Part 12

"Most excellent Churchwoman! you object to change in the Authorized nearly as much as you would to a change in the Prayer Book. But really that piece that came out lately--of the saga, not the Prayer Book,--was quite inaccurate," Anita musingly added. "I am puzzled. I should care immensely about doing the whole thing as you have wanted me to. Bits go well. I confess I have done several when the spirit moved too hard. I could go on now I know." She raised her voice to be heard in a sudden gust. "It was written, or sung rather, to such a tune,--but up in the Seminar room the passion for accuracy falls on me and a sense of pride comes when I detect the accurate Professor Wirthau in an error. I quite despise that piece in English you spoke of. But now, come, I am in the other mood. Let us go into partnership. You have a turn for verse. I supply dry fact and you transform it into poetry. Let a few of your friends work for you and drop from some one committee--or will this have to wait till next year?"

"Next year!" Isabel smiled at her friend. "You are an institution here, Nita, no one would dream of breaking your work off, but mine, such as it is, comes this year to its natural end in an A. B. and next year I shall be disporting myself among--well, not Norse sea kings. My little sister is to come out with me, you know, and as mamma is not strong I believe my superior age and learning are to serve all but the formal needs of a chaperon."

"You a chaperon!" And Anita looked with amusement at her friend.

"I assure you I should make an excellent one. You mistake my character. It is almost portentously tempered with gravity. Will you race me from the church," she looked up at the deserted and lonely Church of the Good Shepherd they were then passing, "to the other, the cathedral?"--to St. Thomas of Villa Nova, she meant.

"Poor Mr. Clumsy-paws," Anita stopped panting, "he is far behind."

After the tired dog had caught up with them, looking reproachfully, they left behind the bleak church which lifts its golden crosses with uncompromising directness to the winter sky.

Through the fantastic snow twilight an hour later, they climbed the winding hill road to the college. Yellow lights shone steadily in ordered array--a few dark figures passed by somewhere--then a bell rang out suddenly and they hurried in. Yet before turning to the serious duty of preparing for dinner Anita let herself again be caught by her more alert friend idling at the window.

"Another problem, is it? in addition or subtraction?"

"Subtraction," she turned from the cool stars and rushing wind to the staid greeting of books and manuscript, "but what I am subtracting is, perhaps, no such loss after all--an unknown quantity, you see."

II

Anita had just received her father's answer to her letter. Letters are notoriously liable to different interpretations according as one confines oneself to the desires and emotions expressed therein or to those not expressed therein,--not to the uninitiated, that is. Parents are not likely to be the initiated: they have dealt too long in obvious literalness with their children. So, when Anita in her letter laid undue stress on her father's need of her and several other needs classed as domestic, he saw only an overdevelopment of the female conscientiousness in matters household--and a spirit of sacrifice which he duly admired. "Quite heroic, for her heart is set upon staying on at college," the old gentleman had remarked half aloud as he smoothed out her letter.

She read his answer as she sat before a cheerful little fire, a quaint figure in a red and blue flowered kimono. It was the interval between dinner and the time to dress for a college reception. Gay little noises came from the corridors as, by bright coloured screens, soft pillows and stiff potted plants, these were changing from mere means of communication into places of refuge for those who preferred to satisfy their social needs with a lesser degree of illumination and crowding than the large dining-hall, now reception-room, afforded.

Anita fingered her letter. She found it conclusive. She also found herself uncertain as to just the sentiments with which to regard it. His need of her was quite ignored. That annoyed her; but obviously in this she misunderstood him as completely as he had misunderstood her. The letter spoke of the vocation of the scholar and the sacrifice to it of the lesser things. To this she agreed, or thought she did, but had any one seen the grey eyes as they looked fixedly into the fire, he would have seen in these eyes a hunger which was not perhaps wholly for scholarship. Anita had, at the time with full conviction of sincerity, suggested a plan for going on with her work in New York. There were libraries there for the books needed--if one travelled a good many miles. Her father, most wisely and clearly, as she recognized somewhat wearily, spoke of the difficulty of concentrating one's mind on serious work among the distractions of a great city. He himself had once dreamed of a scholar's retirement.

She watched a blue flame curl over the edge of an unburned coal and die down again. She well understood this desire and had even felt it herself. A few years before in Oxford, where she had stayed a month during her one trip abroad, she had longed for just such a life. She remembered how, on one of those summer afternoons in the long vacation, she had sat on the coping of a deserted quad and looked across the tall sunlit grass to a flowering white rosebush which clung and climbed over the grey stone tracery, and then had turned back to the worn inscriptions on the wall behind her in memory of those who had worked there many years before. For her the oak stairways up from the cloisters led to anchorites' cells where men worked through endless, still, summer days. She was very young then and only in Oxford during the long vacation. On her return she first saw Bryn Mawr and then she said, with entire conviction, that to be there would be very well. The long low buildings half covered with creepers suggested, as she saw these also deserted and on a summer day, her dream of life at Oxford. Disillusionment, since then, of course there had been. She had objected, more than a healthy girl with steady nerves should object, to the sounds of girlish talk and laughter, to the many mechanical details of college life, and only found the dream again when night had long come down in quietness and she saw the outline of halls and campus trees soft and still in the moonlight, all signs of newness gone and only a few lights here and there to suggest the silent student. Of late she had shrunk less from the rush and gayety of noise, her objection lying now more against a certain crudity in enjoyment which seems unavoidable at some stages--in either sex.

And now as she sat in the bright kimono and watched the little flame curl and die and half heard the sound of gayety outside her door, Oxford was no longer her dream city. The bored dweller in towns who echoes the praise of rural life and poses a martyr to the weariness endured in the city, may smile at her for a foolish maiden, yet true it was that now she longed for nothing more vague and unknown, nothing more romantic and delightful than simply New York. She longed not merely to see it as now occasionally for a few brief days but to live there, to breathe its heavy air, whether that be tainted or pure, to hear the clamour of its streets. To watch it there, would give for her an added charm to the coming spring, to see it as it touches the city square making this fresh and green in a frame of busy walls with patterned beds of daisies and pansies or early blooming crocuses and a springing fountain in the midst. Here every one knew her. She wished the wish most familiar, but for that as urgent, to go day after day down in the streets, one in the changing mass of passers-by, and watch strange faces till the sense of personality was swept away and forgotten. She wished to feel again at night the fascination of a city then most spectacular yet most itself, as one watches it perhaps from a train and, along side streets, one sees in sudden long flashes the streaming white lights. What these lights were, lights of restaurant or theatre or lights of music hall--where she might go or where she might not,--she cared little now, she wanted the picture and the sound. In time she would want more, the dinner, the play,--this, however, was all she now saw in the fire; but of this she wanted her fill.

A voice, she knew it for Isabel's, spoke just outside the door. She would never tell her all these idle wishes, for Isabel had, or at least would soon have, herself the reality of all of them and seemed to hold it lightly. She, Anita, had once spoken with a bit of impatience of some excellent phase of college life and Isabel's eyes had grown troubled as though the light words were almost a sacrilege. How very much mistaken their little world was in its opinion of the two! Anita's lips curled up in a little satirical smile and Isabel entered the room.

"Not ready, Nita? A kimono, however charming, is unfortunately not the recognized costume for social occasions in this benighted land,--except for our fellow-students of Japanese persuasion, so haste you into frills and furbelows."

* * * * *

There was a party like any other,--bright lights, gay dresses, a little music and a Distinguished Person,--only a little more movement, groups of girls drifting about together and watching rather than making a part of it; a party taken, perhaps, not very seriously; one, also, which broke itself up into many little ones, these, in some cases, subdued groups of victims gathered in for the amusement of another person's unfortunate importation,--in other cases, guests discreetly chosen from those not utter strangers to each other; and one heard, here the accents of a southern town, there the soft "thee" of those who, small in number, have yet made their own a city's nickname; a party on the whole not homogeneous, restless and shifting, with a disproportion even greater than usual between the lightness of pale fabrics and the sombreness of men's dress, a disproportion tending, even, it might seem, to social joy--to judge by the greater gayety in purely feminine groups.

On a stiff settee under the broad stairway Anita was established in the midst of a group of Isabel's friends. It was one of the wisely chosen little parties. All included in it belonged, in effect, to one set in the city that counts numberless sets courting recognition and as many more courting the opposite. There was among those around Anita a lady with presence, also a man who had, curiously, refused to be a slave to his bank account and, at forty-five, was causing many misgivings to his friends--and much solid content to himself--through this emancipation. The lady with presence was not his wife, else the emancipation would still have been unaccomplished. There were several strong clear-eyed young men who were still revelling in the untroubled joy of the first years of an independent income; and they took life too seriously to enter quickly into the serfdom which follows after. Now they were preoccupied with buying much pleasant experience in this country and others. A few of them might, in addition to pleasant living, do something worth while, one had already done it, all were rather worth knowing.

Anita's face was a little flushed and she was talking more than usual, though the air of habitual stillness yet clung to her and her hands lay quiet on her lap, half covered by the soft deep ruffles of her blue gown. That she was a student of excellent promise was not known to those about her and Isabel, from long experience, avoided, when within earshot of her, the smallest reference to even the least of her friend's attainments. They did see only a very pretty girl who was talking gayly of all sorts of things in New York with a delight which was charmingly out of place, it seemed to them, among these surroundings; for they could not forget behind the mask of party dress the fact, almost a menacing one to them, of its being a woman's college. As they were New Yorkers by inheritance and much more by education Anita was unconsciously giving them subtle flattery, especially as what she asked about and evidently cared for was not merely the teas and dances uptown but the work and play down among the tall buildings. Isabel sat smiling at Anita's beauty--she gave the word unreservedly that evening--and wondering at her animation among these people who she had feared would bore her friend sadly.

An allusion, a name, suggested a plan for the following winter and they turned to Isabel.

"You are to be with us then?"

"Yes," she answered, "I leave here in a few months." The note of regret was almost evident.

"And Miss Fiske?"

"Ah! she is fortunate," Isabel answered quickly for her. "She has other things to fill her days. No, I refrain from untimely allusions but we all envy her life next year and the year after--for it is all planned, is it not?"

"Yes," Anita replied after a little pause, "I shall only be a few days in New York. I am to be very busy."

The flush died off her face and, as she herself was silent, the talk drifted away from her: when Isabel looked at her next she saw again the quiet face as she knew and liked it best with a gravity which well avoided seriousness,--the eyes a little larger and darker than usual under the bright lights.

_Ellen Rose Giles, '96._

_A DIPLOMATIC CRUSADE_

Sunday after Mid-Years. A grey biting February afternoon, with a promise of snow in the eager air, was darkening over the deserted campus. The examinations, which had finally dragged their slow length to an end on Friday, seemed to have left a peculiar haze in the mental atmosphere; for throughout the college, whence all who could possibly do so had departed for a brief rest, there was a subdued and slightly melancholy air, as though no one had yet realized that another four months must elapse before the agony of having her knowledge investigated would again rack mind and body.

Eleanor Mertoun, deep in the comfort of her cushioned window-seat, alternately mused on the contrast between her busy Thursday self and her lazy Sunday self, and wished for the return of her roommate, who was spending the Saturday and Sunday in Philadelphia. It was certainly the time and place in which to enjoy the retrospect of work done. The red glow of a quiet little coal fire in the grate mingled pleasantly with the fading cold light from without, and lit up warmly the dark green walls of the study, and its polished floor. An antique oval mirror in a dull old gilt frame dimly gave back the double of a graceful sword fern which spread its long fronds over the end of a well-filled bookcase below. Eleanor, being in a contemplative mood, stared hard at the fern and reflected that _it_ toiled not and was very beautiful. Before she could go on to the philosophic consequences of her meditation, the door was swung open vigorously, and in came a tall figure in hat and ulster.

"Why, it's Marjorie Daw herself," exclaimed Eleanor, springing up to greet the longed-for roommate. "I thought you weren't coming back till to-morrow? You're just in time to save me from acute melancholia, but I can't believe you had any premonition of that!"

"I'm _gefrohren_--give me a cup of hot tea, for the love of--Me, and then I'll tell you," answered Marjorie Conyngham, as she threw off hat and coat, sat down on the rug by the hearth, and held out both hands towards the fire.

Eleanor dashed out to fill the kettle, and soon had a steaming cup and a "jammed" cracker ready for Marjorie. Then she put a "Busy" sign on the outside of the door to guard against too attentive friends on borrowing bent, sat down beside the newcomer, clasped her hands around her knees, and commanded, "Go on."

"I had an unusual and severe attack of piety that prevented me from cutting Pol. Econ. in the morning. It was brought on, I think, by the idea of having to copy six pages of lecture notes on the social state of the indigent Indians."

Eleanor interrupted her. "Oh, I don't in the least care what brought you, now that you're here. I meant, I want to know all about the Atkinsons, what you did and said,--and how many times you upset your glass at table."

Marjorie passed over this insulting thrust, and irrelevantly remarked: "Isn't it a pleasant thought that exam. time is over, and so Betty Hall no longer goes down the corridor warbling 'Earth is my resting place, Heaven is my home,' or 'I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger, I can tarry, I can tarry but a night'?"

Eleanor laughed at the remembrance. "It is, surely. Poor old Betty! Doesn't she suffer more from the fear of being flunked out than any upper-classman you ever saw?--and she makes elaborate preparations for going home at every exam. time. But come back from this digression and stick to the manuscript. Marge, conversationally you're a tramp!"

"About the Atkinsons? They're very well, thank you.--Oh, don't break my head with the tongs and I will be good! I have a lovely tale to tell you, really, Eleanor. I met a man----"

"Impossible!" interjected Eleanor.

"Who's digressing now?" demanded Marjorie.

A meek small voice from the gathering darkness said "Little Ellie," and then Marjorie went on; "a man whom you know quite well in the general if not in the particular--a handsome, well-groomed, middle-aged man with iron grey hair, serenest confidence in his own judgment and estimate of things, and--here you may perceive the rub, Lee--unconquerable prejudice against the essentially modern woman--in the abstract."

"Ah!" breathed Eleanor, scenting the battle from afar.

"In the concrete, I confess, she shows him to be 'not impregnable as a bulwark of archaism,' as Dr. Phillips would say." Marjorie was smiling at the fire, which was only half lighting the corner of the dim study. "Eleanor, from the moment that I first heard that man speak and open fire on the kind of thing the modern girl is going to become, I marked him for my prey. Oh! it was lovely," laughed she suddenly, rocking back and forth in an ecstasy of delighted amusement, "it was lovely to see the mighty fall."

"Do tell me how it happened! What did you use on the poor man?" asked the eager Eleanor.

"It wasn't force, hardly even force of argument. He did not know I was a Bryn Mawrtyr at first, and so he was led into jesting with me just as he would have with any mere society girl who was ready for badinage. When he fathomed my real character his face was an entertaining spectacle--a mixture of regret, astonishment, and--well,--annoyance, such as one is not always privileged to see. I saw he was preparing for driving me out of college by hot argument, so I got out my strategic tools and turned the conversation.

"You know we have threshed this all out before so many times, and raged to each other about the quarter of the population who take us, without looking, for mannish boarding-school girls, as empty-headed as the women of ten centuries ago, but more silly because we pretend to be what we are not; and about the other quarter, who look upon us as grinds and blue-stockings, star-gazers impossible and undesirable to touch with a pole of any length! This man had a smattering of both those ideas, and was--is--bringing up his daughter on principles impossible to classify. He told me all about his plans for her before I quite got the conversation turned from the explosive topic, and I feel sure the poor child will find herself an anachronism in ten years.

"I knew it would shock him fearfully if I talked politics; but besides being anxious to shake him up a bit, I really wanted to do battle with Mr. Atkinson (as usual) about England's policy in South Africa. And so I launched on that perilous undertaking, making as gallant a defence of Oom Paul and all Boerdom as I knew how. To my huge delight, the man (his name is Ballantyne) had to acknowledge that he disagreed with Mr. Atkinson and agreed with me! Point No. 1.

"Just then Teddy Atkinson began talking music. You know he is very enthusiastic--goes to the Symphony concerts, all the operas, and that sort of thing. He asked about the Glee Club at college, and wanted to know if I were still Leading-Grand-High-Soprano-in-Alt, or something equally foolish. You should have seen Mr. Ballantyne's face--looked as if he thought music and political science mutually exclusive terms. I plunged in at once and talked 'technical' all I knew how. Don't think me a horrid _poseuse_, Lee, though I was playing to the gallery in a way. I didn't pretend to very much more than I knew, and besides it was all a part of my deep-laid plot for bringing down that man."

"You! posing!" was Eleanor's sole comment. "Go on."

"You see my scheme? To let no subject of conversation escape; whether it was anything Mr. Ballantyne had ever heard of or not makes no difference. The point was to convince him, as thoroughly as was possible in one short evening, that I, in the character of college woman, was neither a bit of thistle-down nor a fearful prig. The next thing was--oh yes!--domestic affairs. Mrs. Atkinson, without knowing it, helped me immensely there. She began the topic, and though my knowledge of it was so theoretical that if I had been an angel I should have feared to tread on that subject, I rushed in. Fortunately, I had gathered enough information from running the house last summer while mother was away to talk without utter nonsense. I told them about the cook who said, when I went down and criticised some of the products of her skill: 'It's yersilf I'll set on the stove if yez do be afther interferin' in _my_ bisnis!' And I thought Mr. Ballantyne's amusement rather excessive for one who disapproved so heartily of me and my college. Perhaps he took it as a welcome proof that I couldn't manage cooks. It proved a good transition anyway; for Mr. Atkinson was reminded of one of his delicious stories, which made me think of some lovely tales we heard from Betty Hall and the frivolous-minded Dorothy at the fudge party after Philosophy exam. on Friday; and then of course the Ballantyne had one to tell, so that the table cheered up markedly. I could see now that he began to think me amusing if peculiar, and I gained an inch whenever I could.

"After that we went on talking about all sorts of things, for Teddy Atkinson couldn't have played better into my hands if he had been an accomplice, and suggested the most diverse known subjects. College settlement was closely followed by wireless telegraphy, yacht races, and golf, especially at the Merion Cricket Club; and though I had to be wary of terms sometimes when it came to the second and third, I didn't back down once--not once. Then Mr. Ballantyne and I had a bit of a talk together, in which I tried to introduce 'a current of new and fresh ideas' into his mind, and gently remove some others already there. I think his capitulation would have come very soon if he had stayed longer, for when he rose to go he said that he did not know whether he would find it best for his daughter to go to Bryn Mawr, but he hoped she would prove as many-sided as he had found a college woman might be. Wasn't that worth working hard for?"

Eleanor, leaning over and spanning Marjorie's forehead with her hands, murmured "Undue cerebral enlargement----"

"Lee--you idiot!" cried Marjorie, "do you imagine for one moment that I would have spent a laborious, uncomfortable, self-conscious evening to make any living person like me on my own account? I didn't care what Mr. Ballantyne thought of _me_--I wanted to make him like the college girl in me, and show him how utterly he was mistaken in his baseless notions of what college makes a woman."