Part 15

_Second Mother._ Yes, indeed! We feel, Mr. Fosdick and I, that my daughter's friends have been almost as good for her as what she learned, though that comes first, as she must teach, now. She was always so solitary and reserved and never cared for the girls at home, but here she has such good friends and loves them all so--she's grown more natural, more like other girls; and we lay it all to her having been thrown in from the beginning with such pleasant, nice girls as these. You know them, I suppose--Bessie and Sue and Bertha Kitts--

¶ _Two alumnæ strolling between the houses and the enclosure, chatting with friends and spying out acquaintances._

_First Alumna._ Good gracious, isn't she through yet? I pity the poor girls, standing all this while!

_Second Alumna._ Yes, that's just it! Arrange the oration to suit the girls, do!--If they're tired, let them sit down! It's absurd to criticise the one really academic exercise of the whole affair entirely on the basis of the girls' comfort, I say!

_First Alumna._ But, my dear, the poor things have done so much and stood so much anyhow--and I should think Miss Maria would be tired herself.

_Second Alumna._ Then it's her own lookout. She should have dropped one or the other. They try to do too much. I can tell you that we were proud enough to stand twenty minutes when Ethel Richardson talked, and she didn't feel that it was beneath her notice to devote all her time and attention to that one thing, either. We didn't make so much of these universal geniuses then, but I doubt if we had poorer results from the less widely gifted. It's too much strain; one simply can't do everything.

_First Alumna._ No. They're 'way ahead of us in lots of things, but I'm glad I came when I did. Don't you remember what a good time we used to have spring term? Dear old last spring term! Do you know there isn't any, now? Don't you remember how we dropped ev--well, a good deal, and lay in the hammocks in the orchard and mooned about and took a long, comprehensive farewell to all our greatness? We'd made or lost our reputations by then, and we just took it all in and--oh, I suppose we did sentimentalize a little, but it all meant more to us apparently.... Well, it's all gone now. They begin on the play so early, and it's all rehearsing, and then they can't let their work drop, so they keep everything right up to the pitch--according to their story. And there are six societies to our one, you know. And all the houses give receptions to them right in a bunch, and every one is so bored at them--at least Kitty says they are. But you can't always tell by that, I suppose.

¶ _Applause from the enclosure and a general scurry as the ushers crowd up to surround the class, who begin their Ivy Song--a piece of musical composition something between a Gregorian chant and a Strauss waltz, with a great deal of modulation, in which the words "hopes and fears," "coming years," "plant our vine," and "still entwine" occur at suitable intervals. They wander away in a bunch, frantically surrounded by the ushers and the chain, to another side of College Hall, where the Ivy is interred. A general break-up then begins, the orator and the president join their admiring families, and people begin to stroll home, the prominent members of the class pausing at every sentence to have their pictures taken._

_Two members of the class and one of the Faculty._

_First Member of Class._ It was the funniest thing I've heard this year, really! You know the girls simply _slave_ for her--they _slave_. They can't help it, you know, for she thinks that's all there is in the world and if you don't have your note-book made out she looks at you in such a way--oh, well, it makes Mollie's spine cold, she says. Mollie's done splendid work for her--not that she doesn't do it for everybody--but she was determined to make her see that she could be at all the rehearsals and take the observations, too. The only thing she didn't do was to go the last two or three nights, but gracious, she'd more than made that up! I thought I did pretty well when I put in five hours of Lab., but those girls have done eight and ten hours a week some weeks, note-books and observations and all. Just to satisfy her, you know--they love to work for her. And what do you think she said the last time they met? Do you know about Astronomy, Mr. Brooke? If you do, I shall spoil the story for you, for I don't know the first thing. But I think it was the parallax of the sun. "Now, I should think you could just step out between the acts," said she, calmly, "if you couldn't get out for all the evening, and take your note-book with you, Miss Vanderveer, and just take it--it's a beautiful observation! And you've taken one, and it will be a great thing to tell your children that you've gotten the parallaxes of the sun yourself!"

_Second Member of Class._ And when we thought of Mollie dancing about there with her collar undone, trying to make those idiotic men understand something and being everywhere at once--between the acts, you know, being a fairly occupied time for her--when we imagined her walking out of the garden scene or Orsino's house to take the what-do-you-call-it of the sun (though I don't see how she could take it of the sun at night--it must have been the moon, Ethel).

_Member of Faculty._ And what did Miss Vanderveer say?

_First Member of Class._ I'm sure it was the sun, Teddie, Mollie said sun--why, she coughed and said, "I certainly will, if I get time, Miss Drake!"

_Member of Faculty._ Great presence of mind, I'm sure.

¶ _Group of relatives and three members of the class._

_First Member._ Mamma, this is Miss Twitchell and Miss Fosdick--Maria and Malvolio, you know.

_Mother._ I am pleased to meet you both. I want to tell you how much I enjoyed, _etc._

_Misses Twitchell and Fosdick._ We're so glad if you did, _etc._

_Mother._ I was not able to catch much of your speech, but Ellen tells me we can have the pleasure of reading it later.

_Miss Twitchell, moving away._ I'm afraid you will have the opportunity--but I tried to make it as short as I could!

_Mother._ And now I suppose you're going home to sleep all day? I should think you'd need it.

_Miss Twitchell._ Oh, dear, no! I'm going to the Alpha on the back campus this afternoon, and I want to look in at Colloquium, and then there's the Glee Club to-night, you know. I've no more worry now, nothing to do but enjoy myself.

_Aunt._ What is this, Ellen? The Glee Club--

_Ellen._ Why, Aunt Grace, the Glee Club promenade, don't you know? That's when the lanterns are all over, and they give a concert, and we all walk about, and it's so pretty--don't you remember I told you?

_Aunt._ Well, then, I'll go right home and take my nap, if I'm to go out to-night. Are you going to all these things, too, Ellen?

_Ellen._ Well, practically. Only I'm going to Phi Kapp and Biological instead. But I _am_ going to lie down--I'm so tired, I can't think straight, and you know I'm on the Banjo Club, and we have to have a short rehearsal--

¶ _The crowd gradually disperses, and the campus is practically deserted; men begin to put up poles and wires for lanterns; others gather and arrange scattered chairs. Stray relatives hunt for each other and their boarding-places or inquire with interest which is the Science Building and the Dewey House. Belated members of the class wander homewards or patiently seek out their families, whose temporary guardians are thus relieved._

_Abstracted member of the class and large, domineering woman in black satin, before the Morris House gate._

_Large Woman._ This is the Hatfield, is it not?

_Member of Class._ Oh! I beg your pardon? No, it's the Morris.

_Large Woman._ Ah! I was told it was the Hatfield.

_Member of Class, simply._ Well, it's not.

_Large Woman._ And that over there (_pointing to the Observatory_), that is the Lilly House?

_Member of Class._ No, that's the Observatory. Lilly Hall is up farther. It's just beyond the Dickinson--no, the Lawrence--I mean the _Hubbard House_!

_Large Woman._ And where is the Hubbard House?

_Member of Class._ Oh, dear! (_pulls herself together with an effort_) it's up in a line, the one, two, three, third from here.

_Large Woman._ Thank you. And I wish to see the Botanical Gardens, too. Where are they? (_Member of Class points out their position._)

_Large Woman._ And where is the Landscape Garden?

_Member of Class, vaguely._ Why, I suppose it's over there, too. I don't exactly--it's all landscape garden, I suppose--it's not big--

_Large Woman, severely._ I was told there was a fine landscape and botanical garden--are you a member of the college?

_Member of Class, leaning against the post._ Why, yes, but it's all botanical garden, for that matter. (_Catches sight of a tree with a tin label tied to it and points luminously at it._) _That's_ botanical, you know--all the trees and shrubs!

_Large Woman, with irritation._ I am quite aware that it is--I--

_Member of Class, despairingly._ Oh, excuse me, I mean it's--it's--_I mean they all have labels!_ (_Large Woman stalks majestically away; Member of Class makes a few incoherent gestures in the air, murmurs_, "I am _such_ a fool, but I'm _so_ tired!" _Throws out her hands wearily and trails into the Morris House._)

THE TENTH STORY

_THE END OF IT_

X

THE END OF IT

There are two methods of conducting a class supper. The first is something like this: you pick out three utterly unrelated girls who never had anything to do with one another in their lives, and call them the supper committee; you pick out two clever, uninterested girls and call them the toast committee; you pick out an extremely busy girl who lives half a mile off the campus and call her the seating committee; you pick out a popular girl who is supposed to be humorous because she laughs at everybody's jokes and knows one comic song, and call her the toast-mistress.

And this is the result of it: The supper committee meets, wonders what under heaven induced the president to appoint the other two, finds out what caterer they had last year, and after a little perfunctory argument employs him again without further action, with the result that one end of the table has five kinds of ice cream and the other a horrifying recurrence of lukewarm croquettes; the toast committee spends a great deal of time in hunting out extremely subtle quotations from Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam, with the result that no one of the toasters gets the least idea of how she is expected to elaborate her theme; the seating committee is so harassed by everybody that she gives up her diagram in despair, and successive girls erase and sign and re-erase till nobody but the three or four leading sets in the class are satisfied, and they are displeased because the toasters are either put in a line at the head or scattered about the tables, and that separates them from their immediate cliques; the toast-mistress turns out to be more appreciative than constructive, and worries her friends and bores her enemies beyond previous conception. The main body of unimportant necessary people are crowded off by themselves and feel somewhat flat and heavy and irritated at the noisy groups beyond them; the toasts are apt to be a little sad and vague because the girls don't fit them and talk too much about enduring friendships, the larger life, four years of stimulating rivalry, and alma mater. Why they do all this at this season and this alone, only the Lord who made them knows.

But Ninety-yellow did not employ this method. It occurred to Theodora somewhat originally, perhaps, as she looked around her that last Tuesday evening, that a better class supper was never arranged. It can hardly be asserted that it was a really good supper, for it is to be doubted if a hundred and seventy-five women ever sat down to a really good supper; but there was almost enough of it, and it was very nearly hot. Kathie Sewall had picked the supper committee well, and they knew one another thoroughly enough to give it all to the chairman to do and to make fun of her till she was spurred on to a really noble effort. She knew that it is always damp and cold class supper night, and planned accordingly. Kitty Louisa Hofstetter managed the toasts, and though Kitty Louisa was uneven and a little vulgar at times, she was clever in her unexpected hail-fellow-well-met way and popular with the class for the most part. She had a genius for puns of the kind that grow better as they grow worse, and they were shamelessly italicized in the toast-cards, which caused great merriment before the toasts had begun. And the seating was very well done, for the class was nicely broken up and mixed about among the tables till everybody was within four or five of a reasonably important person.

As for the toast-mistress--well, you see, Theodora's opinion of her might have been a trifle exaggerated, for she was Theodora's best friend. How little she had changed, Theo thought, as she watched her rumple her hair in the same funny, boyish way that she had freshman year. Theo had seen her first in the main hall, floating with the current of freshmen that pushed its way almost four hundred strong to meet its class officer and find out that O. G. meant Old Gymnasium. That far-off freshman year! Theo smelt again the clean, washed floor; saw again the worried shepherds herding their flocks into the scheduled stalls and praying that the parents might go soon and leave their darlings, if misunderstood, at least unencumbered; heard again the buzz and hum of a thousand chattering, scuffling girls, bubbling over with a hundred greetings for each other.

"Hello, Peggy! Peggy! I say, _hello Peggy_!"

"Oh, hello! Have a good time?"

"Grand! Did you?"

"Perfectly fine--I saw Ursula and Dodo and--Oh, Ursula! hello! Here I am!"

"Why, Peggy Putney, you dear old thing! When did you come? They say you're in the Hatfield--how did you get there?"

"Two ahead of me and they dropped out. Miss Roberts only just told me--"

Theodora had felt very lonesome and homesick just then--everybody but herself knew so many people! And then Virginia had happened along and jostled her and begged pardon, and they had fallen into a conversation on the relative merits of the Dewey and the Hatfield. Later they had studied Livy together and confided their difficulties to each other. Virginia's mother was a Unitarian and her father was an Ethical Culturist, and her room-mate was a High Church Episcopalian and never ate meat in Lent! She thought Virginia would very probably be damned, if not in the next life, certainly in this, and she intimated as much. Virginia thought it was very hard to live with somebody who disapproved of you so much.

Theodora had been brought up to be a neat, self-helpful little person, and her room-mate, Edith Bliss, had never even seen her bed made up and left her clothes in piles on the floor just as she stepped out of them. She was horribly homesick and wept quarts every Sunday afternoon, and confided to Theodora in moments of hysterical relaxation that she thought every girl owed it to herself to have soup and black coffee for dinner and that she was going to wire Papa to take her home immediately. Theo looked at her now, eagerly devouring a doubtful lobster concoction and openly congratulating herself on the olives at her left. She was fond of Frankfurters now, was Edith, and had recently alarmed the authorities by her ingenuous scheme for annexing a night-lunch cart and keeping it on the campus: it would have been so nice, she said regretfully, to slip out and get a Frankfurter between hours!

How pretty the Gym looked! The juniors had decorated it as well as they could at odd minutes, and they had lingered in a bunch as the class came in to lean over the balcony and sing to them.

Theodora remembered how the Gym had looked the night of the sophomore reception: all light and music and girls and a wonder of excitement. She had never had an evening dress before, and her little square-necked organdie had been dearer to her than any other gown before or since. They played _Rastus on Parade_, and she had such nice partners and some of the girls were so lovely and had such white, beautiful shoulders--they seemed to count evening dress but a slight and ordinary thing. By junior year house-dances are wont to pall, and seniors have been known to make rabbits and read Kipling in preference; even among the freshmen Theodora had found some disillusioned souls who lamented the absence of men and found the sophomore reception slow!

Across the table an odd, distinguished-looking girl, with a clever face and dark, short-sighted eyes, smiled at her, and Theo's thoughts flashed back to that great day when she first really loved the class--the day of the Big Game. What a funny, snub-nosed little nobody Marietta Hinks had been then! But how she played! How she dodged and doubled and bounced the ball, and how they cheered her!

Oh, _here's_ to Mari_etta_, For we _shall_ not soon _forget_ her--

Well, well, how they had grown up! Now she was "Miss Root" to the little, dark-eyed girl in the back seat in chapel, who smiled so shyly at her when the seniors led out down the middle aisle. Theo was wearing her roses to-night, and as she scratched off a little note to thank her she had seemed to see herself, another little dark-eyed girl, sending anonymous roses to Ursula Wyckoff. Dear me! would anybody ever again combine such graces of mind and body as that ornament of Ninety-purple? She had gone on wheel-rides with Theo, and once she had asked her over to wait on the juniors at a spread--Theo had sat up and got her light reported in order to write home about it.

There are those, I understand, who disapprove strongly of this attitude of Theodora's happy year: dogmatic young women who have not learned much about life and soured, middle-aged women who have forgotten. I am told that they would consider Theodora's adoration morbid and use long words about her--long words about a freshman! I have always been sorry for these unfortunate people: their chances for reconstructing Human Nature seem to me so relatively slight.

When Theo had gone home that summer with hands almost as well cared for as Ursula's, sleek, gathered-in locks, and a gratifying hold on the irregular verbs (Ursula spoke beautiful French), her mother had whimsically inquired if Miss Wyckoff could not be induced to remain in Northampton indefinitely and continue her unscheduled courses! But perhaps she was a morbid mother.

Her mother! The plates and flowers swam before Theodora's misted eyes, and the sight of Virginia--so kind that year--brought back somehow those waves of desolation that would come over her again and again, in lecture rooms, in her own dear room, at meals--all that clouded sophomore year. It was just as her good fortune came through the mail to her--a room in the Nicest House--that her mother died, and rooms mattered little to Theo, then. There were kindly aunts and other children, and she was not needed at home; so it seemed best to go on, and she had come up the steps of the Nicest House, a little black-dressed figure, and into the arms of the Nicest Woman.

It seemed to her that there was never a room so cheerful, nor pictures so lovely, nor a fire so red, nor tea and bread and butter so good, nor a smile so comfortable as the Nicest Woman's. Mademoiselle and Fräulein and Miss Roberts were sweet and kind, and the girls did all they could, but it was to the Nicest Woman that one came when conditions and warnings were in the air or one's head ached or one had eaten too much fudge or been annoyed by somebody's banjo practice. When the seniors of the Nicest House were eating and laughing there at night, it was a gay room--the Nicest Woman's; but it was very dim and quiet in the dusk, when Theodora slipped in by herself with reddened lids, and sat on the couch, and they talked of things that started to be sad but somehow always turned out cheerful; for when it was about the children and Will at Yale little jokes were sure to come up, and when Theo wondered if perhaps she hadn't been careless about writing home, and if Mother had gotten more letters in the spring, maybe--the conversation always changed, and she found herself feeling so glad and thankful that she'd gone right home in June and not visited at Virginia's.

Virginia had gone into Phi Kappa that winter, and Theo had been so proud of her. She was in the first five, and as she really hadn't expected it at all it was quite exciting. Adelaide Carew went in too, and though she went about with the seniors a great deal and called most of her class "Miss," she was much more generally liked than in her freshman year, and Virginia had got to know her better and better. Through her Theo had seen more of Adelaide, and she had been amazed to find out how really kind-hearted and human she was beneath her unapproachable ways.

But then, you never could tell--girls were so queer! Only last night, when they were walking about under the lanterns after the concert, she and Virginia and Adelaide, with two of the junior ushers, and the juniors, sophisticated young people, had cynically suggested that perhaps they'd better take themselves away in order that the three might seek out their Ivy and bedew it with their final tears, Adelaide had coughed a little huskily and suggested that perhaps when they'd planted their own Ivy they wouldn't be feeling so gay! They had stared at her blankly, hesitated, decided that coming from such a source it must have been an extraordinarily acute sarcasm, and gone away giggling, leaving Theo to wonder and Adelaide to flush and talk very hard about Bar Harbor and the comfort of a big room all to yourself once more.

Such a strange room-mate as Theo had had that year--she seemed fated to room with girls who had never made up their beds. This one had lived freshman year with friends in the town, and had had everything done for her, and when Theo asked her one day if campus life was wearing on her, she had turned two stormy gray eyes on her and burst out, "Oh, no, Theodora, but I am so _deadly_ tired of picking up my night-gown every _single_ morning, I think I shall _die_!"

On one historic occasion, early in the year, Theo had happened to make up her bed for her, and upon her pleased recognition of the fresh linen it had come out that she had been for some weeks accustomed to change her upper sheet and leave the under one undisturbed on the bed--it had seemed more logical, she said, and how was she to know? They had teased her about it till the Nicest Woman interfered and fined every girl who mentioned it, and they bought _Sentimental Tommy_ with the money, and read it evenings in the Nicest Woman's room after supper.

Well, well, they'd sit about her fire no more, as the poem said that somebody wrote to go with the silver tea-ball the seniors gave her when she served them their last tea. They'd come in no more after Alpha and Phi Kapp to tell her all about it--how nice she had been when Theo got into Alpha! That was junior year and they took her to Boyden's for supper, and her bowl and pitcher were full of violets for days. Everybody seemed so glad, and Martha Sutton had pinned her own pin on Theo's red blouse. Kathie Sewall had taken her over--nobody dreamed that Kathie would be senior president then--and what a hand-shaking there had been! And such a funny, clever play, with butlers and burglars and lady's-maids--it was illustrative of American literature, she learned later, but it was not a pedantic illustration.