Part 7

* * * * *

The result of the talk that night was that in September Annie took the long and expensive journey East, and entered on her four years’ course of study.

Of course, there was no coming home for the holidays; the fifteen hundred dollars in the bank could not stand that; nor did she have to come back in the long vacation, which would have been a serious expense, for the president of the college, who was greatly impressed by the girl’s ability and character, permitted her to live in one of the college houses during the summer, and found for her an opportunity to teach some little children. She earned enough money to pay her board during those twelve weeks, and did not have to draw on the cherished bank account.

The beginning of that college life was a strange experience to Annie,--the quiet, refined atmosphere, the beauty of culture, the conception of spaciousness and dignity, and the awaking of that sense of fitness which is called conventionality. To Annie these things were like the opening of the eyes of one born blind. By degrees the small niceties of life revealed themselves to her,--the delicacies of serving, the delicacies of living, the delicacies of manner and voice and thought. She felt them all with a passionate sort of joy.

It is curious to observe that by the pure and virgin mind these things, which may be so worthless in their lifeless formality, are seen in their real and fundamental nobility, and are accepted with the instinct of religion. At first Annie was so normally unconscious of her antecedents that it did not occur to her to proclaim that all these things were new. And then, by and by, having eaten of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there came to her a certain deep spiritual experience; she recognized that the root of conventionality, the beginning of the sense of fitness, lay in character; therefore she knew no shame that her father ate with his knife, or sat in his shirt-sleeves, or did many unlovely things. She did not like them; but she knew no shame, only love. But it was then that, very simply, she took occasion to say that her father, who was a mechanic, had sent her here to college, so that she might be fitted to support herself by teaching. She said this because she recognized another point of view, and, recognizing it, felt a certain lack of straightforwardness in keeping silent; and also because she was proud of Johnny Graham. Then she forgot it. It was too unimportant to think of.

She assimilated all these new ideas, and felt them and lived them, as though she had been to the manner born. Her very face reflected them. She was almost a beautiful young woman. Her deep eyes looked out from under her straight, pure brows with a certain high directness of glance and tranquil self-poise which gave a sense of breeding which was inescapable. The fact that she had said that she was poor was only in its way another proof of her superiority--so some of the college-girls said, who went into schoolgirl ecstasies about her.

“You know it’s vulgar to be rich,” a young man told her one evening, as they talked together in the June dusk. It was Annie’s fifth year, and for the first time she was going home in the long vacation. A scholarship, and four summers of teaching some little children in a country house on the outskirts of the village, had meant that for the last two years Johnny Graham’s bank account had been recuperating, a very, very little; at all events, there had been no drain upon it.

And now Annie was going home. She had won the highest honors of her class, and had even been offered a position on the college staff, and her happiness was as frank as a child’s.

“In so many weeks I’ll see father. In so many days!”--she kept saying to herself. And now it had come to Saturday evening, and she was to start home on Monday. She was walking back from her little pupils’ house, where she had said good-by until September. She was not alone.

A certain Dick Temple, a cousin of her pupils’ mother, had a way of running down from town to spend Sundays with the Pauls, to play, he said, with the children, and get in some rowing on the river, and to exercise his cousin John’s polo ponies, and--to see Annie Graham.

But this last was not so stated in the bond.

He had a way of appearing in time to walk across the campus with her, after little Kate’s music lesson Saturday afternoon, and once or twice he had beguiled her into his boat, and they had gone floating down the river in the twilight, talking of everything in heaven and earth. Being young, religion had been their first theme; and then, by and by, love;--in the abstract, of course. A month ago, they both had feared themselves incapable of experiencing this beautiful emotion--Annie, because she was going to devote herself to study and her father; Dick, because he had outlived such things, and was very bitter and cynical and mysterious in his allusions to life, which, he said, “he knew.” Sometimes they talked of their future; and it was then that Annie had told him, smiling, that she had no such luxurious prospects as those which he had been outlining for himself,--travel, and study, and the philanthropic opportunities of great wealth.

They were walking slowly along under the great elms toward her door; it had rained earlier in the day, and the worn bricks of the narrow pavement held here and there shallow pools of water; the sun struck across the wet grass in a low flood of gold; and there was the scent of young leaves and roses in the air.

“We are poor people,” Annie had said, with an amused look; “I’m going to teach school and wear spectacles, and be very stern and learned.”

“Ah, well,” returned the young man, “it’s the thing to be poor nowadays; it’s awfully vulgar to be rich! It’s queer, now, when you think of it, Miss Graham, how many people in our class have lost their money, isn’t it?”

“We’ve never had it to lose,” Annie said; “the family fortunes are to rise on school-teaching.”

Dick glanced at her with quick admiration in his handsome young eyes. He was twenty-four, but he blundered over his words like a schoolboy.

“Miss Graham,” he said, “you won’t mind if I say I think it’s awfully fine in you, don’t you know, to teach, and all that sort of thing? Of course, girls do things now. I mean nice girls, don’t you know. Why, cousin Kate gave music lessons before she married; and she was a Townsend. Still, it’s people like that, don’t you know, that can afford to do things like that!”

“I don’t suppose any one can afford to be dependent,” Annie said simply, “and my father is really poor, Mr. Temple.”

Her beautiful direct look as she said this made the young fellow’s heart suddenly leap. He wanted to burst out and tell her how much he admired her; admired? no, loved her! That was the word. Yes, he, who had thought he had outlived all that sort of thing. All in a moment he felt that he wanted to tell her this; but she seemed so remote that he dared not speak.

“I suppose I ought to get my governor to go and call on hers,” he reflected; “these decayed gentlefolks are death on propriety. But maybe she wouldn’t look at me, anyway,” he added to himself, in a miserable afterthought; for she began to speak in such an interested way of some mathematical work she had to do that night, that he felt there was no room for him in her thoughts. He left her at the college door and went back, ardent and despairing, to confide in his cousin Kate, who, it must be admitted, had rather a startled expression when he told her he was “all bowled over by Miss Graham.”

“But, Dick, what would your father say if it got serious? Cousin Henry has such ideas, you know. She’s a charming girl, but we don’t know anything about her people.”

“We know they are poor,” Dick said boldly; “but that doesn’t matter in the least. Surely you are not so narrow, Cousin Kate, as to think it matters?”

“No, that doesn’t matter, of course,” cousin Kate said doubtfully.

* * * * *

As for Annie, she went, smiling a little, and blushing a little, upstairs to her room. But she did no work in higher mathematics that night.

Instead, she finished her packing, and wrote her last semi-weekly letter of the term to her father. To be sure, he would get it just a day or two before she came herself; but she would not have had Johnny Graham miss that Saturday letter for a good deal. She knew he would carry it about in his pocket, and read it over and over, and put it on the wooden chair beside his bed at night. Perhaps it was a little more affectionate, this last letter, than usual; she told him about the weather, and that she would start on Monday, and would telegraph him when to expect her. And something of the progress of her two pupils; and how she had made an experiment in the laboratory, and had burned her fingers; and--and that she had met an interesting man, a cousin of Mrs. Paul’s. He had taken her out rowing once or twice, she said. And, oh! she was so happy that she was coming home! She could hardly believe that it was true, she was so glad. And then she said she was always his little girl who loved him--“Annie.”

Then when it was written, she put her head down on her arms, folded upon her writing-table; there were tears in her eyes when she lifted it again.

“When he said ‘our class,’ ought I to have spoken?” she asked herself. “No, he must know; I told Mrs. Paul. No, no, I couldn’t!” And all her love and all her pride for her father rebelled against the slight to him which such a confession would have been; it would have seemed to imply that he was less gentle in soul than Richard Temple himself, or any one else.

Mr. Temple saw her at church the next day and walked home with her; although she kept all the while on Mrs. Paul’s right, while Dick had to walk on the outside and could only look across at her, which did not please him in the least. She did not talk to him very much, but she seemed to have a good deal to say to his cousin, which perplexed her adorer, for though he had a proper regard for the stout and estimable Mrs. Paul, he could not see why Miss Graham should talk to her with such apparent interest, when an intelligent young man was really eager for a look or a word. He heard her laughing a little about going home “like a stranger and foreigner,” she said.

“I haven’t seen South Bend for nearly five years; you know it is such an expensive journey.”

Mrs. Paul said yes, she supposed it was. “It takes four days and five nights to get there, doesn’t it? It seems to me I passed through it once. I suppose those Western places are very progressive, aren’t they? They are not shocked at the idea of a university education for women. One runs up against that here very often.”

Annie shook her head, smiling. “Isn’t it funny to think that people do really feel that it is unfeminine; ‘threatening to the womanly woman,’ as they say.”

“I’ve come to think that the ‘womanly woman’ means the brainless woman,” Mrs. Paul said.

“What fools people are who feel that way about the higher education of women,” Dick broke in. “It’s incredible! Miss Graham, I shall be passing through South Bend in a fortnight or so; may I call?”

“Of course; I shall be delighted to see you,” Annie said, “and my father will be so glad to see any friend of Mrs. Paul’s; he knows how kind you have been to me,” she ended, with an affectionate look at Dick’s cousin.

Then Mr. Temple, with an eager timidity so foreign to him that Mrs. Paul suppressed a smile with difficulty, wondered if Miss Graham would have time to go out on the river that evening? He knew she would be awfully busy; but it would be a heavenly evening on the river! He was so promptly assured that she should not have time that the poor fellow looked very blank; in fact, he was distinctly cross in the family circle for the rest of the day. At night he softened and tried to be amiable, for he was constrained to be confidential, and he knew that “Cousin Kate” would not hesitate to snub him unless he made himself agreeable.

“Now, really, don’t you think she’s very unusual?” he insisted, after having told Mrs. Paul all the pleasant things which he could remember that Miss Graham had said to him about her two little pupils.

“If you mean Miss Graham, why, yes, I do think she’s unusual, Dick.”

“Did you ever notice,” said the fatuous Dick, “how softly her hair grows around her forehead? And her eyes--what color are her eyes?”

“I’m sure I can’t say,” Mrs. Paul answered dryly. “Dick, would you mind going in and getting me a shawl? It’s rather cool out here on the terrace.” When he came back she had made up her mind how to proceed. “Now, Dick, listen, I’m not a snob, but”--

“If you are going to say anything about that beautiful creature’s working for her living,” Dick threatened, “you might as well stop on the spot.”

“Of course I’m not going to say anything about her working for her living; why should I? I worked for my living before I married John. You know I’m not a snob, but I do believe in class. I don’t mean to be unkind, and certainly she is a charming girl, and--ladylike. But--there is something, I can’t tell what it is--that seems as if she had not always been used to things”--

Dick Temple said something between his teeth, and his cousin flung her head up.

“Dick!”

“Well, it makes a man want to be emphatic, Cousin Kate,--such nonsense! Class? We’re Americans, thank the Lord! And talk about ancestors, I never saw descent so plainly. Look at the way she carries her head! And her voice, her manner! Darn it, because a girl’s poor”--

“Good-night, Richard,” said Mrs. Paul, rising with great dignity.

“Oh, hold on! Don’t get mad. Hold your base. I apologize; only, it seems pretty hard to be down on a girl”--

“You know I’m not down on her; I like her very much; I respect her very much.”

“Well, then, what’s the matter?” demanded Dick boldly.

“I don’t know. Only I have a vague recollection that when she came to teach the children she mentioned, in a casual sort of way, something about--about her home, or her father and mother, or something. I can’t really remember, but I know I gained the impression that she was”--

“Poor?” Dick burst in. “Of course she’s poor. She has never made any secret of that. Why should she? Only a cad would do that.”

“I don’t mean poor,” Mrs. Paul said, frowning. “I wish you would have some manners, Dick, and not interrupt. I merely mean that a young man has no right to pay attention to a girl in another class unless he means to follow it up. I despise a trifler, Dick.”

“You don’t despise him any more than I do,” Dick returned loftily. “But there isn’t any question of class here. We don’t have any higher class than hers; and as for ‘following it up,’ as you say--if a fellow thought there was any chance for him with that woman he’d follow it up quick enough, and ask her to marry him! Yes, and he ought to do it as formally as though she were a princess. She _is_ a princess! He ought to go and ask her father if he might ask her. Her poverty, which seems to trouble you so much, Cousin Kate, has no bearing on the situation.”

Poor Dick was smarting with Annie’s apparent coldness and his cousin’s snobbishness--so he called it; but there was really no excuse for bursting out at Mrs. Paul in this way; and it was no wonder that she said good-night with some asperity, and went upstairs and told her husband that Dick was a perfect goose, besides being rather a cub.

“He’s twenty-four and old enough to know better,” she said. “Oh, dear, I do wish his father was here!”

“You’d better wish her father was here; then you’d know the pit whence she was digged,” John Paul said. “Of course, if he ever sold cotton by the yard, Dick’s future happiness would be imperiled.”

“Now, John, don’t be horrid,” said his wife impatiently; “you know perfectly well what I mean. I’m not a snob, as I told Dick, but there is such a thing as class.”

“If Dick’s worth anything,” pronounced John Paul, standing before his glass and ripping his collar off the stud with a vicious tug, “he’ll marry that girl if her father is a hod-carrier.”

II

Five years! It was a long time. Johnny, standing in the railroad station, his heart beating high with pride and joy, couldn’t help crying out when he saw her:--

“Why, how you’ve growed, Annie! Bless my heart, if you ain’t growed!” But his eyes were misty, so perhaps it was that made his little Annie look so tall. He had not recognized her for a moment,--this lady who, with the tears trembling in her eyes, came up to him and took his hands and cried out, “Father!” Afterward he said he didn’t know why he had taken her for a lady, for, sakes alive, her clothes were plain enough. He was quite distressed about her clothes.

“You’ve stinted yourself, Annie,” he reproached her as they went home in the street cars. “You ought to be havin’ a silk dress, lookin’ the way you do. Why, I took you for a lady, Annie. You ought to have fine clothes, my pretty; we’ll take some money out of the bank and get you a regular silk dress,” he told her, scolding her and loving her, and bursting with pride, and taking up their intercourse just where it had paused, five years ago. She was a pretty girl and a great learner, Johnny thought; but she was just his Annie.

It was late when they got home. He had left the kitchen fire clear and ready for the steak Annie would broil, and the gas was flaring wide from new burners, and Johnny had bought a long plush scarf for the top of the mantelpiece over the kitchen range. When Annie was fairly in the house, and the door was shut, it seemed as though the happiness of heaven had come into the little kitchen. Johnny laughed, and drew the back of his hand across his nose, and sniffed and blinked, and the tears ran freely down his little cheeks. He walked round and round Annie in critical inspection; and ran her from room to room, even up to Dave Duggan’s attic, to show her how unchanged everything was. He made her come into the parlor and showed her the faded ribbons and tottering plush frames.

“I dusted ’em every Sunday, Annie,” he said. And then he told her how he had turned out the person to whom he had rented her old room. “Well, now, he was set on stayin’,” Johnny said; “he was always sayin’ he wanted to see you, but I guess Dave Duggan was just as well pleased not to have him round. Dave ain’t married yet, Annie.” Then Johnny laughed very much, and added, winking at his own joke, that he guessed Dave had forgotten her, she’d been away so long.

The wonderful thing about it all, and the beautiful thing about it all, was that this little man did not in the least care that his Annie was an educated woman; he did not even know it.

It seemed as if Annie could not enough show the tenderness that made her heart ache with its swelling. She sat beside him, holding his work-roughened hands in hers, and told him over and over about these five years which he had given her; she knew, and she was feeling as she spoke, how every joy of study, and every pang of the happiness of appreciation had come from these patient, loving, grimy old hands. “You’ve given me everything,” her heart was saying, “and I love you! I can never say how much.” But it seemed as though it were saying, also, “Why, why did you put me where I was to learn that you were you, and I was I?”

One looks on at such a situation and says, “If it could stop here, it might be possible.” But it cannot stop there. It is not the adjustment of the relations between parents and child which is the difficult thing. The acceptance of a different point of view by these three may even come without much pain. No; it is the outsiders who make the situation impossible--the father’s cronies, the mother’s friends, the acquaintances of the untaught girlhood. The impossibility revealed itself that very night when Dave Duggan came in to welcome her home. Annie gave him her hand, flushing and paling at his familiarity, his boisterous, facetious “Hollo, Annie! How you was?” In him, after that easy greeting, the first note of the difference made for all time was struck; for he grew conscious and uneasy, and scuffled his feet, and cleared his throat, and laughed in a silly way. Yet all the old admiration spoke in his eyes. Johnny was full of significant jokes, and kept elbowing Annie and winking; and Dave’s loud rebukes of his host’s “fun” were even more meaning.

At nearly midnight Annie went upstairs, tired, white, smiling; and lay open-eyed until dawn.

* * * * *

Dick Temple’s intention of “passing through South Bend in a fortnight” was a little delayed. Cousin Kate’s vague misgivings took the form of a postscript in a casual note to his mother; there was no more than a word or two about Dick’s _tendresse_ for a pretty college-girl who had been the children’s governess during the last three summers while they were out of town; that was all. But it was enough. And Mrs. Paul felt she had done her duty.

“And perhaps prevented Dick from doing his,” her husband commented grimly.

“If he can be prevented, he’d better be; for he wouldn’t be good enough for Annie Graham!” cousin Kate declared with much spirit, and immediately became, in her own mind, the champion of the incipient love affair.

Her letter was passed on by Dick’s mother to Dick’s father, who said good-naturedly that the boy was a jackass.

“The young lady is probably too good, for him,” said Mr. Henry Temple, “but I’m not going to have that boy marrying John Paul’s governess without a few remarks from me.”

Mr. Temple telegraphed his son not to leave town on the day he had arranged, as he wished to see him; and then he came all the way from Old Chester for the purpose of making the remarks, which, of course, were to be general; it would give the matter too much importance to treat it as particular or probable. So, in a casual way, he referred to cousin Kate’s letter, and enjoined his son not to be a fool. Dick’s instantly aggressive attitude and skill in “answering back” were most surprising to Mr. Temple. A man is always surprised at his son’s ability in this direction; it is as though his own hand or foot suddenly acquired individuality. Furthermore, Richard was very sentimental, and had much to say of his father’s un-American point of view and of his own readiness to marry a “woman he loved” (if she’d have him) if she were a washerwoman.

“As for Miss Graham,” said Dick, “I’ve no right even to speak of her; but she’s a lady, and an angel”--

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Mr. Temple. “I wonder if I ever was as young as you, Dickon?”

But he was really disturbed, and wrote to a friend who owned the great South Bend Rolling and Smelting Furnaces, and might be expected to know who and what the Grahams were.

Meantime, Dick Temple, twice as much in earnest for his father’s not unreasonable expostulation, packed his things and started for the West. It was a hot July afternoon when he arrived in South Bend; he was fretted by the heat and his own impatience and the stupidity of the landlord of the hotel in being unable to tell him where Mr. Graham lived.

“There’s no family by that name on the hill, sir,” he said. “Graham--Graham--there’s some Grahams here in the directory; what’s the gentleman’s business, sir?”

“I don’t know,” Dick said, fuming. “What sort of a place is this, anyhow, that you don’t know where people live? It’s small enough for you to know everybody”--

“We’ve twenty thousand inhabitants, young man,” said the landlord with much offense. “The only Graham I know is Johnny; he’s a gasfitter, and does odd jobs here once in a while”--

“Have your clerk copy all those Graham addresses,” said Dick coldly. “I’ll go round till I find the person I wish. Unfortunately I don’t know the gentleman’s first name. Have you got any kind of conveyance in this place? Just have a hack called, will you?”