had made in the middle of her junior year to the
effect that even among the Faculty one ran across occasional evidences
of real intelligence.

"Martha," she said abruptly, "I meant what I said about Mary and
Alberta--they'd make a very good pair."

"And Miss Sutton and I--" returned Martha, sardonically.

"Precisely," said Biscuits, "Miss Sutton and you. Oh, I know nobody
has the slightest right to ask it of you and we all supposed you
wouldn't, but at the same time I thought I'd just lay it before you. I
firmly believe, Martha, that you are the only person in this house
capable of managing Martha Sutton!"

"I?" And _Madame Chrysanthème_ dropped to the floor.

"Yes, you. Now, Martha, just look at it: you know that the girl is a
perfect child--you know that she means well enough, and in her way she
has a keen sense of humor. Now you are much more mature than the
average girl up here and you take--er--broader views of things than
most of them. You wouldn't be so shocked at the things Suttie does;
you could, very gradually, you know, convey to her that her ideas of
humor were just a little crude, you know, and that would strike her
far more than the lectures that Alberta used to read her by the hour."

"Oh! Alberta!" Martha gasped. "Alberta was enough to drive _anybody_
to drink!"

"Just so. Well, as I told Mrs. Harrow, you were the one, but of course
no one had the least right to press it. And of course, in your last
year, and all that, and naturally you haven't any special interest in
her, and it's all right if you won't."

Martha scowled for a moment and appeared to be reviewing her own past
life, rapidly and impartially.

"It would be a good thing to have her kept out of the halls, at
least," she announced, at last, irrelevantly.

"That's what I told Mrs. Harrow," said Biscuits, eagerly. "You see,
Alberta _bored_ her so, Martha. She's a clever child and she likes
clever people. She needs tact, and Alberta hasn't the tact of a hen.
Only, you see, Mrs. Harrow felt that in a great many ways the
example--"

Martha rose and confronted her guest. "I hope you understand,
Biscuits, that if I ever _did_ go into the kindergarten business I
should know how to conduct myself properly. I have never for one
moment tried to fit everybody to my own standards: I appreciate
perfectly that things are--er--relative, and that what may be
perfectly safe for me is not necessarily so for others."

Biscuits coughed and said that she had always known that, and it was
for just that reason that she had hesitated to ask Martha to give up
her ways and habits: habits which if harmless to the unprejudiced
observer were a trifle irregular, viewed from the strictest standpoint
of a college house.

"There's no particular reason why you should," she concluded, "and
perhaps, anyhow, as Mrs. Harrow says--"

"Perhaps what?" snapped Martha.

"Oh, nothing! Only she doesn't believe you could do it, and of course
she perfectly loathes having to make a change this way--she says it's
a terrible precedent--and--"

"See here, Biscuits," said Martha, solemnly, "never mind about my
habits. I suppose," magnificently, "it won't hurt me to get to bed at
ten, once in a way, and it's only till June, anyhow. She _is_ a bright
enough child, and as you say, she needs tact. If it keeps the house
quiet and saves you dinging at 'em all the time, I can do it, I
suppose. I might try studying for a change before mid-years, too."

Biscuits got up to go. "I appreciate this very much, Martha," she said
gravely. "I know what it means to you, but I really think you'll do
her a lot of good--I mean," at a sudden pucker of Martha's brows, "I
mean, of course, that a person to whom her badness doesn't seem so
very terrible will be a revelation to her."

"Oh, yes!" said Martha.

Biscuits waylaid Sutton M. on the stairs after dinner and suggested a
conversation in her own cosey little single room. Sutton M.
accompanied her, suspiciously.

"Now, what do you think you're going to do?" she inquired bitterly, as
Biscuits offered a shiny apple and tipped _Henry Esmond_ off the
Morris chair. "Going to put me with some spook or other, I
suppose--I'll leave the house first. I've had enough of that!"

"No, you won't, either," Biscuits replied. "You'll be as good as Kate
is, and not make me curse the day I was elected house president. Now,
Suttie, I'm going to tell you something that must not go beyond this
room--beyond this room," she repeated impressively.

"Not Kate? I have to tell Kate," said Sutton M., but with an air of
deepest interest. Outsiders rarely confided in the Twins.

"Well, Kate then, but nobody else. Promise?"

Sutton M. nodded.

"I'm going to do what might be greatly criticised, Suttie, I'm going
to tell you that I think it would be a very good thing for Martha
Williams if you would quietly go in and room with her and let Mary
come in with Alberta. Now, I've done no beating about the bush--I've
told you out straight and plain. What do you say?"

"I say it's a fool arrangement, and that I won't have a thing to do
with it," said Sutton M., promptly.

"All right," returned Biscuits, calmly, "that's all. Is that apple
green? I don't mind it, but it makes some people sick."

"You know perfectly well Martha's the last girl in the world--we'd
fight night and day."

"I know she's one of the brightest girls in the college, and that
she's getting low in her work, and it's a shame, too," said Biscuits.

"Would I make her higher?"

Sutton M. tried to be sarcastic, but she showed in her manner the
effect of the confidence.

"Yes, you would," said Biscuits. "Mary Winter's just spoiling her.
She's a perfect nonentity, and she studies like a grammar-school
girl--it just disgusts Martha. And Mary admires her so that Martha
just rides over her and gets to despise good regular studying because
Mary does it so childishly. If some one could be with her who was
bright and jolly and liked fun and had a sense of humor and did good
work, too, for you two do study well--I'll give you that credit--it
would be the making of her. And Mary's such an idiot. She shows that
Martha shocks her so much that Martha just keeps it up to horrify
her--"

"I know," said Sutton M., wisely, "like those cigarettes--Martha never
really liked them."

"Exactly," Biscuits agreed, though with an effort, for the Twins
certainly knew far too much. "The moment I told Martha that it wasn't
in the least a question of morals with us but entirely a matter of
good taste--that we didn't think she was wicked at all but that it was
very bad for the house, and that when we were all represented in the
_Police Gazette_ as trotting over the campus with cigarettes in our
mouths, the college would get all the credit and she wouldn't get
any--why, she stopped right away. And considering how it irritated her
I think she was very nice and sensible about it."

"But just because Kate and I studied, Martha wouldn't, would she?"

"Yes, I think she would. She'd feel that it was an example to you if
she didn't. And she's so bright. It's a shame she should flunk as she
does. She knows we all know she could get any marks she chose, so she
doesn't care."

Sutton M. looked thoughtful. "I think her stories are fine," she
remarked. "And I suppose I'd have to go with some spook, if I don't,"
she added gloomily.

"Mrs. Harrow feels bad enough about the change," Biscuits interposed,
"and she said she'd act very severely next time. I persuaded her that
you'd--that is, I didn't persuade her, I'm afraid. Of course, she
feels that if you _should_ by any chance drag Martha into your kiddish
nonsense, why--she doesn't like Martha any too well, you know, and--"

"Biscuits," interrupted Sutton M., hastily, "if I _should_ go in with
Martha, and I must say I should think _anybody'd_ be welcome to her
after that stick of a Mary Winter, I wouldn't drag her into a
thing--truly, I wouldn't. I'd be careful! Kate says that Patsy says
she's lots of fun and awfully jolly and nice when you know her," she
added.

Biscuits assented warmly. "And you understand, Suttie," she continued,
"that it's not everybody I'd speak to in this way or that Martha would
have. Martha's rather particular: she understands that Alberta May is
a little trying, good and kind as she is. But I realize what a good
thing it would be for Martha to be with somebody who wouldn't be so
shocked whenever she said anything to that skull."

"Oh, that skull!" said Sutton M., with a wave of her brown hand. She
looked up and caught Biscuits' eye with the sharp, uncompromisingly
literal Sutton twinkle. "Biscuits," she demanded, "did anybody ever
know of anything really _bad_ that Martha ever did--ever?"

"Never," said Biscuits, promptly.

Sutton M. chuckled: "That's what we always thought," she said, and
added: "Well, I'll try it, and," very solemnly, "you can trust me,
Biscuits--I promise you."

When Biscuits went back to Martha's room she missed the skull, and
beheld on the newly dusted bookshelves a decorous row of historical
works and an assortment of German classics. This gratified her, for it
was with the German department that Martha's erratic methods of study
most obviously clashed. Martha was detaching from the wall a pleasing
engraving representing a long white lady with her head hanging off
from a couch, on which she somewhat obtrusively reclined, an
unwholesome demon perching upon her chest and a ghastly white horse
peeping at her between gloomy curtains. This cheerful effect was
entitled "The Nightmare," and as it left the wall, Martha fell upon an
enlargement in colored chalk of one of Mr. Beardsley's most vivid
conceptions, and laid them away together.

"Why, Martha!" she exclaimed, "this is really too much--there's no
reason why you should take your things down!"

Martha smiled tolerantly. "Oh, it makes no matter to me," she said
indifferently. "I know the Loti by heart, anyhow, and though none of
these things affect me in the slightest way--I really can't see
anything in them one way or the other--still I frankly refuse to take
any responsibility. If the child should happen to feel that the skull,
for instance--"

Biscuits grinned. "It's one less thing to dust, anyway," she remarked,
and left Martha to her work of reconstruction.

She wandered in, one evening, two or three weeks later, to get a
German dictionary, and beheld with a pardonable pride the Twins
gabbling their irregular verbs in whispers by the lamp, while Martha,
stretched on the couch beneath the gas, communed with Schiller and the
dictionary. The Twins gave her one swift ineffable glance, kicked each
other under the table, and bent their eyes upon their grammars:
Martha nodded to her, indicated the Twins with one of her three-volume
smiles, and drawled as she handed her the dictionary, "In the words of
Mr. Dooley and the Cubans, 'Pa-pa has lost his job, and all is now
happiness and a cottage-organ'!"




THE FIFTH STORY

_THE EDUCATION OF ELIZABETH_




V

THE EDUCATION OF ELIZABETH


I

     FROM MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON TO MISS CAROLYN SAWYER

        _Lowell, Mass., Sept. 10, 189-._

MY DEAREST CAROL: The thing we have both wished so much has happened!
Papa has finally consented to let me go to college! It has taken a
long time and a _great deal_ of persuasion, and Mamma never cared
_anything_ about it, you know, herself. But I laid it before her in a
way that I really am ashamed of! I never thought I'd do anything like
it! But I _had_ to, it seemed to me. I told her that she had often
spoken of what a mistake Mrs. Hall made in letting Marjory come out so
soon, and that I should _certainly_ be unwilling to stay at Mrs.
Meade's another year. I'm doing advanced work now, and I'm _terribly_
bored. The girls all seem so very young, somehow! And I said that I
couldn't come out till I was twenty-two, if I went to college. I
teased so that she gave way, but we had a _terrible_ siege with Papa.
He is the _dearest_ man in the world, but just a little _tiny_ bit
prejudiced, you know. He wants me to finish at Mrs. Meade's and then
go abroad for a year or two. He wants me to do something with my
music. But I told him of the _fine_ Music School there was at Smith,
and how much _harder_ I should work there, _naturally_. He talked a
good deal about the art advantages and travel and French--you know
what I think about the _terrible narrowness_ of a boarding-school
education! It is _shameful_, that an intellectual girl of this century
should be tied down to _French_ and _Music_! And how can the scrappy
little bit of gallery sight-seeing that I should do _possibly_ equal
four years of earnest, intelligent, _regular_ college work? He said
something about marriage--oh, dear! It is _horrible_ that one should
have to think of that! I told him, with a great deal of dignity and
rather coldly, I'm afraid, that _my_ life would be, I hoped,
_something more_ than the mere _evanescent glitter_ of a _social
butterfly_! I think it really impressed him. He said, "Oh, very
well--very well!" So I'm coming, dearest, and you must write me all
about what books I'd better get and just what I'd better know of the
college customs. I'm _so_ glad you're on the campus. You know Uncle
Wendell knows the President very well indeed--he was in college with
him--and, somehow or other, I've got a room in the Lawrence, though
we didn't expect it so soon! I feel inspired already when I think of
the chapel and the big Science Building and that _beautiful_ library!
I've laid out a course of work that Miss Beverly--that's the
literature teacher--thinks very ambitious, but I am afraid she doesn't
realize the intention of a _college_, which is a little different, I
suppose, from a _boarding-school_(!) I have planned to take sixteen
hours for the four years. I must say I think it's rather absurd to
limit a girl to that who _really_ is _perfectly_ able to do more.
Perhaps you could see the Register--if that's what it is--and tell him
I could just as well take eighteen, and then I could do that other
Literature. I must go to try on something--really, it's very hard to
convince Mamma that Smith isn't a _summer resort_! Good-by, dearest,
we shall have such _beautiful_ times together--I'm sure you'll be as
excited as I am. We shall _for once_ see as much of each other as we
want to--I wish I could study with you! I'm coming up on the 8.20
Wednesday morning.

         Devotedly yours,
             ELIZABETH.



II

     FROM MISS CAROLYN SAWYER TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON

         _Lake Forest, Ill., Sept. 17, 189-._

DEAR BESS: I'm very glad you're coming up--it's the only place in the
world. I'm not going to be able to meet you--I'm coming back late this
year--Mrs. Harte is going to give our crowd a house-party at Lakemere.
Isn't that gay? I met Arnold Ritch this summer. He knows you, he said.
I never heard you speak of him. He's perfectly _smooth_--his tennis is
all right, too. For heaven's sake, don't try to take sixteen hours--on
the campus, too! It will break you all up. You'll get on the Glee
Club, probably--bring up your songs, by the way--and you'll want to be
on the Team. Have you got that blue organdie? You'll want something
about like that, pretty soon. If you can help it, don't get one of
those Bagdad things for your couch. I'm deadly sick of mine. Get that
portière thing you used to have on the big chair at home. It's more
individual. We're getting up a little dance for the 26th. If you know
any man you could have up, you can come--it will be a good chance to
meet some of the upper-class girls. We may not be able to have it,
though. Don't tell Kate Saunders about this, please. She'd ask
Lockwood over from Amherst, and I've promised Jessie Holden to ask him
for her. We shall probably have Sue for class president this year--I'm
glad of it, too. There will be a decent set of ushers. I suppose
you'll want me for your senior for the sophomore-senior thing. I'll
keep that if you wish. I shall get up by the 24th. I'm in the Morris.
Don't forget your songs.

         Yours in haste,
             C. P. S.


III

     FROM MRS. HENRY STOCKTON TO MRS. JOHN SAWYER

         _Lowell, Mass., Sept. 23, 189-._

DEAR ELLA: In spite of great uncertainty on my part and actual
unwillingness on her father's, Lizzie has started for Smith. It seems
a large undertaking, for four years, and I must say I would rather
have left her at Mrs. Meade's. But her heart is set on it, and it is
very hard to deny her. She argues so, too; really, the child has great
ability, I think. She fairly convinced me. It has always seemed to me
that a girl with good social surroundings, a good home library, and
an intellectual home atmosphere does very well with four years at so
good a school as Mrs. Meade's, and a little travel afterwards. Lizzie
has quite a little musical talent, too, and I should have liked her to
devote more attention to that. Very frankly, I cannot say that I have
been able to see any improvement in Carrie since she went away. I
suppose it will wear off, but when I saw her this summer she had a
manner that I did not like so well as her very pleasant air three--no,
two--years ago. It seemed a curious mixture of youth and decision,
that had, however, no maturity in it. Katharine Saunders, too, seems
to me so utterly irresponsible for a young woman of twenty-one, and
yet so almost arrogant. I expected she would know a great deal, as she
studied Greek before she went, but she told me that she always skipped
the Latin and Greek quotations in books! She seems to be studying
nothing but French and Literature and History; her father could
perfectly well have taught her all that, and was anxious to, but she
would hear nothing of it. She wanted the college life, she said. Ah,
well, I suppose the world has moved on since we read Livy at Miss
Hopkins'! I picked up a Virgil of Lizzie's yesterday and was
astonished to find how it all came back. We felt very learned, then,
but now it is nothing.

I hope Carrie will be good to my little girl and help her perhaps with
her lessons--not that I fear Lizzie will need very much help! Miss
Beverly assures me that she has never trained a finer mind. Her essay
on Jane Austen was highly praised by Dr. Strong, the rector of St.
Mary's. Of course, dear Ella, you won't resent my criticism of
Carrie--I should never dream of it with any one but an old and valued
friend, and I shall gladly receive the same from you. But Lizzie has
always been all that I could wish her.

         Yours with love,
             SARAH B. STOCKTON.


IV

     FROM MR. WILLIAM B. STOCKTON TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON

         _Boston, Mass., Oct. 16, 189-._

MY DEAR NIECE: Your mother advises me of your having just entered
Smith Academy. I had imagined that your previous schooling would have
been sufficient, but doubtless your parents know best. Your mother
seems a little alarmed as to your success, but I have reassured her.
I trust the Stockton blood. Whatever your surroundings may be, you can
never, I am sure, set yourself a higher model than your mother. I have
never known her to lack the right word or action under any
circumstances, and if you can learn that in your schooling, your
friends and relatives will be more than satisfied.

I enclose my cheque for fifty dollars ($50), in case you should have
any special demand on your purse not met by your regular allowance. I
remember many such in my own schooldays. Wishing you success in your
new life, I remain,

         Your affectionate uncle,
             WILLIAM B. STOCKTON.


V

     FROM MISS ELIZABETH CRAIGIE TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON

         _New Haven, Conn., Oct. 21, 189-._

MY DEAR ELIZABETH: Sarah tells me that you are going to college. I am
sure I don't see why, but if you do, I suppose that is enough.
Children are not what they used to be. It seems to me that four years
at Mrs. Meade's should have been enough; neither your Aunt Hannah nor
I ever went to college, though to be sure Hannah wanted to go to Mt.
Holyoke Seminary once. I have never heard any one intimate that either
of us was not sufficiently educated: I wonder that you could for one
instant imagine such a thing! Not that I have any reason to suppose
you ever did. However, that is neither here nor there. Your Aunt
Hannah and I were intending to give you Mother's high shell-comb and
her garnet set for Christmas. If you would prefer them now for any
reason, you may have them. The comb is being polished and looks
magnificent. An absurd thing to give a girl of your age, from my point
of view. However, your Aunt Hannah thinks it best. I trust you will be
very careful of your diet. It seemed to me that your complexion was
not what it should have been when you came on this summer. I am
convinced that it is nothing but the miscellaneous eating of cake and
other sweets and over-education. There has been a young girl here from
some college--I think it is Wellesley--and her complexion is
disgraceful. Your Aunt Hannah and I never set up for beauties, but we
had complexions of milk and roses, if I do say it. Hannah thinks that
the garnets are unsuitable for you, but that is absurd. Mother was no
older than you when she wore them, and looked very well, too, I have
no doubt. I send you by express a box of Katy's doughnuts, the kind
you like, very rich, and a chocolate cake. Also some salad and a loaf
cake, Mrs. Harding's rule. I trust you will take sufficient exercise,
and don't let your hands grow rough this winter. Nothing shows a lady
so much as her hands. Would you like the garnets reset, or as Mother
wore them? They are quite the style now, I understand. Hoping you will
do well in your studies and keep well, I am,

         Yours lovingly,
             AUNT LIZZIE.


VI

     FROM MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON TO MR. ARNOLD RITCH, JR.

         _Lawrence House, Northampton, Mass.,
             Nov. 1, 189-._

MY DEAR ARNOLD: It is only fair to you to tell you that it can never
be. No, never! When I--if I did (which I can hardly believe)--allowed
you to think anything else, I was a mere child. Life looks very
different to me, now. It is quite useless to ask me--I must say that I
am surprised that you have spoken to Papa. Nor do I feel called upon
to give my reasons. I shall always be a very, very good friend to you,
however, and very, very much interested in you.

In the first place, I am, or at least you are, far too young. The
American woman of to-day is younger than her grandmother. I mean, of
course, younger than her grandmother is now. That is, than she was
then. Also I doubt if I could ever love you as you think you do. Love
me, I mean. I am not a man's woman. I much prefer women. Really,
Arnold, it is very strange how men bore me now that I have known
certain women. Women are so much more interesting, so much more
fascinating, so much more exciting! This will probably seem strange to
you, but the modern woman I am sure is rapidly getting not to need men
at all! I have never seen so many beautiful red-haired girls before.
One sits in front of me in chapel, and the light makes an aureole of
glory about her head. I wrote a theme about it that is going to be in
the _Monthly_ for November.

I hope that you won't feel that our dear old friendship of so many
years is in any way changed. I shall never forget certain things--

I am enjoying my work very much, though it is easier than I had
thought it would be, and the life is different in many ways. If I did
not think that Miss Sawyer had probably invited you, I should be very
glad to have you come up for the Christmas concert, but I suppose it
is useless to ask you. I had no idea you were so fond of tennis!

         Your friend always,
             ELIZABETH WOLFE STOCKTON.


VII

     FROM MR. HENRY STOCKTON TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON

         _Lowell, Mass., Nov. 1, 189-._

MY DEAR ELIZABETH: Yours received and read with my usual attention and
interest. I am glad that your college life continues to be pleasant,
and that you have found so many friends. I was much interested, too,
in the photograph of Miss Hunter. I find the blue prints are more
common than I had supposed, for I had imagined that they were
something quite new. It is certainly very accommodating in your
teachers to allow themselves to be so generally photographed. Your
mother seemed much pleased with Miss Hunter, and glad that you were in
the house with her and liked her so much. I was surprised to see her
so young in appearance. I had very foolishly imagined the typical old
style "school-marm," I suppose. But it seems that she was graduated
only a few years ago, herself.

Now, my dear Elizabeth, I am going to speak to you very seriously. I
trust that you will take it in good part and remember that nothing can
be more to my interest than the real happiness and well-being of my
daughter. The tone of your letters to both your mother and me has
seemed for some weeks unsatisfactory. I mean that we have found in
them a nervous, strained tone that troubles me exceedingly. I cannot
see why you should close with such expressions as this (I copy
verbatim): "Too tired to write more;" "All used up--lots of Latin to
do--can only find time for a note;" "Tired to death because I'm not
sleeping quite as well as usual, just now;" et cetera, et cetera.

I have been to see Mrs. Meade, and she assures me that your
preparation was more than adequate: that your first year should prove
very easy for you, _in Latin especially_. Now what does this mean? You
left us well and strong, considering that you have always been a
delicate girl. It was for that reason, as you know, that I
particularly opposed your going to college.

But there is more. Mrs. Allen's daughter, Harriet, has been at home
for some days to attend her sister's wedding. Your mother and I
naturally seized the opportunity of inquiring after you, and after
some questioning from us she admitted that you were not looking very
well. She said that you seemed tired and were "going it a little too
hard, perhaps." That seemed to me a remarkable expression to apply to
a young girl! My endeavors to find out exactly what it meant resulted
in nothing more explicit than that "Bess was trying to do too much."

Now, my dear girl, while we are naturally only too pleased that you
should be striving to stand well in your classes, do not, I beg of
you, imagine for one moment that any intellectual advancement you may
win can compensate us or you for the loss of your health. You remember
Cousin Will, who carried off six honors at Harvard and came home a
nervous invalid. I fear that the Stockton temperament cannot stand the
strain of too continued mental application.

I must stop now, to attend to some business matters, and I will add
only this. Do not fail to remember my definite conditions, which have
not altered since September. If you are not perfectly well at the
Christmas holidays, you must remain with us. This may seem severe, but
I am convinced, your mother also, that we shall be acting entirely for
your good.

         Yours aff.,
             FATHER.


VIII

     FROM MR. ARNOLD RITCH, SR., TO MISS MARION HUNTER

         _New York, N. Y., Nov. 4, 189-._

MY DEAR MISS HUNTER: You may remember meeting, five years ago, in
Paris, in the Louvre, an old American, who had the great pleasure of
rendering you a trifling assistance in a somewhat embarrassing
situation, and who had the further pleasure of crossing on the
_Etruria_ with you a month later. I was that man, and I remember that
you said that if ever there should happen to be an occasion for it,
you would be only too happy to return your imaginary debt.

If you really meant it, the occasion, strangely enough, has come. I
know well enough from my lifelong friend, Richard Benton, whose family
you have so often visited, that you are an extremely busy young woman,
and I will state my case briefly. I never make half-confidences, and
I rely implicitly on your discretion in the following clear statement.
My only nephew and namesake, incidentally heir, has been for some time
practically engaged to Miss Elizabeth Stockton, the daughter of an old
friend. The engagement has been entirely satisfactory to all parties
concerned, and was actually on the eve of announcement, when the young
lady abruptly departed for Smith College.

My nephew is, though only twenty-four, unusually mature and thoroughly
settled: he was deeply in love with the young lady and assures me that
his sentiments were returned. She now quietly refuses him, and greatly
to her parents' dissatisfaction announces that she intends remaining
the four years and "graduating with her class," which seems a strong
point with her.

Her father and I would gladly leave the affair to work itself out
quietly, were it not for an unfortunate occurrence. Ritch, Jr. has
been offered an extremely good opening in a Paris banking-house, which
he must accept, if at all, immediately, and for six years. He is
extremely broken up over the whole affair, and says that unless
Elizabeth returns to her old relations with him, he will go. This will
be in three weeks.

I am not so young as I was, and I cannot leave America again. I can
only say that if the boy goes, my interest in life goes, to a great
extent, with him. He does not mean to be selfish, but young people,
you know, are harder than they think, and feel deeply and, for the
moment, irrevocably. He says that he is certain that this is merely a
fad on Miss Stockton's part, and that if he could see her for two
weeks he would prove it. I should like to have him try.

This is my favor, Miss Hunter. Elizabeth respects and admires you more
than any of her teachers. She quotes you frequently and seems
influenced by you. Arnold has made me promise that I will not ask her
parents to bring her home and that I will not write her. I will not.
But can you do anything? It is rather absurd to ask you to conspire
against your college, to give up one of your pupils: but you have a
great many, and remember that I have but one nephew! It is all rather
a comedy, but a sad one for me, if there is no change within three
weeks, I assure you. They are only two headstrong children, but they
can cause more than one heartache if they keep up their obstinacy.
Elizabeth has forbidden Arnold to come to Northampton on the score of
her work, and wild horses could not drag him there.

I offer no suggestion, I ask nothing definitely, I merely wonder if
you meant what you said on the _Etruria_, and if your woman's wit,
that must have managed so many young idiots, can manage these?

         Yours faithfully,
             ARNOLD M. RITCH.


IX

     FROM MISS MARION HUNTER TO MRS. HENRY STOCKTON

         _Northampton, Mass., Nov. 7, 189-._

MY DEAR MRS. STOCKTON: As you have certainly not forgotten that I
assured you in the early fall of my interest, professionally and
personally, in your daughter, you will need no further explanation,
nor be at all alarmed, when I tell you that Elizabeth is a little
over-worked of late. In the house with her as I am, I see that she is
trying to carry a little too much of our unfortunately famous "social
life" in connection with her studies, where she is unwilling to lose a
high grade. She entered so well prepared that she has nothing to fear
from a short absence, and as she tells me that she does not sleep well
at all of late, she will have no difficulty in getting an honorable
furlough. Two weeks or so of rest and freedom from strain will set her
up perfectly, I have no doubt, and she can return with perfect safety
to her work, which is, I repeat, quite satisfactory.

         Yours very cordially,
             MARION HUNTER.


X

     FROM MRS. HENRY STOCKTON TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON
         (_Telegram_)

         _Lowell, Mass., Nov. 8._

Come home immediately will arrange with college and explain myself.

         MOTHER.


XI

     FROM MISS MARION HUNTER TO MISS CONSTANCE JACKSON

         _Northampton, Mass., Nov. 10, 189-._

DEAR CON: I'm afraid it will be impossible for me to accept your
seductive invitation for Thanksgiving. We're pulling the girls up a
little sharply this year, and it would hardly do for me to come back
late. But it _would_ be good to hear a little music once more!

It was rather odd that you should have mentioned that idiotic affair
of mine in Paris--the hero of it has just written me a long letter
_apropos_ of his nephew, who wants to marry that little Miss Stockton,
whose Harvard cousin you knew so well. That portly squire of dames is
actually simple and straightforward enough to suggest that I
precipitate the damsel into the expectant arms of his nephew and
heir-apparent--he is used to getting his own way, certainly, and he
writes a rather attractive letter. I owe him much (as you know) and if
Elizabeth, who is a dear little thing and far too nice for the crowd
she's getting in with--you knew Carol Sawyer, didn't you?--has such a
weak-kneed interest in college as to be turned out of the way by a
sight of the destined young gentleman, I fancy she would not have
remained long with us in any case. She's a pretty creature and had
cunning ways--I shall miss her in the house. For I don't believe
she'll come back; she's not at all strong, and her parents are much
worried about her health. It is more than probable that the Home will
prove her sphere.

Personally, I don't mind stating that I would it were mine. When I
consider how my days are spent----

You might not believe it, but they grow stupider and stupider.
Perhaps I've been at it a bit too long, but I never saw such papers as
these freshmen give one.

And they have begun singing four hymns in succession on Sunday
morning! It's very hard--why they should select _Abide with Me_ and
_Lead, Kindly Light_ for morning exercises and wail them both through
to the bitter end every Sunday in the year is one of the local
mysteries.

I must get at my papers, they cover everything. Remember me to Mr.
Jackson; it was very kind of him to suggest it, but I must wait till
Christmas for the Opera, I'm afraid. If I should not come back next
year--and it is more than possible that I shan't--I may be in Boston.
I hope in that case you won't have gone away.

         Yours always,
             M. I. HUNTER.


XII

     FROM MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON TO MISS CAROLYN SAWYER

         _Lowell, Nov. 20._

CAROL DEAR: I am writing in a great hurry, as I have an engagement at
four, to tell you that I have decided not to return to-day, as I
intended. Will you get the key of 32 from Mrs. Driscoll, as Kitty goes
home over Sunday, so it will be locked, and get out my mink collarette
and my silver toilet things and my blanket wrapper, and I think there
is twenty dollars in my handkerchief case. I am extremely disturbed
and confused--when one is really responsible for anything one feels
very much disturbed. Of course, I don't believe a word of it--it's all
folly and nonsense--but still, six years is a long time. Of course,
you don't know at all what I mean, dear, and I'm not sure I do either.
I forgot to say that I'm probably not coming back to college this
year. Mamma feels very worried about my health--you know I didn't
sleep very well nights, and I used to dream about Livy. Anyway, she
and Papa are going abroad early in the spring, and really, Carol, a
college education isn't everything. If I were going to teach, you
know, it would be different, but you see I was almost finished at Mrs.
Meade's--I was taking advanced work--and it isn't as if I had had only
the college preparation. Then, if we go abroad, I must do something
with my French. You know there was simply _no_ chance to practise
conversation in such a large class, and I was forgetting it, which
Arnold thinks would be a pity. He speaks very fine French himself.
Then, you see, there'll be all the galleries and everything and the
Sistine Madonna and the cathedrals--they're so educative--everybody
admits that. It's hardly to be supposed that Geometry and Livy are
really going to be as broadening to me as a year of travel with Papa
and Mamma, is it? And though I never said anything to you about it, I
really have felt for some time that there was something a little
narrow about the college. They seem to think it is about all there is
of life, you know, with the funny little dances and the teas and all
that. Even that dear Miss Hunter is really _un peu gâtée_ with it
all--she thinks, I believe, that a college education is all there is
for anybody. She told Mamma that I wasn't well--she wanted me to keep
my high grade. Oh! Carol! there are better things than grades! Life is
a very much bigger thing than the campus even! I think, dear, that one
really ought to consider very frankly just what we intend to do with
our lives--if we are going to marry, we ought to try to make ourselves
cultivated and broad-minded, and in every way worthy to be--Oh, Carol,
dearest, I'm terribly happy! It isn't settled, of course: I am utterly
amazed that they all seem to think it is, but it isn't. Only probably
if I still feel as I do now, when we get back, I shall ask you, dear,
what we promised each other--to be my bridesmaid--the first one! I'm
thinking of asking Sally and Grace and Eleanor--all our old set at
Mrs. Meade's, you know. I think that pink, with a deep rose for hats
and sashes, would look awfully well on all of you, don't you! It seems
a long time since I was in Northampton: the girls seem very young and
terribly serious over queer little lessons--or else trying to play
they're interested in each other. Arnold says he thinks the attitude
of so many women is bound to be unhealthy, and even in some cases a
little morbid. I think he is quite right, don't you? After all, girls
need some one besides themselves. I always thought that Mabel Towne
was very bad for Katharine. Will you send, too, my Shelley and my
selections from Keats? The way I neglected my reading--real reading,
you know--oh! _c'était affreux!_ I'm learning the loveliest
song--Arnold is very fond of it:

     _Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie?
     L'heure s'enfuit, le jour succède au jour.
         Rose ce soir, demain flètrie--
     Comment vis-tu, toi qui n'as pas d'amour?_

I'm going out now for a walk. I'm sure you'll like Arnold--I think you
said you met him. He doesn't remember you. Remember me to all the
juniors I met, and if you see Ethel Henderson, tell her I'll write to
her when I get time. Excuse this pointed pen--I'm learning to use it.
Arnold hates a stub.

         Yours always,
             BETTY.




THE SIXTH STORY

_A FAMILY AFFAIR_




VI

A FAMILY AFFAIR


There are Jacksons and Jacksons. As everybody knows, many, possibly
most, of those who bear that title might as well have been called
Jones or Robinson; on the other hand, I am told that certain
Massachusetts families of that name will, on solicitation, admit it to
be their belief that Eve was a Cabot and Adam a Jackson. Without
asserting that she was personally convinced of this great fact, it is
necessary to state that Susan was of the last-named variety of
Jackson. She was distinctly democratic, however, and rather
strong-willed, and for both of these reasons she came to college. It
did not entirely please the family: neither of her sisters had gone,
and her brothers in particular were against it. It is probable that
she would have been decoyed from her plan had it not been that her
cousin, Constance Quincy Jackson, had been for a year one of the young
assistants who dash like meteors through the catalogue and disappear
mysteriously, just as astronomers have begun to place them, into the
obscurity whence they came.

Constance, like Susan, had been persistent, and was studying at Oxford
before the family had quite made up its mind how to regard her;
later, she frequented other and American institutions of learning and
bore off formidable degrees therefrom, and at about that time it was
decided that she was remarkably brilliant, and that her much commended
thesis on the Essential Somethingness of Something or Other was quite
properly to be ranked with her great-grandfather's dissertation on the
Immortality of the Soul.

She would do very well; she could be relied on; and entrusted to her
and further armed with letters of introduction to the social magnates
of the vicinity--which, I regret to say, she neglected to present till
her sophomore year--Susan began her career. Of the eminent success of
this career, it is not the purpose of this story to treat. Beginning
as freshman vice-president, she immediately identified herself with
the leading set of her class, and in her sophomore year was already
one of the prominent students in the college. She was one of Phi
Kappa's earliest acquisitions, and belonged to three or four lesser
societies, social and semi-educational; she had been on the freshman
Team; she was twice a member of the Council; in her senior year she
was literary editor of the _Monthly_ and class president, besides
taking a prominent part in Dramatics. She fulfilled all these duties
most acceptably, taking at the same time a very high rank in her
classes: in one department, indeed, her work was pronounced
practically perfect by a somewhat exigent professor. And in addition,
she was well born, well bred, and well dressed, and considered by her
most enthusiastic admirers the handsomest girl in the college, though
this was by no means the universal opinion.

You might imagine that Miss Jackson was therefore intolerably
conceited, but in this you would err. She took no particular credit to
herself for her standard of work; she had a keen mind, and had been
taught to concentrate it, and her grandfather, her father, and two
uncles had successively led their classes at Harvard. It seemed
perfectly natural to her to be told that she was the one young woman
on whose shoulders a golf cape looked really dignified and
graceful--had not her grandmother and her great-aunt been famed for
their "camel's-hair-shawl shoulders"? A somewhat commanding manner and
a very keen-sighted social policy had given her a prominence that she
was conscious of having done nothing to discredit; and as she had been
quite accustomed to see those about her in positions of authority,
and had learned to lay just the proper amount of emphasis on adverse
criticism, she steered her way with a signal success on the perilous
sea of popularity. Her idea of the four years had been to do
everything there was to be done as well as any one could do it, and
she was not a person accustomed to consider failure.

I mentioned at the beginning of this story the two classes of
Jacksons. Emphatically of the former and unimportant variety was
Elaine Susan Jackson of Troy, New York. Mr. Jackson kept a
confectionery shop and ice cream parlor, going to his business early
in the morning and returning late in the evening. This he did because
he was a quiet-loving man, and his home was a noisy one. Mrs. Jackson
was a managing, dictatorial woman, with an unexpected sentimental vein
which she nourished on love-stories and exhausted there. From these
books she had culled the names of her daughters--Elaine, Veronica, and
Doris; but prudence impelled her to add to these the names of her
husband's three sisters--a triumph of maternal foresight over æsthetic
taste--and they stood in the family Bible, Elaine Susan, Veronica
Sarah, and Doris Hannah.

Mr. Jackson was not a sentimentalist himself, and read nothing but the
paper, sitting placidly behind the peanut-brittle and chocolate mice,
and relapsing sometimes into absolute idleness for hours together,
deep in contemplation, perhaps, possibly dozing--nobody ever knew. At
such times he regarded the entrance of customers as an unwelcome
intrusion and was accustomed to hurry them, if juvenile, into undue
precipitance of choice. From this even quiet he emerged seldom but
effectively: when Veronica entertained the unattractive young men she
called "the boys," later than eleven o'clock, when Doris went to the
theatre more than twice a week, or when they had purchased garments of
a nature more than usually unsuitable and pronounced. Then Mr. Jackson
spoke, and after domestic whirlwinds and fires the still voice of an
otherwise doubtful head of the family became the voice of authority.

Elaine gave him no trouble of this sort. She did not care for young
men, and she never went to the theatre. Her clothes, when she had any
choice in the matter, were of the plainest, and she had never teased
her father for candy since she began to read, which was at a very
early age. _I Say No, or the Love-letter Answered_, was her first
consciously studied book, and between ten and fifteen she devoured
more novels than most people get into a lifetime. Incidentally she
read poetry--she got books of it for prizes at school--and one
afternoon she sandwiched the _Golden Treasury_ between two detective
stories. She did not care for her mother's friends, gossiping, vulgar
women, and she loathed her sisters'. She had a sharp tongue, and as
parental discipline was of the slightest, she criticised them all
impartially with the result that she was cordially disliked by
everybody she knew--a feeling she returned with interest. She found
two or three ardent friends at school and was very happy with them for
a time, but she was terribly exacting, and demanded an allegiance so
intense and unquestioning that one by one they drifted away into other
groups and left her.

In her second year at the high school they read the _Idylls of the
King_, and she discovered her name and saw in one shame-filled second
the idiotic bad taste of it--Elaine Susan! She imagined the lily maid
of Astolat behind her father's counter and became so abased in her own
mind that the school found her more haughty and disagreeable than
ever. From that moment she signed her name E. Susan Jackson and
requested to be called Susan. This met the approval of the teachers,
and as the schoolgirls did not hold much conversation with her, the
change was not a difficult one.

By the time she had been three years in the high school she was
considered by every one the most brilliant student there, and the
principal suggested college to her. This had never occurred to her.
Though they had never lacked for necessities, Mr. Jackson's business
was not conducted in a manner to lead to marked financial success, and
though he said little about his affairs, it was evident to them all
that matters were slowly but surely running down hill. Doris and
Veronica were eager to leave school and spend a term at the Business
College, some friends of theirs having done this with great success
and found positions as typewriters, but their father insisted on their
staying at school for two years at least. It would be time enough to
leave, he said, when they had to. It was significant of the
unconscious attitude of the family that there had never been any
question of the oldest daughter's leaving school: Elaine had always
been real bright, her mother said, and as long as books was all she
took any interest in, she might as well get what she could--she
presumed she'd teach.

But this acquiescent spirit changed immediately when she learned that
her husband had told Elaine he would send her to college for two years
anyway, and as much longer as he could afford. It seemed to Mrs.
Jackson a ridiculous and unwarranted expense, particularly as he had
refused to allow the term at the Business College partly on the
financial score. She lectured, argued, scolded; but he was firm.

"I told her she should, and she shall," he repeated quietly. "She says
she thinks she can help along after a while, and you needn't worry
about her paying it back--she will, all right, if she can. I guess
she's the best of the lot of us; she's worth the other two put
together. You let Lainey alone, Hattie, she's all right!"

This was during her last year at school, and as she had on her own
responsibility taken the classical course there, finding a fascination
in the idea of Greek, she accomplished the preparation very easily.

Her mother, bowing to the inevitable, began to plume herself on her
daughter "who was fitting herself to go to Smith's College," and rose
many degrees in the social scale because of her. But their ideas of
the necessary preparations differed so materially, that after
prolonged and jarring hostilities marked by much temper on both sides,
the final crash came, and after a battle royal Elaine took what money
was forthcoming and conducted her affairs unchallenged from that
moment. It was a relief to be freed from the wearisome squabbles, but
she cried herself to sleep the night before she left--she did not
perfectly know why. Later she told herself that it was because she had
so little reason to cry when she left home for the first time.

She went to the train alone, because the girls were at school and her
father at his business. She said good-by to her mother on the porch,
with the constraint that had grown to characterize her attitude
towards them all, but her mother was suddenly seized with a spasm of
sentiment, and kissing her wildly, bewailed the necessity that drove
her firstborn from her to strangers. Later the girl found it sadly
characteristic of her life, that absurd scene on the porch; with her
heart hungry and miserable for the love and confidence she had never
known, she endured agonies of shame and irritation at the
demonstration that came too late. She went away, outwardly cold, with
tight-pressed lips; her mother read _Cometh up as a Flower_, and wept
hysterically that Fate should have cursed her with such an unfeeling,
moody child.

It is hard to determine just what incident convinced Susan--for she
dropped the initial on her registration--that life had not changed for
her because she was to live it in Northampton, and that she must be
alone there, as she had been in Troy. Just before she left college she
decided that she had known it immediately: that from the moment when
she plunged into the chattering, bustling crowd in the Main Hall,
where everybody knew somebody and most people knew all the others, a
vague prevision of her four years' loneliness came to her: a pathetic
certainty that she could not, even with the effort she was too proud
to make, become in any reality a part of that sparkling, absorbed,
unconscious current of life that rushed by her.

Sometimes she dated her disillusionment--for she had had her dreams:
she knew them only by the pathetic disappointment of the obstinate
awakening--from the day that she saw her namesake laughing in the
midst of a jolly group of girls to whom she was presenting her father
and her aunt. They were handsome, well-dressed people with a distinct
air, and they were tolerantly amused at Sue in her new environment and
showed it in a kindly, courteous way that was much appreciated. As
Susan passed the group there was a great laugh, and she heard Sue's
voice above the rest.

"Truly, Papa, I thought you'd finished! You know, whenever I
interrupted, Papa used to make me sit absolutely still for a quarter
of an hour afterward--it's not so long ago he stopped, either!"

Her father laughed, and patted her shoulder, and Susan went on out of
hearing. It was only a flash; but she saw the gracious, well-ordered
household, the handsome, dignified people, the atmosphere of
generations of good breeding and scholarship, as clearly as if she had
visited them, and her heart swelled with angry regret and a sickening
certainty that all the cleverness in the world could not make up for
the youth she had been cheated out of. She thought of the bickering,
squabbling family table in Troy and tried to imagine her father
teaching Doris and Veronica not to interrupt: her cheeks burned.

In class Sue was often near her; she knew that she was recognized
chiefly by the fact that _she_ was Susan Jackson, too. On the first
day, when the instructor had called "Miss Jackson" and they had both
answered, "Miss Susan Jackson," when they still replied together, and
finally "Miss Susan Revere Jackson," when the matter was cleared up,
Sue had looked at her with interest, and after the class made some
little joking remark. If the other had answered in the same spirit,
nobody knows whether this story need have been written. But Susan had
heard Cornelia Burt ask: "Is she related at all, Sue?" and heard Sue's
answer, "Oh, dear, no! From Troy, I believe."

Now Sue meant absolutely nothing but what she said, but her namesake
read into the words a scorn that was not there--either in intention or
fact. Her heart was sore with a hot, vague jealousy: this girl, no
longer there than she, had stepped so easily into a place prepared,
apparently, for her; she knew everybody, went everywhere; admired by
her own class and made much of by the upper-class girls, she was
already well known in the college. She was a part of it all--Susan
only watched it. And because of this and because she admired her
tremendously and envied her with all the force of a passionate,
repressed nature, the poor child answered her little remark with a
curtness that was almost insolent, and the manner of an offended
duchess. Sue flushed a little, lifted her brows, threw a swift glance
at Cornelia, and walked away with her. Susan heard them laughing in
the hall, and bit her lip.

She could not know that Sue had described her in a letter to her
father as "a queer, haughty thing, but terribly clever. Nobody seems
to know her--I imagine she's terribly bored up here. I said some
footless thing or other to her the other day, and she turned me down,
as Betty says. Did you meet Dr. Twitchell? He was stopping with the
Winthrops...."

Susan used to wonder afterwards if it would all have been different
had she been on the campus. I know that most college people will say
that it would, and it is certain that campus life was the best thing
in the world for Martha Williams: nobody knows with what
self-conscious egotism she might have been spoiled if her friends and
foes had not conspired to laugh it out of her. But, on the other hand,
those who have watched the victims of that reasonless, pitiless
boycotting that only women can accomplish so lightly--so
unconsciously, do you think?--know the ghastly loneliness of the one
who, in the very centre of the most crowded campus house, is more
solitary than the veriest island castaway.

There is no doubt that Susan needed a great deal of discipline. She
had been for so many years superior to her surroundings, so long not
only the cleverest but the finest-grained, most aristocratic of all
those she saw about her, that although she had perfectly appreciated
the fact that she would probably no longer be in that relative
position, she had not estimated the difficulty of the necessary
adjustment, and it is only fair to those who gave her her hardest
lessons of calm neglect to state at once that her manner was a trifle
irritating.

To begin with, she had made herself unpleasantly conspicuous at the
time of their first freshman class-meeting by rising after half an
hour of unventilated and tumultuous altercation, and leaving the room.
Now it is not the custom of popular freshmen to leave their first
class-meeting in this manner--not as if one were faint or demanded at
recitation, but as merely intolerably bored and not a little
contemptuous; and the scrambling, squabbling class regarded her
accordingly. Susan Revere Jackson was bored, too--unspeakably bored;
but she sat indefatigably in her chair in the front row, applauded
nominations, discussed the presumably parliamentary features of the
occasion, smiled and agreed, differed at proper intervals, and left
the room vice-president. It is hard to know just how much enthusiasm
Sue really felt: Susan, to whom she soon became the visible expression
of all the triumph and ease and distilled essence of the successful
college girl, used to wonder, later, as older than Susan have
wondered, how much of her college life was ingenuous and how much a
perfectly conscious attitude. For long before she left, Susan realized
that she had greatly misjudged a large proportion of the girls, whom
the event proved more practically wise than she, and that they who
fill the rôle of "fine, all 'round girl" with the greatest success are
often perfectly competent to fill others, widely different.

This she did not understand at first, and as a result of her ignorance
she included them all in her general condemnation: she found them
immature, boisterous, inclined to be silly; or narrow-minded and
dogmatic when they were less flippant. She was somewhat exacting, as
has been said before, and the solemn, ponderous attitude of the
occasional girl who wallows before the abstract Higher Education, and
lectures the Faculty gravely on their failure to conduct her to its
most eminent peaks during the freshman year, appealed as strongly to
her sense of humor as if she had not herself been sadly disappointed
in the somewhat restricted curriculum offered her at that period.

This was through no fault whatever of the college, but because the
girl had absolutely no practical basis of expectation and knew no more
of the thousand implications of college life than she did of normal
girlhood with its loves and disciplines and confidences, its
tremendous little social experiences, its quaint emotions, and
indispensable hypocrisies. Her vague conception of college life was
modelled on _The Princess_: she imagined graceful, gracious women,
enamoured of a musical, poetic, higher knowledge, deliciously rapt at
the wonderful oratory of some priestess of a cult yet unknown to her:
a woman beautiful and passionate, who should understand her vaguest
dreams and sympathize with her strangest sorrows as no one she had yet
known or seen could do. She found a crowd of jostling, chattering
schoolgirls, unformed, unpoised; many of them vulgar, many stupid,
many ill-bred; overflowing a damp, cold hall that smelled of wet,
washed floors; reciting, in a very average fashion, perfectly concrete
and ordinary lessons from text-books only too familiar, to
businesslike, middle-aged women, rather plain than otherwise, with a
practical grasp of the matter in hand and a marked preference for
regular attendance on the part of freshmen.

It was characteristic of her that what cut deepest in all the
disillusionment was not the loss of the hope, but the shamed
perception of the folly of it, the realization of the depth of
practical ignorance it implied, the perfectly conscious pathos of a
life so empty of real experience of the world as to make such naïve
visions possible. She did the required work and kept her thoughts
about it to herself, but the effect of what she secretly felt to have
been a provincial and ridiculous mistake showed itself in her manner;
and the occasional hauteur of her namesake, who had inherited a very
effective stare of her own, was diffidence itself compared with the
reserved disdain that covered her own smarting sensitiveness.

Girls who had tumbled about with their kind from babyhood, who had
found at home, at church, at school a varied if simple social
training, resented her formality and could not see that pure shyness
of them, pure wonder at their rough-and-ready ease of manner, their
amazing power of adjustment, their quick grasp of the situation and
each other, lay at the root of her jealous dignity.

So she called them "Miss," and they thought her affected; she waited
for invitations that she should have taken for granted, and they
thought her haughty; she made no advance in a place where only the
very favored are sought out and most must earn even the humblest
recognition with honest toil and assiduous advertisement, and they
quietly let her alone. She was not on the campus, and as the girls in
the small boarding-house with her were industrious and ordinary to the
last degree and became very early impressed with her realization of
this fact, she saw little of them, and her one opportunity of getting
the campus gossip, which is the college gossip, grew smaller and
smaller. She took solitary walks, thereby confirming the impression
that she preferred to be alone--for who need be alone among a thousand
girls unless she wishes it?

On such a walk, late in the fall, she stood for some time on one of
the hills that rise above the town proper, looking for the hundredth
time at the mountains, outlined that afternoon against the dying light
of a brassy, green sky. The trees were bare and black about her; the
lights in the comfortable houses were flushing up the windows with a
happy evening red; belated children were hurrying home; and now and
then groups of girls, fresh-cheeked from their quick walk, swung by,
in haste for supper and their evening engagements. Over her heart,
hungry and misunderstood, there poured a sudden flood of passionate
longing for one hour of unconscious happy comradeship with homes and
girls like these; one hour of some one else's--anybody else's--life;
one taste of dependence on another than herself. It fell into rhythm
and fascinating phrases while she gave herself up to the mood, and she
made a poem of it that night. In two days she was famous, for High
Authority publicly placed the poem above anything yet done in the
college; it was seized by the _Monthly_, and copied widely in the
various college publications; to the editorial board and the Faculty
who did not have other reason for knowing her, she became "the girl
who wrote _At Autumn Dusk_." It was long before she equalled it,
though almost everything she did was far above a college standard; and
one or two people will always think it her best poem, I have no doubt,
in spite of more recent and perhaps more striking work.

For this poem was only the beginning, it may as well be admitted now,
of Susan's career as a genius. This degree is frequently conferred, no
doubt, when unmerited; but the article is so susceptible of imitation,
the recipe for producing the traditional effect so comparatively
simple, that it is to be wondered at, on the whole, that the aspirants
for the title should be, among so many clever young women, so
relatively few. To a frank and recently awakened interest in Shelley,
Keats, Rossetti, and Co., it is only necessary to add a vacant
abstraction, a forgetfulness of conventional meal hours--supper, for
choice--a somewhat occult system of reply to ordinary remarks, and the
courage of one's convictions in the matter of bursting out with the
irrelevant results of previous and prolonged meditation irrespective
of the conversation of the moment. Any one who will combine with these
infallible signs of the fire from heaven as much carelessness in the
matter of dress as her previous bringing up will allow--though this is
naturally a variable quantity--and a certain unmistakable looseness of
_coiffure_--was there ever a genius with taut hair? heaven avert
it!--may be reasonably certain of recognition. It is understood, of
course, that with the qualifications above mentioned a taste for verse
and an ear for rhythm, in conjunction with the frank appreciation of
the poetical firm also above mentioned, have produced their inevitable
result.

The character of the output naturally has something to do with the
extent of the reputation, and although Susan, the most promising
candidate for the degree then in the field, had alarmingly few of the
most obvious signs of her rank, this was indulgently passed over, and
she was allowed her laurels.

But it was Sue Jackson on whom all the first congratulations were
heaped: roses and violets, that blossom at the slightest excuse in
Northampton, covered the hall table in the Hubbard House, where she
spent her first two years; affectionate and mock-reverential notes
crowded the bulletin board for her; a spread was actually got up and
the guests invited before the mistake was known. To do her justice she
would have promptly despatched the notes and flowers to her defrauded
namesake, but the donors, whom she consulted, would have none of it.

"Why, Sue! Why, the idea! _Didn't_ you write it? Oh, girls, what a
joke! How perfectly funny!--Send 'em to her? Not at all. Why on earth
should Neal and I send that girl flowers? For that matter, she cut us
dead day before yesterday, on Round Hill, didn't she, Pat? And she's
in our Greek, too. We'll have the stuff to eat, anyhow. You're a nice
old thing, Sue, if you can't write 'this extraordinary poem'!"

Susan, who heard next to nothing of college news, heard about this.
She heard how Sue had gayly responded to toasts: "The Poem I did not
write," "My Feelings on failing to compose my Masterpiece"--this was
Neal Burt's, and she was very clever over it--and others. The only
thing she did not hear about was Sue's half-serious response to "My
gifted God-child," suggested by an upper-class friend. She made a
little graceful fun and then added quite earnestly, "And really,
girls, I _do_ think she ought to be here! After all, the Class, you
know--Let's take down the flowers and all the fudge--come on! She
can't do more than squelch us!"

The very girls who had scoffed at the idea before were naturally the
ones to take it up immediately, and they were hastily gathering the
things together, when the bell rang. They could not hope to get there
and back before ten, and most of them were already deep in the
matron's black list for reported lights; so they gave it up, and put
the flowers in the tub, where a sudden frost over night struck them
and they perished miserably.

To Susan it was the bitterest thing of all; it took the sweetness from
her success; it dulled the piquancy of her sudden position. She could
not possibly know how little it meant to Sue; that it was only one of
many spreads, and by no means the triumphal feast she imagined; that
after the first they forgot why they had planned it, almost. To her it
was her chance at life, her long-delayed birthright, and Sue had taken
it, too, along with everything else. "She might have left me
that!"--it was her thought for more than one unhappy night.

Before she went home in June she had written a Chaucer paper that
became vaguely confounded in the matter of literary rank with the
works of its famous subject, in her class-mates' simple minds, so
great was the commendation of Another High Authority in regard to its
matter and style. It came out in the May _Monthly_, in which were some
pretty little verses of Sue's. They were paraphrased from the
French--Sue had taken any amount of French before she came up--and
Susan spent her time at chapel in looking harder than ever at her
namesake as she laughed and chattered and took her part in the
somewhat crudely conceived jokes that seem to amuse girls so
perennially. Less flexible, as she afterwards considered, less
hypocritical, as she irritably felt then, she marvelled at the mental
make-up of a girl capable of appreciating the force and pathos of De
Musset's best work and expressing it so accurately, and able at the
same time to find content in such tiresome, half-grown nonsense.

When the _Monthly_ came out, she was amazed to receive a dozen copies
with a hasty note:

     Dear Miss Jackson: Here are the copies you wanted--never mind
     the money. There are always a lot left over since we enlarged
     the edition. If you want more, after we've sent out the Alumnæ
     list, we'll give them to you.

         H. STUART.

It was only one of the many notes intended for Sue that had been
coming to her since the beginning. But none of the invitations to
dinner, to Alpha and Phi Kappa, to walk, to ride, to wheel, to eat a
box from home, had the effect of this one. For Sue came after her
_Monthlies_ and in a ten minutes' conversation wrought more ruin than
she would have believed possible.

"Did you get all mine and your own, too?" she asked laughingly. "I
should send away a hundred, more or less, if _I_ did 'absolutely
satisfactory' Chaucer papers! I should be that proud....

"You see, Papa has to have the _Monthly_, if there's anything of mine
in it, _tout de suite_--directly--now. He was wild with rage at me
because he learned about that little fool story I had in, once before,
from Cousin Con, 'long afterwards,' he said--it was only a week! And
then, other people, you know....

"Did you get any of these off, before I came? Because it's all right
if you did--I don't need a dozen. Isn't it funny I don't get any of
your things? You must be somewhat cloyed with my notes and stuff--I
should think you'd be bored to death. It's very wearing on me, Miss
Jackson, explaining all the time, 'No, I'm not the one! I assure you I
didn't write it.' You've no idea....

"My cousin is on the _Harvard Monthly_ board, you know--he telegraphed
congratulations to me. He was that set up over it! It was really very
funny....

"I'm afraid I'm keeping you--were you going out? Shall I tell Helen
Stuart to send yours down? She may think we've both got all we want.
Do you know what Alpha's going to be to-night? Somebody said it was
going to be Dr. Winthrop--he's my uncle, you know, and I thought if it
was I'd go down to the station...."

She had not the slightest idea that her thoughtless and, to tell the
truth, somewhat embarrassed chatter was one succession of little
galling pinpricks to the other. Her father, who expected his
daughter's little triumphs to be his own, as a matter of course; her
cousin at Harvard; her uncle who lectured to the Alpha; her notes and
flowers--she must know that there was the best of reasons for her not
getting her namesake's!--her light implication that everybody went to
Alpha; her very expression: "No, I'm not the one!" seemed to the
girl's angry sensitiveness a studied insult. Not the one! As if there
were any one else! She did not know how unbearably formal and curt she
seemed to the other, nor how strongly she gave the impression of
wanting to be let alone.

Sue went away to mail her _Monthlies_, and Susan locked her door and
considered at length and in detail the humor of her visitor's light
remarks as applied to herself. She fancied _At Autumn Dusk_ and _A
Study of Chaucer_ demanded by an enraged father, and smiled--a very
unpleasant and ungirlish smile. Moreover, it is possible that she did
her father an injustice here. While it is improbable that he would
have persisted in lending them about among his friends, to his wife's
open amusement, as did Mr. Jackson of Boston, and notwithstanding the
fact that he would doubtless have failed to appreciate them fully, he
might have liked to see them. Later, much later, Susan was to find a
number of her poems and stories clipped with care from the magazines
and pasted into an old scrapbook, with the glowing notices of her
first really well-known work; the book hidden under a pile of old
newspapers in her father's closet. She cried over them for days--he
was dead then--and published _Blind Hearts_ shortly afterward. None of
her class-mates, most of whom gave or received that exquisite
sonnet-cycle for Christmas that year, could have known that the roots
of it struck back to her freshman year at college.

After a stupid, hot vacation, in which she lost touch more than ever
with her people, from whom she was to draw slowly apart, it seemed,
forever, she came back with a little, unowned hope for other things: a
vague idea that she could start fresh. She told somebody, afterwards,
that just as she got to understand girls a little she lost all
connection with them; she did not lose connection with them just then,
so it must be that she did not then understand them.

Indeed, what was, perhaps, her greatest mistake was made at this time,
and colored the year for her. It happened in this way. The Alpha had
the first chance at the sophomores that year, and for a wonder, the
sophomores were not only clever but possessed that intangible quality,
"the Alpha spirit," in a gratifying degree. The ticket for the first
drawing included the two Jacksons, Cornelia Burt, Elizabeth Twitchell,
and to fulfil that tradition that inevitably elects one perfectly
unexplainable girl, Kate Ackley, a young person of many and
judiciously selected friends. At the very night of the election it was
suddenly rumored that Sue Jackson had openly declared her intention of
refusing Alpha in favor of the rival society, on the ground that she
liked Phi Kappa better and had more friends there.

Now aside from the fact that this report was utterly baseless, for Sue
would have preferred the Alpha, if only to go in among the first five
of all, it was aside from the point. As some irritated seniors
afterwards explained with much temper and reiteration to the chidden
society, Alpha was sufficiently honorable in the sight of the college
to endure very calmly rejection at the hands of any freshman
whatsoever, whether or not they had any certainty of the truth of the
rumor. But the girls were struck with the solemn necessity of
immediate and drastic action, and with a gratifying thrill of
excitement they struck off Sue's name and put in Margaret Pattison's,
the sixth in order, whereat Phi Kappa greatly rejoiced and promptly
elected Sue the next week.

Now it is very sad that the only person who seriously misunderstood
this whole affair was Susan Jackson of Troy. Sue very quickly learned
the whole matter; what her feelings may have been is not certain. Phi
Kappa made a jubilee over her, and she became, as is well known, a
great light in that society. Miss Pattison, by some mysterious free
masonry--the girls who are "in everything" seem to absorb all such
matters through their pores--soon found out her luck, and was frankly
grateful for it. Alpha retained the courage of her convictions and
assumed a distinctly here-I-stand-I-can-no-otherwise attitude. Phi
Kappa chuckled privately and looked puzzled in public. But Susan had
made a great mistake, and what is worse, never knew it. A little
gossiping freshman in the boarding-house she had moved into, who had
been injudiciously petted by the seniors and imagined herself in
everybody's confidence, told Miss Jackson, with many vows of secrecy,
that there had never been such a time in Alpha in the history of the
college: they had meant to have Sue--oh, of course!--but there had
been a terrible mistake at the balloting and names had been confused,
and though etiquette forbade any expression of their real feeling,
they were nearly wild at their clumsiness.

It is hardly to be wondered at that Susan jumped to her conclusion.
She had got so many things intended for Sue--why not this? She knew
that cleverness and even college fame are not the only calls to a
society, and she had no real friends in either of the two
organizations. She could not believe that the Alpha would purposely
omit Sue: if they had chosen both, it would have been different, but
as it was....

So she received their very earnest congratulations with a constraint
that chilled them. They reasoned that she was perfectly certain of
the election and took no pains to hide it, and though they could not
blame her for this, they thought her more conceited than ever, and
regarded her accordingly. The poor child was suffering from actual
humility, however, not conceit. She could not know that her mark on
both society lists was the highest ever given; that Alpha would
cheerfully have sacrificed any two, or even three, of the others for
her; that much as they regretted Sue, they wasted less sorrow over her
now that they were sure of the leading girl in Ninety-red. For that
was what they called her--the girls that she thought patronized her.
They took her after-successes almost as a matter of course. "Oh, yes!
she was far and away the most brilliant girl in the college!" they
said. But she never heard them.

The house she had moved into with an unacknowledged hope of getting
more in touch with them was the last house she should have chosen. It
was filled from cellar to roof with freshmen, and not only are they
notoriously clannish under such conditions, but there were at least
eight or ten of them from the same prominent preparatory school, and
among them was their class president. It was not possible for Susan to
join herself to this little circle of satellites, and they controlled
the entire house in a very short time. So she took to visiting the
head of the house, a faded, placid soul with a nominal authority and a
gentleness that moved even her worst freshmen--and a bad freshman
combines the brutality of a boy with the finesse of a woman of the
world--to a little shamed consideration during their periodic fits of
social reform. Sitting by her fire in the dusk, with the smell of hot
cooked chocolate drifting in from the hall, and the din of the
assembled tribes in the president's room overhead, Susan passed long,
bored, miserable hours. Half listening to the older woman's talk, half
sunk in her thoughts, she alternately chafed with rage at the idea of
her college life drifting out in solitary walks and tired women's
confidences, or took a sad kind of comfort in one fire where she was
always welcome, one friend that loved to talk to her.

For Mrs. Hudson grew very fond of her, and something in the girl's own
baffled, unsatisfied soul must have helped her to understand the
stress and pathos of the tired little woman's life. Few of the girls
who afterwards read _Barbara: A Study in Discipline_, would have
believed that the high-hearted, wonderful heroine was based on Miss
Jackson's study of their freshman landlady. But most of Susan's
knowledge was gained from such unscheduled courses.

In her junior year she let her work go, to a great extent, and spent
much time in the town libraries, reading omnivorously. As a matter of
fact, her class work deteriorated not a little, as much by reason of
dangerously extended cuts as anything else. But it all failed to
interest her, somehow: the detailed campaigns, the actual value of
money, the soulless translations, the necessarily primary character of
the beginnings of any study of modern language. She felt with growing
irritation that she should have learned genders and verbs earlier in
life, and she surprised her expectant teachers with poorer and poorer
recitations. Mademoiselle had no means of knowing that though Miss
Jackson stammered through the subjunctive she was reading dozens of
novels and plays with a very fair ease; Fräulein could not tell from
her imperfect handling of the modal auxiliaries that she had written a
better paper on _Faust_ than many a six years' student of German, and
already knew most of Heine by heart.

This year she made a few friends, chiefly in Phi Kappa, for some
reason or other, which irritated the Alpha girls a little. To do her
justice, she was utterly ignorant of this result of her connection
with Bertha Kitts and Alida Fosdick, nor would it have resulted in the
case of an ordinary girl. But Susan was more prominent than she ever
realized, and her whole connection with the others being official and
logical rather than social and actual, her conduct and opinions were
very sharply criticised from a rather exacting standpoint. Nor was
this wholly unfair, for she was herself an unsparing critic. More than
one of the Faculty smarted under her too successful epigrams; various
aspirants for popularity and power in the Alpha or the class learned
to dread her comments; her few friends themselves were never quite
sure of her attitude toward them. But she was not, for her part, sure
of them: it is hard to make friends in one's junior year. And though
she saw quite a little of Biscuits and Dick and Neal Burt--always her
constant admirer--she never for a moment lost the consciousness that
she was no friend of their friends, that she had no place in those
groups long since formed and shaken into place. They were a little
jealous of her, too, and resented her selection of this girl and that
from among them, though they could not but admit that her judgment was
good.

Her sources of irritation were the same always. Their very
flexibility, the ease with which those she had chosen out slipped from
her to their other friends (they laughed with her at them, even, after
the manner of girls--did they laugh with them at her?), filled her
with a hopeless jealousy. It was not their nice clothes and their good
times she grudged them, though she wanted both: it was their
connections, their environments, their very disciplines. When Biscuits
with loud lamentations elected Philosophy at the decree of her father;
when Neal took up two courses of Economics in order to help her mother
with "some footless syllabi in mother's literary club;" when Betty
Twitchell endured the gibes of her friends every rainy day because
"Papa won't let me wear a short skirt; he hates a woman in one--I
think it's perfectly horrid of him, too! Wait till I get pneumonia! As
if I'd 'get a carriage' to take me from the Hatfield to College Hall!"
Susan would have given every rhyme in her head for one year of their
conventional, irresponsible lives.

It was not money she longed for: Neal Burt was poor enough, and made
no secret of "my cousin's boots, my dear, and my aunt's silk waist,
and Patsy's gloves that don't fit her, that I have on this minute!"
But Neal gave her one of her worst quarter-hours, at the time her
mother came up. She was a pretty little woman with Neal's eyes; her
simple clothes had, like Neal's, a distinct air of taste and selection
about them; her interest in everything was so pleasant, her manner so
cordial and charming, that she made an easy conquest of the girls and
Neal'

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