Part 8

"Always cylinders." This with a sudden sense of coldness. "The Deluge, and others. But I changed my mind." Never should any one, her former roommate least of all, know what had changed her mind. Actually this was a letter from Sydney Lodge, written in July and saying in effect, "I need you rather badly. How soon are you coming?" She had explained on a post-card that certain bricks and cylinders ought first to be deciphered and in the meantime had cabled for the rooms. She knew--it was one of the discoveries of this extraordinary afternoon--she knew Sydney's ways even to the point of prediction; that if she should say: "But my dear child I wrote you I had engaged the suite for us both," the young lady would answer with a brilliant smile of privilege and a new note--was it the sentimental?--in her voice: "Did you really? Well, I must have been thinking of something else when I read the letter." It was impossible not to laugh, but Esther covered the laughter with a sudden inspiration:

"Oh, I say, don't you want to share my study?"

"But Sydney?" cried poor Hilda, setting down her flowered teacup.

"Sydney's engaged. One Lewis Mason."

"Oh, dear!" Hilda answered flatly. "I'm rather sorry. I always believed in her, you know. She might have done things."

"Presumably one can do things with a husband. He is supposed to help," replied Esther, throwing forward her general convictions in the grotesque struggle for loyalty.

"Ah, she can't. And," added the girl, conclusively, "he won't."

"How's that?"

Hilda returned violently: "I know the beggar. She stayed a Sunday with Helen when I was there this summer and--he called in the evening. He's in politics, but quite respectable. I don't know why I shouldn't come, if you really want me: I'm taking my Ph. D., too, you know. Think it over. He's what they called," said Hilda with an explicit vagueness, "'_le parfait gentleman_.'"

VI

Esther looked around, when she went back to the emptiness, almost with a little shiver. This was the end then: _après tant de jours: après tant de fleurs_. She had just for a little while known the unacademic world, people who had seen something different in her face, something rather sweet and rather sensitive.

How far all the things seemed and all alike how dim: the socialist meetings in Berlin, the cheap dinners at a droll _crêmerie_ in Paris frescoed all around with the history of the Queen of Hearts and the immemorial tarts; even the soft after-dinner hour when she was staying with her cousins down in Leicestershire; even a delicious painter-boy who had just got into the Salon--all alike out of reach. The life before her looked poor and thin: books to be sure were at hand and one could hurry up to New York two or three times in a winter for the opera, and go abroad every summer with a companion chosen, like Hilda, expressly for her impersonality, one year to Greece, another time for the French cathedrals and _châteaux_.

Hilda--"she's impersonal as a Velasquez," she had written in the first week--proved for the aggrieved young woman the Griselda of companions.

Even to herself Esther would only admit a few grounds of grievance. Sydney did well to marry, though there were elements of pain in the shock and the strangeness of her elected husband, but she, or somebody else, might have sounded a note of warning. That faint sigh of amorous trouble and the consequent precipitate response! Esther found herself in the position of one running at full speed who stops short, consciously red-faced and rather blown. The picture made her angry and undigested anger made her sick and spoiled her work.

There was even a sense of participation in Sydney's guilt, a secret confession of some dawdling in Paris, some philandering, that provoked to wholesome laughter. She had moments of saying to her inward interlocutor that it was rather absurd to chafe at the loss after all of only a few months, in June she would go back to London, to Paris, to the great glad world. But these conversations shared more or less the chimerical character of the thoughts when one lies awake at night and in the bodily warmth and darkness and the inner blaze of the overheated brain, one's perceptions, one's values are all monstrous. At last she saw that she had in truth been only playing with the thought of the straight, brown-bearded young artist in his little round cap like a Holbein drawing. Him she had not left behind without annoyance, though certainly she would not have wished to bring him along; but she could not even for Sydney have left behind her lexicons and manuscripts, and comical little bricks done up in pasteboard jewel boxes.

VII

The moon plainly was coming up in a hurry behind Dalton as Esther paused at the entrance to her room, for though still invisible it filled with light the air outside all the windows. Against this pale-blue background Hilda on the sill was making coffee in a tall green porcelain pot. The air was full of the spicy steam.

"_Dégenérée!_" laughed Esther. "Didn't you have coffee for dinner?"

"Dinner was a long time ago," replied Hilda sententiously. "Besides, I didn't have enough. Where have you been? Your frock is clammy."

"In the Harriton family graveyard, first, sitting on the steps over the wall and listening to a woodthrush. Did you ever have enough?" Esther added, lighting a lamp as she spoke, while the brass teakettle winked in the soft light and the outside earth vanished. "Hilda, it's a good world."

"A well-enough world," answered Hilda crossing the yellow patch to get the delicate cups. As she returned with them Esther studied her black serge skirt and caught it up.

"Cat-hairs!" she affirmed. "How was Helen?--I've not seen her for a long time. And how was Pasht? He has a black soul."

"He's uncommonly beautiful. If you go to Chapel to-morrow," said Hilda irrelevantly, "you will hear the President announce that I am appointed a Reader in English for next year. Pretty good, isn't it, for a Canadian who is Scotch?"

"That's all right, Doctor Railton," murmured Esther congratulating her and adding, "Then I'm sure of you here next year." This was before the days of Low Buildings, and Readers lived in the Halls where and how they could.

Esther lay back in her chair, admiring the tarnished frame of a quaint oval mirror that reflected a really admirable Japanese water-colour of Hilda's. She was glad the study would be unchanged another year, and quiet. She thought, too, with a little shudder of the hot bad air of crowded rooms, the loud noise of voices, the indecorous bustle of a life made up of many acquaintances.

"I am going to Spain this summer to look at some Arabic manuscripts," she said at length. "You'd better come too. If we cross cheaply and don't travel we can live on nothing. Berenson says the Spanish galleries are full of wonderful pictures, practically unknown."

"My dear, I've a family," laughed Hilda ruefully.

"Didn't you say last night that they were going to the winds of heaven this year and that you didn't know what to do? Represent to them, moreover, that one shouldn't lose so superb a chance of _doing_ me. Seriously, I shall take a whole stateroom, not having forgotten the seasick German girl I came home with last time, and you'd much better occupy the other berth. Indeed, I can't travel alone in Spain, you know."

Her eyes were fixed on eighteen square inches of pinkish brocade pinned against the wall--her Christmas present to Hilda and a ruinous extravagance. A chance word, from a lecture, she had caught up and fancied once, came back: "Nobody frames the multiplication table and hangs it on the wall." But surely that was because the multiplication table was shallow and petty and strikingly untrue: there were tracts of knowledge infinite and unfathomable where one would never tire.

The things, she realized, which one does not ask too much of--and the people--are the things which are forever surprising one with unguessed possibilities.

"Curiosity, after all, is the only insatiable emotion," said Esther out of her experience, and there were always more little bricks: one might even in time when one had read all the rest, go and dig some up with one's own hands.

_Georgiana Goddard King, '96._

_STUDIES IN COLLEGE COLOUR_

The great bell clangs out through the morning air--through the snowflakes that thicken it, sending its summons over the white-crusted campus. The slippery walks are crowded with black figures moving towards Taylor Hall, single, in groups of twos and threes, wrapped close with shawls and hoods, half of them umbrellaless. Voices fall as they enter and amid friendly jostling around the bulletin board and in the cloak-room whispered greetings are exchanged. Then upstairs to the silent chapel, with its white windows made whiter by the frost; a stillness seeming to fold it round. The black mortar-boards nod their tassels in cheery greeting; subdued talk between neighbours fills the room with a low hum. A sudden hush; the talk stops; the heads are still; a moment's pause and the service has begun. All are together for once in the day, with no distinctions of class or grade. All are alike children, and children of Bryn Mawr. At the close of the prayer another moment's silence. Then a sudden movement. The bell clangs out again. A general rush to classes, to the office, to one's room. The day has begun.

* * * * *

The sunlight is streaming in through the broad windows. It dances among the leaves of the red geraniums on the window-sill and falls upon the carpet in bright spots and bands. The bookcase and the two shelves of the little mahogany desk are crowded with a confusion of much worn, many-coloured volumes. Over the Dresden inkstand and disordered files of papers and pencils a small brass dragon mounts guard. Dainty cups shine on the white tea-table, which bears for its motto the words of the March Hare:

"_It's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the tea things between whiles._"

On the Turkish scarf which drapes the mantel stands a ginger-jar full of yellow roses. Across the rocking-chair is thrown a college gown, while tennis balls and rackets strew the floor. The divan is filled with flowered cushions innumerable, and half-buried among them is the mistress of all this colour and confusion. She is reading "The Republic."

* * * * *

It was a warm afternoon in May. The shadows were lengthening on the campus, and the air had all the stillness of midsummer. On the grass near the gravel walk a robin was hopping and pecking. Two black-gowned figures had just passed slowly by, and now all was still again. A sparrow who had been hovering for several minutes over head alighted close by the robin.

"Ah!" said the robin, "could you but fancy what you have lost! Two seniors conversing together. Did you not perceive them?"

The sparrow would gladly have concealed his ignorance on such classic ground, yet, constrained by curiosity, with hanging head he asked, "What may seniors be?"

"Seniors," replied the robin. "Do you not know, then, that seniors are the sovereigns of this place? Indeed, I assure you, it is true. We have their own confession for it. Listen while I tell you the words of these two as they passed by.

"'Well, it is almost over,' said one. 'And next year what do you suppose will become of the college?'

"'It is too dreadful to think of,' said the other. 'Some of our class may come back as graduates. That is the only hope.'

"'And even then they cannot help the Undergraduate Association. And they will be too few to manage Self-Government. Oh, this dear old college! It is too terrible to think of leaving it to go to rack and ruin. And just when everything is in the best condition possible! Imagine the Editorial Board without some member from '93! And the standard of class work is sure to fall next year.'

"'And the gymnasium, too. To be sure most of us are making up conditions in the gym, but then----'

"'Oh, there is no help for it! The college is sure to go down now. And it has been rapidly rising for four years! It is too cruel!'"

The robin paused. Then he hopped confidingly towards the sparrow and, cocking his head on one side, whispered, "If you will take the trouble to listen you will hear conversations like that every spring on this campus. Now you know what seniors are."

_L. S. B. S., '93; G. E. T. S.,'93._

_EPOCH MAKING_

The morning after the freshman play found the gymnasium looking somewhat forlorn. The portable stage had lost part of the discreet drapery that masked its front below the footlights, and now recklessly displayed its crazy supports to the public eye; the footlights themselves were a mass of blackened tallow in their battered tin sockets; the faded green canton-flannel curtains which had served as a forest background for the last act of _Prince Otto_, and been torn from half their rings at its end when Seraphina and the prince tried to make a simultaneous entry in response to applause, trailed limply from their remaining supports, and seemed to beg for the friendly shadows of the property-room to hide their rents and tatters. In the corners of the stage, the groups of branches which had simulated the primeval forest drooped their withered heads in mournful wise against their too evident props, and like the grey cambric rocks and tin-foil rivulet which occupied the centre of the scene, were hardly recognizable as parts of last night's fairy woodland.

Even less recognizable, but scarcely so forlorn, the actors in the performance soon began to drop in, at first one by one, and then in little groups of two or three. They came in fresh and smiling and full of misdirected zeal for the work of clearing up; most of the later arrivals came from the basket-ball field, and flung down their gayly-coloured golf-capes just where they would be most in the way; and all of them, as they went about pulling down the decorations, and piling borrowed properties into bewildering heaps for return to their owners, chattered incessantly of last night's great success.

The November sunlight fell in yellow, dusty shafts through the high windows above the running track, spilling its pale brightness on the cluttered floor and stage, and spread even into the alcove where the horizontal bars jostled the horse and the rowing-machines in ignominious confusion and with a general shamefaced air of being huddled out of the way. The position of the yellow rays indicated ten o'clock, and the busy workers, having accumulated rugs, curtains, costumes, bric-a-brac, a number of potted plants, and the fragments of a pasteboard fireplace, in heterogeneous piles on every side, were beginning to wonder if they could ever straighten them out again, when the arrival of three or four fresh recruits gave them an excuse for resting while they reported progress.

Their labours, indeed, spoke for themselves. Peggy Dillon, the class chairman, who headed the reinforcements, opened her round blue eyes aghast at the dusty chaos which greeted her, and found herself bereft of speech by the look of modest pride which beamed from all the faces before her; but one of her companions, a handsome girl with a certain air of authority about her, was equal to the occasion.

"Dear me, how enterprising you all are!" she exclaimed, coming forward with a comprehensive smile; "there is really a great deal accomplished already. (Don't look so utterly overcome, Peggy, if you can help it.) You must have worked like beavers to get all those curtains down."

The workers, hot, dirty, and dishevelled, beamed with redoubled brightness upon the speaker, and upon the havoc they had wrought, and tasted all the sweetness of being appreciated. Pauline Van Sandford was a tall girl who carried her head rather high, and spoke with a good-humoured imperiousness. Perhaps these things added weight to her remarks. With a very creditable show of gratification, she went on,

"And nearly all the properties in piles!" Here a gasp from Peggy, who had just discovered her pet cast in one of the said piles under a section of the stage-steps, warned her to hasten her climax; she worked up her remarks to quite an enthusiastic close, and then, apparently consumed with anxiety for the workers' fatigue, she fell upon the helpful band, and fairly swept them from the gymnasium upon a wave of appreciative solicitude.

"Do go home and lie down, all of you--no, it's really too much to expect--no, don't think of staying, we can do all the rest--no, you are too good, and we are awfully grateful, but--there!" She slammed the door upon the bewildered objects of her gratitude, and then, falling back against it, exchanged looks of despair with her companions.

"Who would ever have thought they'd get at it so early!" wailed Peggy, on her knees beside a particularly hopeless-looking heap of articles; "will some one help me to rescue my poor Clytie? Shirley, lend a hand with these steps."

Shirley Nairn, a slender girl with a big, soft, dust-brown pompadour, brown eyes, and a firm little chin which half contradicted their gentleness, began cautiously to lift away the boards. She had a fluttering grace in all her movements like that of a bird just lighting. "Rescue is the word," she said; "there is still hope for most of the things, but unless we do a lot before lunch, those Vandals will be back again, and next time there will be nothing left but chips."

In spite of the discouraging outlook, an hour or two of hard work did wonders. Curtains and costumes went to the property-room, the faded forest hid its head in a corner, the borrowed chairs and rugs and rubber-plants found themselves grouped in something like order, and the rescue party sank at last upon a mattress in the alcove to wipe its heated brow, and survey results.

"There is less damage done than you would think," observed Katharine Holland; she was a girl of that ineffectual type that must always appeal to some one, and she now turned her long brown face and mournful eyes towards Shirley. "Except for Peggy's Clytie, and a few smashed pots, and that long tear in Miss Meredith's leopard-skin, most things seem to have been miraculously spared. There is a special Providence that watches over idiots."

Still inspecting her very grimy hands, Shirley said, "They aren't really idiots, but you can't leave them to themselves. We should have had a committee."

"It's all my fault; I neglected it," began Peggy meekly.

"We are all just as bad," Pauline interrupted in a decided tone; "Louise is stage manager, and I am business manager, and look at our behaviour: we have both been wasting valuable time on our essay appointments when we should have been attending to business."

As self-accusation seemed the order of the day, each of the small party came forward to blame herself, and did it thoroughly and at some length. When a soothing pause came at last, Shirley said meditatively,

"I heard Miss Meredith say the other day that women couldn't work together effectively, because woman isn't a political animal."

Charlotte Meredith's masters degree and undisputed cleverness gave no small weight to her opinion among the undergraduates, but Pauline, as her cousin and protégée, stood less in awe of her than most of the freshmen; she had even dared to christen her, quite openly, "the Cynic." It was Pauline, therefore, who now voiced the meeting's dissent from Miss Meredith's dictum. Woman could be a political animal, if she chose, and was properly directed. All that the class of '9-- needed was to be taught to think before they acted.

Louise Ferguson, a small bustling girl with red hair, wanted to know how you were going to teach them to think. They might be able to do it separately, but when you took them in the mass, they were just like a flock of sheep, and class meetings merely a game of follow-my-leader. No matter how clever and sensible the individual girl was, a class of sixty-three girls was capable of any idiocy on the spur of the moment. "Look at the number of classes who elect their presidents, and then hate them ever after. Look at the case of the class who barred out their temporary chairman, and then spent the rest of their college career wishing they had elected her. They never know what they want, or if they do, they don't know enough to get it."

"Thanks awfully," crowed Peggy; "all the bouquets are coming my way. '9-- made me chairman, therefore they did not want me. Q. E. D. Thanks ever so much!"

As Louise and Peggy were roommates, their differences could be left for private settlement. Louise therefore took no notice of this interruption, beyond a threatening scowl at the speaker, and, sticking bravely to her point, appealed to Pauline for support. In Pauline's opinion class politics were usually unintelligent, but she did not agree that there was no help for it. When the spirited discussion which this remark brought on had run its rather ineffectual course to no conclusion, the two disputants fell silent, and four of the little group found themselves looking shyly at Shirley Nairn.

Three of the girls had come up together from the Airlie School in New York, and Pauline Van Sandford was their leader; Peggy Dillon was a Philadelphia girl who had chanced upon a room in the "Airlie corridor" of Pembroke East, and whose short-lived ascendency in '9--'s affairs had declined, very early in her chairmanship, into dependence upon Pauline; but Shirley Nairn lived in Merion, and the four knew very little about her, except that her schoolmates from the Briony School of New Haven counted on her to win the class presidency from the Airlie candidate. So now they eyed her sideways, and waited for her views on class politics as expressing class intelligence; and the pause was just beginning to be uncomfortable when she lifted her head.

"We might try to better things in our own case," she said tentatively; "there ought to be a way to make class politics intelligent, but we can only prove it by doing it."

"How?" asked Louise, while Pauline rapidly decided that Shirley Nairn did not have that square chin for nothing. Then, taking the floor herself, Pauline opined that the whole trouble lay in too hasty action. "We women," she said, rather grandly, and with her usual air of decided conviction, "we women make up our minds before we think; we look at a few arguments, listen to our friends' opinions, leap to a conclusion (usually all wrong), and score another foolish vote."

Peggy's groan of mock despair, which followed this speech, and was meant to preface a lively protest, was robbed of effect by the sudden sound of Taylor bell, ringing for lunch-time; and the parliament of five forthwith dissolved. But as they dispersed, Pauline pledged them all to come to her room that evening for further discussion of the subject. They met there accordingly, with a few other high souls who were ripe for reform; they discussed; and from their discussion there grew a plan.