“I am certainly getting frivolous,” she thought severely.
“I will go up to my study. I can think better there.” As she passed her little French clock, she noticed with a slight shudder that it was twenty minutes after four. She stopped suddenly and rang a bell. “I will make it easy for both of us,” she decided; “I will order tea served as usual, and I will just tell him very calmly how impossible it is for me to take upon myself any other career than that of a student and writer. No one can possibly be sentimental over a tea-urn and champagne biscuits,” she thought with relief. When the man appeared she gave him instructions to bring in the tea-things at five precisely. “That will make our interview short and yet give me time to settle it all at once and forever,” she thought. “Afterward we can discuss every-day affairs, and I am sure he will recognize how wisely I have acted, and we can be very good friends,” and she passed slowly up the stairs to her particular den.
She felt stronger now, more certain of herself. The first sheets of her “curtain-raiser” were lying on her desk, and the sight of them encouraged her. For a moment a bewildering vision of a crowded theatre, a storm of applause, and herself, seated behind the curtains of a box,seeing, hearing her own piece, took possession of her. She even heard cries for the author, but of course her duty to herself and her family would prevent her appearing publicly as the writer of the play. She could see no objection, however, to being pointed out as “Miss Hungerford, you know, the brilliant young authoress.” Yes, life was a failure, art was everything! Nothing should ever come between her and her work.
Then she sat down at her desk and tried to write. She remembered the keen sense of pleasure she always experienced when she had finished a sonnet or scene of a play, but she was thinking now of how she would receive Stanhope. “I will give him my hand in a very quiet, friendly way that will show at once what my decision is. Nothing shall make me alter or give up my career.”
But it was very hard to give up everything, and she was very young and her friends thought her beautiful. Could there be no compromise? After all life need not be so dreary, and Paul Stanhope was distinctly the nicest and most eligible man she knew. Any number of girls liked him tremendously, and she sighed as she thought that she was keeping some girl from getting a very good husband indeed.This idea, though not wholly distasteful to her, brought her sharply back to her resolutions, and she picked up her Calderon. She had been reading it the day before and had left it turned down at the page. Suddenly a great pity for Calderon took possession of her. After all he was so dead now! Could he know how famous he was? Was he famous while he lived? Did his fame bring him love and happiness? She did not even know. Underneath the Calderon lay a copy of a poet’s works—a poet now famous and beloved, but who had died miserably poor and unknown. By the side of this volume lay the last number of a popular magazine. She had bought it because it contained a story by a man whom all the world was talking about. She had read in the morning’s paper that he had just been divorced from his wife. The sight of the book sickened her. She turned away and opened the case where she kept her Shakespeare, and took out a book at random. It was the sonnets. He, too, the greatest and wisest, had been wretchedly unhappy.
Suddenly the futility of all effort took hold of her. Suppose she should drudge her life away, never taste of happiness, die, and be only known as “Hungerford the dramatist.” She shuddered. In the years to come many people might not even know whether “Hungerford” had been a man or a woman. But she could never hold up her head again if she should relinquish her “career” now. What would her friends think? She felt that she had burned her ships behind her when she had published her tragedy, and that the eyes of her world were upon her.
She wished she were not so stylish and so distressingly well off in this world’s goods. Geniuses, she reflected, were always ugly and poor. Only lately had it come to be considered not infra dig. to grow rich off one’s brains. She would have liked to be an old-time ugly, poverty-stricken genius. As that could not be, however (her family might have objected to being dispossessed of a most generous income), the best thing she could do was to work on to the end. Better to die in harness, nobly striving after perfection, than to live to an ingloriously happy old age. She saw herself a melancholy woman, whose youth and beauty had fled before the exhausting demands of her genius. Fame had come, but too late. Her name was on every lip, but death awaited her. Nothing was left her but to choose her biographer and epitaph. She had long thought that the lines(adapted) from the “Adonais” would be very appropriate:
“Peace, peace! she is not dead, she doth not sleep;She hath awakened from the dream of life!”
“Peace, peace! she is not dead, she doth not sleep;She hath awakened from the dream of life!”
“Peace, peace! she is not dead, she doth not sleep;She hath awakened from the dream of life!”
She considered them very sweet, and Shelley had always been one of her gods. There was a sort of poetical justice in the selection. She felt very sad and firm.
Just then someone tapped at the door, and a card was handed her. She trembled a little as she took it, but there was no change in her voice as she told the man to take Mr. Stanhope to the library and that she would be down immediately.
But she did not go at once. She stopped at her own door and went to the mirror, where she loosened her hair a little at the sides, and after looking critically at the effect, she went slowly down the stairs. At each step she repeated to herself “I must be firm. My career before everything.”
She was saying this over to herself for the twentieth time when she found, rather to her dismay, that she was at the door. Pushing aside the curtains, she extended her hand as she planned to do, but something in Stanhope’s expression as he came quickly toward her made her falter and let it drop to her side. The next thing she knew he had his arms around her and she was not repulsing him. He had not given her the least chance to explain, she thought indignantly. She would never have allowed it if he had given her a moment’s time! As for Stanhope, no idea of explanation entered his head. He saw no necessity for one.
After a while she told him that she did not love him, but he did not seem to believe her, and she could think of no way of proving it after what had happened. Then she assured him that she had always planned to spend her life in writing and study, and that it was impossible for her to marry him. But he declared that there were no end of writers in the world and absolutely but one woman who could be his wife, so that he did not think her decision just or warranted. And then he went over to her very tenderly and asked her if she really cared more for her musty books and a “brilliant career” (Stanhope was careful to use the word “career”) than she did for a man who loved her so devoutly that he would willingly lay down his life for her? At this Miss Hungerford cried a little, and he put her head on his shoulder while she thought about it.
While they were thus engaged the clock struck five and the servant appeared punctually with tea-things. He was much confused when he caught sight of them, and Miss Hungerford privately determined to speak to the man for his officiousness.
The wedding was very brilliant and Miss Hungerford’s “most intimate friend” was maid of honor. She never told the bride, but she told everyone else, “that she had never expected Eva Hungerford to marry and give up her career, but that she was thankful it had happened, and she was sure she would be happy!”
In the meantime Daly’s is without the curtain-raiser.
MISS ATTERBURY put the paper she was reading carefully and slowly down upon the table. It was theBoston ——, and there was a long article upon the first page marked ostentatiously around with a blue lead-pencil, and headed in glaring letters, “Athletics in Girls’ Colleges.”
There was a dangerous gleam in Miss Atterbury’s dark-gray eyes, and she seemed a trifle more than her ordinary five feet eight inches as she drew herself up and turned, with that careful repression of irritation which always denotes the extreme limit of self-control, upon an inoffensive freshman, comfortably installed in the window-seat, playing a mandolin.
“I was in Antwerp two weeks last summer,” she remarked, with careful emphasis, “and I heard the cathedral chimes play ‘La Mandolinata’ twice every five minutes, I think. I would be obliged if you would play something else, or even stop altogether for a while—I have something important to talk about just now.”
The freshman stuck her pick guiltily in the strings, and shifted her position upon the cushions into one of extreme and flattering attention, while the four girls who had been playing whist over in a corner turned hastily around toward Miss Atterbury.
“What is it now, Katharine?” inquired Miss Yale, reproachfully, laying down her cards. “She always takes things so terriblyau grand sérieux,” she explained plaintively to the rest. Miss Yale had her rooms with Miss Atterbury, and stood rather in awe of that young woman, and was very proud of her athletic prowess, and could always be relied upon to tell her friends “that Katharine Atterbury was the captain of the senior crew, and could pull an oar as well as a ’Varsity stroke, and that the champion tennis-player of a certain year had said that she was an antagonist to be feared and respected.”
“Thisis what is the matter,” said Miss Atterbury, in a tragic voice, picking up the paper. “I don’t know who it is that writes such absurd, such wilfully misleading articles about us, but I do know that if I could get at him I would——”
What Miss Atterbury would do was apparently too awful to speak of just then.
One of the girls got up and went over to her.
“But what is it?—what have they said about us now?” she inquired, impatiently.
“What they are always doing—poking fun at us,” replied Miss Atterbury, hotly, and with a fine disregard of grammar. “To read this article one would imagine that we were imbecile babies. One would think that a girl was as weak as a kitten, and didn’t know a boat from an elevator, or a five-lap running track from an ice-wagon, or a golf club from a sewing-machine. He—whoever the man is who wrote this ridiculous article—seems to think that all our training and physical development is a huge joke. He don’t even know how stupid he is. That’s the worst of it—he isn’t even aware of his unutterable, his colossal ignorance!”
“Wouldn’t it be fun to have him drawn and quartered, as an awful example, a sort of warning to the other newspaper men not to write about what they are totally ignorant of, and to leave us alone,” suggested the inoffensive little freshman, with a base but entirely successful attempt to get back into Miss Atterbury’s good graces.
The senior gave her a brief but cordial glance, and then ran on:
“Something must be done about it. I’m tired of reading this sort of trash about women’s colleges. It is time the public was learning the true state of things—that girls can and do swim, and row and play golf and tennis, and run and walk about, just as their brothers do, and that we have courage and muscle enough to go in for football even, except that we have somelittleregard for our personal appearance!”
“And it’s so degrading and irritating to go home in the vacations, and have one’s brother tease one to death about it all, and try to be funny, and ask one if the color of one’s gymnasium suit is becoming, and if the golf captain knows the caddie from a cleek,” interposed Miss Thayer, a pretty blond girl who got up slowly and sauntered over to Miss Atterbury, putting her face over that young lady’s shoulder to get a look at the unfortunate paper. As she did so she gave a little cry of surprise.
“Why, I know the man who wrote that,” she gasped. “There! J. E. N.—see those initials at the end?—they mean Jack Newbold. I remember now he is writing for that paper. He told me this summer at the sea-shore that he was going in for newspaper work. His grandfather owns this paper, you know, and has promised him half a million when he is twenty-five if he will go through the whole thing—learn everything a newspaper man must know. He didn’t want to do it much, but, of course, he would go in for almost anything sooner than lose all that pile of money.”
Miss Atterbury looked thoughtfully and intently at Miss Thayer.
“You say he is a friend of yours?” she demanded, slowly.
“Oh, yes; we got to be very good friends this summer. He taught me how to play fifteen-ball pool—that’s about all he knows,” went on the girl, scornfully. “He’s an awful duffer about everything else. You ought to see him play tennis! It’s not very edifying, but it’s awfully funny.”
Miss Atterbury gave a little gasp of delight.
“That’s too good to be true,” she said, enthusiastically.
Miss Thayer rather stared. “Why?” she demanded, and then, without waiting for a reply, she swept on. “You wouldn’t think so if you had to play doubles with him! And he simply can’t walk—gets awfully tired, he says.Ithink it’s his clothes. Gets ’em in London, and they are terribly swell and uncomfortable. And he is always afraid his collar is going to melt; it’s quite painful to be with him on a warm day. And I couldn’t induce him to come out in my cat-boat with me. Said he didn’t think a girlcould learn to handle one with any degree of safety. Did you ever hear of anything so unjust? I think he wasafraid.”
Miss Atterbury was leaning on the table now, and her countenance had assumed such a cheerful look that the freshman felt quite relieved and ventured to pick up her mandolin again.
“Go on!” demanded the senior, delightedly.
“Well, I don’t know anything more,” declared Miss Thayer, impatiently. “Isn’t that enough for you? He’s no good at out-door sports, and what he is doing writing us up or down is more than I can imagine. He oughtn’t to be allowed to do so. He don’t know anything about it at all, and I should think he would be ashamed of himself. I suppose his editor told him to do it, and he simply ‘made up’ and put down everything he had ever heard about us, and worked in all the old jokes about girls’ colleges.”
Miss Atterbury got up slowly.
“Well!” she said, impressively, to Miss Thayer, “I’m sorry if that young man is much of a friend of yours, for we have got to make an example of him. I suppose you know him well enough to invite him out here Monday afternoon?—for you’ve got to do it,” she added, with calm decision.
Miss Thayer said she thought she might venture on that simple act of courtesy, though she could not quite understand why Miss Atterbury was so anxious to see him since she disapproved of him so entirely; to which that young woman replied that she wished to see him once, so that she might never see him again, and that the next day she would explain her plans, in which she expected their hearty co-operation.
Mr. Jack Newbold had just comfortably installed himself in the 1.50 B. and A. train, when it occurred to him that he might possibly have made a mistake as to the time Miss Thayer expected him. He pulled out the note which he had received from her, and read it again.
“My Dear Mr. Newbold: I have been so interested in what you have written about athletics in girls’ colleges! I saw the article in your paper and knew immediately by the initials that it was your work. Ever since seeing it I have been wishing to redeem my promise to have you come out here and see our college.“All the girls are anxious to see you. I hope you won’t mind receiving a great deal of attention! You know how enthusiastic and unconventional college girls are, and you are of the greatest interest to us just now. Miss Atterbury, a charming girl, is especially eager to meet you. Don’t betooflattered! But we shall all be delighted to see the man who has so ably written up girls’ colleges, and unless I hear from you to the contrary, shall look for you out Monday afternoon by the 1.50 train.“Of course I shall expect you to take dinner and go to the concert in the evening. I tell you this now, so you can wear just the right ‘dress’—men are so ridiculously particular about their clothes!“Very cordially yours,“Eleanor Thayer.”
“My Dear Mr. Newbold: I have been so interested in what you have written about athletics in girls’ colleges! I saw the article in your paper and knew immediately by the initials that it was your work. Ever since seeing it I have been wishing to redeem my promise to have you come out here and see our college.
“All the girls are anxious to see you. I hope you won’t mind receiving a great deal of attention! You know how enthusiastic and unconventional college girls are, and you are of the greatest interest to us just now. Miss Atterbury, a charming girl, is especially eager to meet you. Don’t betooflattered! But we shall all be delighted to see the man who has so ably written up girls’ colleges, and unless I hear from you to the contrary, shall look for you out Monday afternoon by the 1.50 train.
“Of course I shall expect you to take dinner and go to the concert in the evening. I tell you this now, so you can wear just the right ‘dress’—men are so ridiculously particular about their clothes!
“Very cordially yours,“Eleanor Thayer.”
Mr. Jack Newbold was not a particularly vain youth, but he had a slight feeling of satisfaction on perusing that note which made him settle himself even more comfortably in his seat and resign himself cheerfully to the short journey.
“Had no idea that article would make such a sensation,” he was saying to himself, “and I’m glad she expects me by this train. Of course she will bring her trap to the station for me. I believe the college is quite a little distance from the town. Nice little trap—she drives well for a girl, I remember.” And then he fell to wondering whether he had selected just the right things to wear. “Girls are so deucedly critical,” hesoliloquized, and it had been rather hard to decide on just what would be in good taste for an afternoon call and would still do without change for the concert in the evening, and he rather complimented himself on his judicious selection, and was assuring himself that the particular shade of his gloves had not been a mistake, when he found that he was at the station.
Miss Thayer welcomed him effusively.
“I knew you wouldn’t have the vaguest idea of how to get up to the college,” she was saying, “and so I came down for you myself. No, I didn’t bring my trap. I knew you would enjoy the walk up, and I wanted to show you it myself. I remember how fond you were of walking, last summer,” she added, with a bright smile at him.
Newbold stared a little.
“I don’t think,” he began doubtfully; but Miss Thayer interrupted him quickly—
“You cannot imagine how anxious the girls are to see you. Each one wants to show you what she is particularly interested in. Really you are quite a martyr—I mean a hero—in our eyes! We will go up this way,” she ran on. “It’s a little longer and there is a pretty bad hill, but of course a man doesn’t mind a little extra exertion, and it’s even more beautiful than the other way.”
Newbold said he would be charmed to go any way that Miss Thayer might choose, but that he didn’t want to lose any of his visit at the college, and that perhaps it would be wiser to take the short cut. But Miss Thayer said that if they walked a little faster they would get there just as soon, and he would see the finer view, too. So they started off briskly, and Newbold wished that he had worn the other pair of patent leathers, and finally, when he felt ready to drop, and thought they must have walked about five miles, and she told him they had only two more to go, he blamed himself most severely for not having firmly refused anything but the short cut and a cab. One of Miss Thayer’s friends who met her told her the next day that she was glad to see that she had joined the Pedestrian Club, and that she had often wondered why she had not done so before.
“I hardly think it is worth while to go into the drawing-room now,” remarked Miss Thayer, argumentatively, as they strolled up the broad drive to the college. “I see Miss Atterbury down there on the campus playing tennis, and I promised to bring you to her immediately,” she went on. Newbold felt a horrible inclination to say that he didn’t care if he never met Miss Atterbury, and that personally he would very
“YOU CANNOT IMAGINE HOW ANXIOUS THE GIRLS ARE TO SEE YOU”“YOU CANNOT IMAGINE HOW ANXIOUS THE GIRLS ARE TO SEE YOU”
much prefer going into the drawing-room and stopping there for the rest of the afternoon, in the most comfortable chair to be found; but he managed to murmur a weary assent to Miss Thayer’s proposition, and together they started down the steep hill at the bottom of which stretched the campus. But he could not seem to keep up with Miss Thayer, and by the time he had reached the tennis grounds and had decided that in all probability his heart would never beat normally again, he was conscious that he was bowing, and that Miss Atterbury, flushed from playing, was standing before him and was laughing and saying—“I don’t often give acquaintances such a warm welcome!” The next thing he knew was that someone had thrust a racket into his hand, and he heard, as in a dream, Miss Thayer telling her friend that Mr. Newbold was a splendid tennis-player, and that she would have to do her best to beat him, but that she hoped she would for the honor of the college. And then he found himself, somehow, walking over to the court, and, before he could protest, Miss Atterbury was on the other side, and was asking him kindly but briskly if he were ready to play. He thought he was as near ready as he ever would be, so he said “Play!” and waited resignedly for her serve.
It was just after Miss Atterbury had piled up an appalling number of games against him, and he had come to the conclusion that he knew what it would be like to stand fire from a Krupp gun, and had decided that tight patent leathers and a long coat were not just what he would have chosen to play tennis in, that he saw Miss Atterbury, to his intense relief, throw down her racket and run up the hill a little way. She was back in an instant with Miss Thayer and a tall, handsome girl, carrying a lot of golf clubs. When young Newbold saw the golf clubs he felt so tired that he thought he would sit down on the cold ground, although he knew how dangerous such a proceeding was, especially when he was so painfully aware of how hot his head was and how clammy his linen felt.
“Mr. Newbold!” he heard Miss Atterbury say, “I want to present you to Miss Yale. She is the captain of the Golf Club, and I knew you would want to meet her. Anyone who is such an authority on the subject as you proved yourself to be in that article would, of course, want to see the links out here.”
“Ah! thank you!” murmured Newbold; “but I play very little, you know, and I wouldn’t interrupt your game for the world!”
But Miss Yale told him how interested she
“PLAY!”“PLAY!”
had been in his article, and that she wouldn’t feel that she had done her duty by the college unless she showed him the links, and that he really must come with them and tell them whether the meadow-land was too stiff a bit of ground to be gone over. And so Newbold found himself trudging wearily along again between Miss Atterbury and Miss Yale, who seemed as fresh as though they hadn’t moved that day. The links seemed distressingly far off, and the holes absurdly distant from each other. His arms ached so from tennis that he could scarcely hold the driver Miss Yale gave him.
“I wish you would drive off this tee once—men do that sort of thing so much better than girls,” she was saying, admiringly. “They don’t seem to need any practice at all—just comes natural to them.” Newbold had a very distinct impression that it hadn’t come at all natural to him, and he would greatly have preferred not trying before Miss Yale and the knot of young women who had drawn together at some little distance, and were very obviously watching him under the shallowest pretence of hunting for a lost ball. He felt desperately nervous, and his nervousness did not tend to disappear when he made a frantic try at the ball, digging a hole in the ground about a foot in front of the tee, andalmost hitting Miss Atterbury, who jumped back with a little cry very unlike her ordinary calm self.
“I—I beg your pardon,” he began, desperately; but Miss Atterbury assured him that she was all right, and urged him to try again. He did so, and although he balanced himself cautiously on one foot and then on the other, and snapped at the ball several times before trying to hit it, and wobbled his driver after the most approved methods, he topped his ball miserably, and had the mortification of seeing it land in a most difficult hazard. And then he watched Miss Yale drive off with a good backward swing of her club, which hit the ball “sweet and clean,” and sent it a good ninety yards.
“Of course, as you said in your article,” remarked that young woman, picking up her clubs and starting off energetically after the ball, “this is no game for women. It is pre-eminently a man’s game, and a woman’s short collar-bone is never such an obvious mistake as in golf. A man can do so much with a driver or a cleek or a lofter, and the walking is so easy for him, and he is so entirely independent of the weather.” Newbold murmured inarticulate assents as he walked wearily by her. He wondered if she could keep up that pace all around the course, and he especially wondered how fararound it was. He had a great deal of difficulty in getting his ball out of the hazard and lofting it up a steep hill, and he savagely wished that he had joined that golf club all his friends were urging him to join, and decided firmly to do so before he slept that night, and to engage the professional’s services for himself, and to practise till he could drive a ball off without utterly destroying all the turf in the vicinity.
They were on the second round, and Newbold was roughly calculating that his erratic plays had made him walk about three miles, and was wondering if he could live to get up the hill in front of him, when he saw Miss Thayer and Miss Yale, who were three holes ahead of him, coming back toward him.
“You look awfully tired and hot,” said Miss Thayer, sympathetically. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like golf? But what an absurd question! Anyone who could write the article on athleticsyoudid must like it. Only, I suppose, girls seem such duffers at it, to you!”
Newbold looked at her sharply. He had an uneasy suspicion that she was laughing at him, but he was too tired to think of any way of finding out whether she was or not, and so he walked on taciturnly and sufferingly.
“I have such a nice surprise for you,” ran onMiss Thayer. “But I won’t tell you what it is yet.” She pulled out her watch. “It is just a quarter to four now, and I think the surprise will not be ready until a quarter after. Can you possibly wait that long?”
Newbold said he thought he might if he could sit down; but Miss Thayer said she disapproved of getting over-heated and then cooling off rapidly, and that she thought they had better keep moving until it was time to see the “surprise.” So they strolled across the grounds, and the two girls seemed to meet an astonishing number of friends, all going their way. And while Newbold was vaguely wondering what their destination might be, and what new torture was in store for him, he heard Miss Yale say, in what sounded to him like the voice of an avenging angel:
“I think we had better show Mr. Newbold our new running-track while we are waiting. He is so interested in such things, and he might suggest some improvements.” And then Newbold felt himself irresistibly compelled to walk on farther and farther. He wondered sadly why they thoughtheknew anything about running-tracks for girls, and decided that his humorous remarks on the subject in his article had been a great mistake.
“Do you think it’s a fair track?” inquired Miss Yale, anxiously, as they came in sight of it. “It is an eight-lap track, you see, and of course a great many girls only go around four times at first—girls get tired so absurdly easy! Now I suppose men think nothing of making two miles at a time—it is just play for them. Men are so strong—that is their greatest fascination, I think,” she ran on enthusiastically. “Haven’t you seen foot-ball players after a hard practice game start off and run two miles around the track, and seem to think absolutely nothing of it?”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Newbold, unwarily and warmly. “Fellows are so different from girls, you know. A girl cries when she’s tired, doesn’t she? Well, a man just keeps going, you know, and doesn’t let it make any difference to him.”
“I am so glad to hear that, Mr. Newbold,” said Miss Yale, with prompt and suspicious sympathy, and a sudden firmness of tone, “because I wanted dreadfully to ask you to try the track, but hated to do so, for I knew you were tired—at least you look so. But since you just keep going, and it doesn’t make any difference to you, why I would be so awfully obliged if you would run around three or four times. I want to seejust how you hold your head and arms. I don’t believe we do it in the best way, you know.”
It was a rare and pleasingly curious sight that Miss Yale and Miss Thayer and a great many other young women assembled near the track, apparently by a strange coincidence, looked upon. It is not often that one has the chance of seeing an immaculately dressed youth, with flushed and desperate countenance, tear madly around an eight-lap track in the presence of a number of flatteringly attentive young women. It occurred to Newbold as he dashed around and around that it would be far preferable to keep going until he fainted away or dropped dead, than to stop and encounter the remarks and glances of those young women. They would at least feel sorry for him in that case, he thought, gloomily. But even that modest and simple desire was not granted him. As he started on the fifth lap he heard Miss Yale call to him to stop. He had a wild inclination to pay no attention to her, but to keep going on and on, but as he got nearer he saw her step out toward him and put up a warning hand.
“Thank you so much,” she said, warmly. “I think we have all had a lesson in running which we shall not forget soon. I hope you are not tired?” she went on, anxiously.
Newbold said, “Oh, no!” but he felt very tired indeed. His feet ached horribly and his head felt hot and dizzy, and there were queer, sharp pains shooting through his body which made him think forebodingly of pneumonia.
“The surprise is ready—Miss Atterbury is going to have the crew out for your especial benefit!” went on Miss Yale, triumphantly. “Don’t you feel complimented? And you are to pull Miss Thayer and myself about while they go through a little practice for you. Not much, you know, but just enough to show you the stroke and speed we get. The boat is a beauty—but then, of course, you know so much more about it than we do! I imagine from your article that you must pull an oar capitally. Miss Thayer says a cat-boat is your especial hobby, though.”
“Did Miss Thayer say that?” began Newbold, hotly. “Beastly things, I think—hate ’em!”
Miss Yale smiled incredulously and brightly at him.
“How modest you are!” she said, admiringly. “Ah! there is Miss Atterbury!”
Newbold saw some one waving frantically at them.
“Come on!” exclaimed Miss Yale; “we want to see them start off—that’s the best part.”
Newbold never remembered afterward how he got across the intervening space, or how he got into a boat with the two young women. The first thing he heard was Miss Atterbury asking him anxiously how he liked the new sliding-seats, and what he thought of the proportions of the boat, and about outriggers in general, and where he thought they could be built best and cheapest. Newbold felt about as capable of instructing her on such points as of judging the pictures at a Salon exhibit, and he longed, with a longing born of utter exhaustion and desperation, to get away. As he wearily pulled the heavy, unwieldy boat about after the light practice-barge, which kept an appalling distance ahead of him, he decided within himself that the physical development of women had been carried to an absurd and alarming extent, and that men simply were not in it with them when it came to endurance and enthusiasm, and that he had made the mistake of his life when he wrote that article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that his chief might talk until he was blue in the face before he would ever consent again to write about anything of which he knew so little.
They were very disappointed when he told them firmly that he could not stay to dinner or to the concert, but that he had a pressing engagement that would take him back to the city. And they said that there were still the Swedish gymnastics and basket-ball and pole-vaulting to see, and that they were afraid he had not enjoyed himself or he would have got rid of that engagement in some way; but he assured them impressively that he had never spent a more instructive or peculiarly interesting afternoon in his life.
Miss Thayer took him back to the station in her trap, and remarked on how much shorter the way seemed with a good horse; and when she bade him good-by she told him that she would be looking out for another article in his paper, and that she would be much disappointed if his visit had not inspired him to write something. To which Newbold replied that that was his pressing engagement—he was going back to the city to write another article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that he thought it would be different and better than the former one, but that he would not put his initials to it this time.
IT was a sort of farewell party, and the young woman who was going away and who was the object of so much solicitude and tender concern was sitting, enshrined as it were, on a divan covered with a Navahoe Indian blanket and surrounded by innumerable cushions, while the rest hung about her or took up precarious attitudes on the table in dangerous proximity to the student lamps, or settled themselves in steamer-chairs, or sat upon the tiger-skin on the floor. That is, the American girls did; Kan Ato, the pretty Japanese who had come arrayed in a gorgeous new kimono—dull blue embroidered splendidly in silver—sat upright and very stiffly in the window-seat with the dark red of the curtains showing off her jet black hair and her gown wonderfully well; while the tall Scotch girl, a cousin of the guest of honor, had trusted her generous proportions to the only large, comfortable American chair in the room.
There was a great deal of noise and confusionand questioning, and Miss Lavington, as she leaned back against her cushions, half wished that after all the doctor had not let her come. She had been very ill—a short, sharp attack of typhoid—and although she had enjoyed tremendously the wine jelly, and the violets, and the hushed, anxious tones of her friends as they inquired after her at the infirmary, and the many remarks about her good qualities and how clever she was in Conic Sections—“just as if she were really dead,” as she said—still she felt rather too weak properly to appreciate her friends’ enthusiastic sympathy at such close range. And then the thought of going away—and so far away—had made her feel blue and dispirited.
She was a very pretty English girl, whose father—a colonel in an Indian regiment—had sent her to America in the care of a sister of his who had moved to “the States;” and so it had come about that, instead of being a Girton or Newnham girl, she had matriculated at this American college. And now her father had written decisively for her to come out and join him in India, and her college friendships and ties were all to be broken. He had been writing about it for some time, and her illness had finally precipitated the affair. She had only waited until she grew strong enough to start, and the following day had been decided upon.The long sea-voyage would be the very thing for her, the doctor had thought.
She was trying to explain to the interested young women just what route she would take, and was rapidly filling their souls with envy at the familiar mention of Brindisi and Cairo and Aden, when there was a knock and a quick opening of the door and a girl came into the room. She was a very beautiful young woman, and when she sat down on the divan beside Miss Lavington she seemed suddenly to absorb all the attention and interest, and to become in some magical way the guest of honor and centre of attraction. She met with a very enthusiastic reception, for she had that afternoon gained the tennis championship for her class—she was a senior—and had not yet changed her white flannel suit with scarlet sumach leaves worked on it, and as she dragged off her soft cap, one could see that her hair still lay in damp curls upon her forehead.
After she had entered the room one would have realized that they had really been waiting for her. Her mere presence seemed to make a difference. It was this magnetic quality which rendered her so irresistible and all adverse criticism of her so absurd. People might differ as to her beauty—there were some indeed, whosaid that she was too large, or that her eyes were not very expressive, or that her mouth was too small, but they all fell under her influence in some remarkable way, and were very much flattered when she asked them to drive with her, and never failed to point her out to their friends as “the College Beauty, you know;” and even those who honestly wondered how she ever got through her examinations were forced to admit that she had a great deal of natural talent, which she did not always care to exercise. She was a fine tennis player too, using either hand equally well, and when the Tennis Association got itself into debt and she saved the situation by beguiling, in some inexplicable way, the famous musical organization of a certain university into giving a concert for its benefit, her popularity reached its climax. To the less sought-after girls, her composure and ease of manner while surrounded by an admiring circle of college men was nothing short of marvellous, and the recklessly generous disposal which she made of these youths to her less attractive friends seemed to betoken a social prodigality little short of madness.
Miss Lavington looked at her imploringly.
“Make them keep quiet, won’t you?” she said. The Beauty looked around her—“Are youtrying to make her ill again, so she can’t go?” she asked.
Her words had the desired effect, and the girl who had been twanging abstractedly at a banjeurine put it down.
“She oughtn’t to leave!” she declared, plaintively. “It’s a shame! Here we are, just beginning the semestre, and she’s only half through her college course anyway, and just because her father wants her she has to give up everything and go.”
“Yes, and you know she’ll be sure to have jungle-fever or get bitten by a cobra or something, and die,” suggested someone cheerfully, if a trifle vaguely.
The girl lying on the tiger-skin looked up.
“I know why her father wants her,” she began calmly. “There is an officer—young, handsome, well born, a fine place in Surrey or Devon or Kent, been in the family for generations, old uncle, no children—just the thing for her. Her father will take her up to some place in the Himalayas to spend the summer, and he will arrange for the handsome, young, etc., officer to be there, and next fall we will receive the cards. It sounds just like one of Kipling’s stories, doesn’t it?”
They were all laughing by the time she hadfinished, but The Beauty, looking at the girl beside her, suddenly stopped smiling. There was a conscious flush on Miss Lavington’s face which set her to thinking, and then she glanced over to the big Scotch girl and waited an instant.
“Tell us all about it,” she said finally to Miss Lavington. The girl looked up quickly and then dropped her eyes again.
“There isn’t much to tell,” she began. The others were listening now. Even Kan Ato, smiling in her pensive, oriental way, leaned far forward so as not to lose a word.
“He isn’t rich and he hasn’t any place in Surrey—or anywhere else that I know of, except perhaps in India,” she went on. “But he is young and handsome. We used to know each other when we were children—he is a sort of cousin—but I haven’t seen him for years. We used to be very much in love with each other.” She smiled. “My father writes me that he says he is still in love with me, and so—perhaps we are to be married.”
“I knew it,” sighed the girl on the tiger-rug, in a satisfied sort of way.
The Beauty looked at the English girl curiously. “And you haven’t seen him for years? and yet you think of marrying him! How do you know you will love him now?—you are bothchanged—you may be two totally different people from the children who fell in love.” She had spoken vehemently and quickly, and Miss Lavington gazed at her with languid surprise.
“You are not in love with him yourself?” she said, smilingly.
The girl made a quick, impatient gesture.
“I am speaking seriously,” she said. “You are several years younger than I am, and you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t let your father—don’t let anyone—persuade you to bind yourself to a man you don’t know, whose life has been so vitally different from your own as to render the possibility of sympathy between you very slight.”
Miss Lavington looked at her rather coldly.
“You are interesting yourself unnecessarily,” she said; “I loved him not so many years ago—it cannot be possible that so short a time would change us completely.”
The Beauty leaned her head back with sudden wearied look on her face. “A few years at our time of life makes all the difference in the world,” she said, earnestly. “What pleased and interested and fascinated us at eighteen might very possibly disappoint and disgust us at twenty or twenty-two. I do not mean topreach,” she said, smiling deprecatingly and turning to the rest, “but you know as well as I what an influence this college life has on us, and how hard it is to go back to former conditions. If we get stronger here we also get less adaptable. We are all affected by the earnestness and the culture and advancement of the life we lead here for four years, whether we will or no, and it is very hard to go back!”
They were all looking at her in amazement. The Beauty was not much given to that sort of thing. She stopped abruptly as if herself aware of the sensation she was creating, and laughed rather constrainedly.
“Don’t marry your handsome officer unless you are in love with him!” she said insistingly still to the girl beside her. “Don’t mistake the childish affection you felt for him for something deeper. You have your whole life before you—don’t spoil it by precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion!” There was an anxious, troubled look in her eyes.
The girl still stretched out on the tiger-skin glanced up again at The Beauty. “I seem to have started a subject in which you are deeply interested,” she said gayly to her. “And one in which you have had enormous experience too. Do you know you have an almost uncanny way of fascinating every man who comes near you. It’s a sure thing. None of the rest of us have a chance. I believe you could marry half a dozen or so at any time that you would take the trouble to say ‘yes’!”
The girl addressed looked openly amused—“Please take a few off your list,” she said. But the other refused to notice her remark and ran on in her light way.
“And they are all so nice too—it is really hard to choose, but I think on the whole I prefer a certain young man who shall be nameless. Now, would you call his devotion to yourself ‘mad precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion?’”She moved herself lazily over the yellow skin until her head rested against the girl’s knee.
“And he is such a nice, eligible youth too. I hope you are not going to spoil his life by refusing him. Only think how lovely it would be to have one’s father-in-law representing the majesty of these United States at an Emperor’s court,” she went on, turning gayly to the others. “And he is so handsome and clever! He will be representing Uncle Sam himself some day, and she will be reading up the rules of court etiquette and receiving invitations from the Lord Chamberlain to dine with the Queen, and fumingbecause the Grand Duchess of something or other has the right to walk in to dinner before her.” She was not noticing the girl’s significant silence. “Of course he is just the man for you—you wouldn’t make any but a brilliant match, you know, with your beauty and society manner. But just for the present—well, next winter you will début, and you will be much talked about, and the youth will not be with his father at the European capital, but will be very muchen évidencehere, and then—after Easter we shall getyourcards!”
She twisted her head around, smiling, so as to get a look at the girl’s face above her. It wore so grave and hopeless an expression that she gave a little cry.
“Forgive me,” she said, confusedly, “but you do love him, don’t you?”
The Beauty turned her eyes away and shook herself slightly, as if awakening from a dream.
“As confession seems to be the order of the hour,” she said in a dull tone, and smiling peculiarly, “I don’t mind owning that I do love him very much.”
She got up abruptly and moved toward the door amid a chorus of protests, but she would not stay. At the threshold she turned to Miss Lavington.
“Send your things down by the coach,” she said. “If you will let me I will be glad to drive you to the station myself to-morrow.”
When she got to her own study she found a letter thrust under the door with the familiar number of her room scrawled upon it in pencil. She picked it up, and as she looked at the address an expression of profound dislike and weariness came into her face. She opened the door slowly and put the letter down upon her desk, looking at it thoughtfully for a few moments. The handwriting was irresolute and boyish. She shivered slightly as she took the letter up with sudden resolution and tore it open. As she sat there and read it a look of hatred and disgust and utter hopelessness, strangely at variance with her usual brilliant expression, settled harshly upon her lovely, young face.
“My Dearest Wife,” it ran, “Forgive me! but this is about the only luxury I indulge in!—calling you in my letters what I dare not call you as yet before the world.
“I am in a retrospective mood to-night, and feel like writing all sorts of things which I am afraid you won’t much like. Do you know I think that college is doing you harm! Don’t get angry at this, but sometimes I’m afraid you have repented of our boy and girl runaway match; but God knows I haven’t, and I’m glad I didn’t go to college but came out West and went to work for us both. I haven’t succeeded very brilliantly and may be the life has roughened me a bit, but I guess you can have the best there is out here, and I am still as devoted to you as in those old days of the summer before you went to that confounded (excuse me!) college, when you were just eighteen and I barely twenty-one. How interminably long four years seemed to wait then! But it was a case of getting married secretly and of waiting, or of not getting you at all. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, and I’d come back now and take you away, if I wasn’t so afraid of that blessed old father of yours—but I’m just as big a coward as I was three years ago, when I couldn’t screw up courage enough to go to him and tell him that he’d have to relinquish his pet scheme of sending his daughter to college, for she belonged to me. Whew! what a scene we’d have had! It was best to wait, I suppose.
“After all, only a year and then I can claim you! Have you changed any? I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me now. I always had an uncomfortable suspicion that you were very much mysuperior, and I have half fancied that perhaps you only loved me because I was so madly—so passionately in love with you. Did I over-persuade you? have you ceased to love me? Sometimes I get half sick with fear. You are all I have! But after all I feel safe enough—I know you too well not to know that you will never break your promise—even one you hate. But you know I’ll never hold you to that marriage—though it was all valid enough—if you don’t want to be held. I can simply blow my good-for-nothing brains out.
“I won’t write any more to-night. There is so much swearing and noise down in the street that I can hardly think; besides I don’t feel just like it, and lately your letters have only irritated me. But I won’t complain, for I know how generously you have acted and what brilliant prospects you have given up for my precious self!
“Devotedly yours and only yours,
“G. G. B.”
WHEN Miss Eva Hungerford married Stanhope there was one young lady intensely glad of it, although it was whispered that there were also two or three who were quite the contrary. But Mrs. Renford Phillips—once Miss Violet Featherstone—had particular reasons for rejoicing, and she wrote a long letter to Miss Hungerford when she heard of the engagement, and said that she hoped “by-gones would be by-gones now, and that she was sure her friend would be a broader-minded and more perfect woman, if that were possible, now that she was going to have the additional experience of getting married.”
Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been during the first three years of their college life.
The blow had fallen very suddenly, and Miss Hungerford had found it hard to forgive what she called, in her heart, her friend’s tacit deceitand culpable silence. But, as she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Phillips’s letter, her opinions had undergone a decided change, and she felt that perhaps she had been a little hard on her friend and had not understood her feelings and the pressure brought to bear upon her, and she acknowledged that circumstances might materially alter one’s views and actions. And Miss Featherstone, who had been the most talked about girl in college during the last semestre of her junior year, and who had suffered acutely under Miss Hungerford’s indifferently concealed displeasure and surprise at her conduct, replied that now she could be truly happy in her husband and her home, and insisted that Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope should visit her in the Berkshire Hills that summer.
This they did, and though, of course, each thought her husband much the handsomer and more distinguished-looking, still they were very affectionate toward each other, and planned to be at Cowes together the next summer for the yachting.
As has been said, their estrangement happened very suddenly and came about by an unfortunate occurrence one morning in the office of the college.
Anyone who has never had the privilege ofbeing in that office on a Monday morning, just after chapel, can have but a faint idea of pandemonium. The whole seven hundred students seem to be revolving about. There are the young women standing around, waiting to take the next train into Boston, not having been able to go on the early express because they had foolishly forgotten to get a leave of absence on the Saturday previous, and who are furtively trying not to see their friends who are not going on at all, so as to keep from having to attend to their commissions; and there is the girl who is telephoning for roses to wear at the concert that night, and those who are booking boats and tennis courts, and others reading bulletins; and when there is an extra commotion and the crowd is forced back a little to let the cords be pulled up around the desk so as to clear a space; and when the carrier comes in and tumbles the big mail-bags into the middle of it with one hand and unlocks them at apparently the same instant with the other; and when about ten young women fall upon the bags and rend their contents from them, and begin to assort and number and tie up the letters, all the time besieged by their excluded friends to give them their mail on the spot as they are going away, the noise and excitement reach a climax.
But it is all very pleasant and enlivening except the telephone bell, which rings constantly and is wearing on the nerves. It rings not only for all telephone messages but for all telegrams, for the college, being a mile or so from the telegraph station, everything is simply telephoned up to save delays, and that a long and continuous procession of small messenger boys may not be forever circulating between the college and the station.
It was this unfortunate custom of telephoning telegrams, unknown of course to the majority of outsiders, that precipitated the affair. On that particular Monday morning, when the confusion in the office was at its worst, the telephone bell suddenly rang unusually loudly and long, and the nervous Freshman on duty jumped toward it with a warning motion to the rest to keep quiet.
“Hush! it’s a telegram,” she said in a moment, and instantly there was silence, for a telegram is always dreaded where there are so many to whom it could bear ill news. She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil to take it down. From the other end came “Important. Repeat slowly as I deliver it.” The nervous Freshman said “All right,” and braced herself against the support to write.
“To Miss Violet Featherstone.” The docileFreshman repeated it and then said “Wait!” and looked around.
“If Miss Featherstone is here,” she remarked, “she can come to the telephone;” but someone volunteered the information that Miss Featherstone had left by the early train for Boston, and the telephoning proceeded.
“My darling—” the Freshman gasped a little and then repeated slowly “My darling.” There was some suppressed commotion for an instant among the crowd around the doors, and the two at the telephone went at it again.
“I have not heard from you for three days.”
“I have not heard from you for three days,” mumbled the Freshman.
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
When Miss Featherstone reached the college that afternoon she thought she detected a suppressed excitement about the whole place, though she felt rather too tired to think much about it, but when she got to her room she found a telephone message for her which made her sink weakly into a chair.
An appalling vision of the consequences rose before her. She tried to think connectedly, but the effort was too much. Her only thought wasof the effect it would have on her friend Eva Hungerford. She would go to her immediately and find out how much she knew.
As she went along the corridors more than one acquaintance smiled knowingly at her, but she only hurried on. When she reached Miss Hungerford’s rooms, she found that young lady looking dejectedly out of the windows. Her melancholy turned to stony haughtiness, however, when Miss Featherstone approached her tremblingly.
“Yes, the whole college knew of it,” she assured her. “The message had been telephoned up when the office was crowded, and by this time everyone was aware of what her best friend had not known.”
Miss Featherstone rebelled a little under Miss Hungerford’s chilling glance and attempted to explain, but her friend was very sad and firm, and said she did not see how any explanation could do away with the fact that Violet Featherstone had broken the solemn vow they had made together never to marry, but to devote themselves to serious study as a life-work. But when Miss Featherstone quite broke down under her friend’s disapprobation, Miss Hungerford relented a little and asked her if she were really so fond of Renford Phillips, and if shethought life with him in Morristown would compensate her for the loss of Oxford and the Bodleian. Miss Featherstone cried a little at that, and said she thought it would, and that she had started a hundred times to tell her dearest friend about her engagement, but she knew how she thought about such things, and how she would lose her respect for allowing anything to interfere with their plans for mental advancement. And Miss Hungerford only sighed and wrote that night to her mother that another of her illusions had been dispelled, but that she was firmer than ever in her determination to make something of herself.
Miss Featherstone did not return for her degree, but had a pretty church wedding that summer at Stockbridge, and Miss Hungerford sent her a very handsome wedding gift, but refused to be present at the marriage. They did not write to each other much the next year, and Miss Hungerford worked so hard that the Faculty had to interfere, and when she left college with a B. S. degree, smiling sadly and saying that she would be a bachelor as well as an old maid, everybody remarked what a superior girl she was to her friend Violet Featherstone.