*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79465 ***


                             WE SING DIANA
                         By Wanda Fraiken Neff

   To Nora Deming, growing up in a quiet country town, men, women,
   and life itself were teasing problems. Men were freer than women,
   she thought—less bound by custom, less enslaved by their own
   timidities. At Petersfield, the great women’s college, and in New
   York and London, she found others who like herself led
   half-lives, suppressing their emotions and concealing their
   disillusionment. What was it that women wanted?

   ‘We Sing Diana’ tells the tale of Nora’s search for
   fulfillment,—her career, her activities, her friends, and last
   and greatest of all, her passionate acceptance of love. To many
   women the story will show in a flash of revelation the problems
   and abysses in their own and their friends’ lives hitherto only
   dimly apprehended. To men it will come as a novel glimpse into a
   modern woman’s inner life in a world where men have little part.
   And all its readers, regardless of their sex, will appreciate its
   masculine candor, its feminine intuition, its convincing
   sincerity and above all its narrative power that permits no
   flagging of interest from the first page to the last.


                           WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF

   author of ‘We Sing Diana’, began writing for a children’s paper
   connected with the Minneapolis _Journal_ at the age of nine and
   says that she has been covering paper with experimental writing
   ever since. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in
   1909, taught in a wide variety of schools and colleges, ranging
   from Colorado and Wisconsin to New York and Virginia, and
   acquired an M.A. degree at Columbia in 1917.

   She began collecting material for ‘We Sing Diana’ during the
   years 1921-1922, when the American Association of University
   Women sent her to England to study the history of Victorian
   working women. Instructorships at Barnard and at Vassar gave her
   contact with contemporary segregated education of women, and
   marriage in 1925, the necessary leisure, as well as detachment,
   to begin work on this brilliant and convincing story of a woman
   who attempts to find creative satisfaction in intellectual work.

   She is the wife of Professor Emery Neff of Columbia University
   and spends most of her time in New York City, which she knows
   from Harlem to Greenwich Village.


                             WE SING DIANA


                           WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF




                             WE SING DIANA


                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                          Boston and New York
                                  1928


                 COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                          The Riverside Press
                       CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
                         PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.


                                   TO
                             THE MEMORY OF
                         BELLE MANSEAU FRAIKEN




                                CONTENTS


                   Part    I.  The Neophyte        1
                   Part   II.  The Sacred Grove   47
                   Part  III.  Actæon            133
                   Part   IV.  Mount Latmos      221




                                PART I.
                              The Neophyte


                               CHAPTER I


                                   I

Cordelia Tait was thirty-one years old when she read in ‘The Diocesan
News’ that the sisterhood of Saint Agnes had been established in
connection with the cathedral at Kewaukee. She had a thrill of spiritual
exaltation. When mamma died—and every day mamma seemed nearer to that
Place of Preparation which, as nearly as Cordelia could understand her
rector, was somewhat akin to Purgatory—Cordelia would join the
sisterhood. In cases of extreme piety, so she read, the usual age limit
of thirty for novices was stretched to forty. Mamma died six months
before Cordelia’s fortieth birthday. Less than two weeks after her
death, with the ironic clash of events which had characterized all of
Cordelia’s life, she received a letter from the friend of her
boarding-school days, the only real friend she had ever had, a widow
with one child, who had passed the seven years of her widowhood in a
pilgrimage from one health cure to another. Helen Deming, now that the
climate of Colorado could do nothing for her, begged Cordelia to take
care of her little girl. Cordelia read over the letter she had written
to the Bishop during her mother’s last illness, tore it into bits, and
took upon her maidenly shoulders the matronly responsibility of rearing
a child.

When the thirteen-year-old daughter of her old friend arrived, Cordelia
did not know what to do with her. Nora was a spindly, pale girl, with
hair and eyes of a brownish red. Just like a cow, Nora confided in one
of her rare bursts of talkativeness. She wasn’t a common-looking child,
and she didn’t appear difficult to manage.

On the first day, Nora was taken up to Cordelia’s bedroom to inspect her
bureau drawers and closet, which were to serve as models for her own.
Cordelia had decided that the foundation of her young charge’s training
must be neatness. Nora examined the folded bits of ribbon and lace, the
rows of handkerchief boxes, the glove boxes, with encouraging attention.
The perfection of detail, which with women like Cordelia so easily
becomes a passion, was amazing. Nora followed Cordelia to the closet. On
a shelf near the floor were assembled the battalions of Cordelia’s
shoes. Her beautiful feet were her only vanity. She wore number twos,
triple A, made to order by a Maronac bootmaker, who took great pride in
his work. Since they were expensive, they were patched and repatched,
with an infinity of patches, and the oldest dated back before Nora’s
birth.

‘Now,’ concluded Cordelia impressively, ‘if you arrange your belongings
in the same way, you can get up in the dead of night and find any
article you want.’

‘But I never want to find anything in the dead of night,’ Nora
commented, with the flicker of a smile lighting up her solemn young
face.

Cordelia, undaunted, went on delivering her homily on the orderly care
of places hidden from the common eye as a necessity of decent living.
She had great veneration for the unseen corners of the world. She
confessed that after she went to bed at night, if she remembered that
she had neglected to place her shoes neatly side by side, she couldn’t
go to sleep without getting up to arrange them in the proper order.

All the time she was talking, Nora reflected on the possibility of a
fairy prince’s finding one of Cordelia’s shoes on the streets of Maronac
and thinking Cinderella had come to life again. But after several rigid
days under Cordelia’s régime, she decided that her guardian would never
follow Cinderella’s careless fashion of dropping her slipper.

A few more days in Maronac made her doubt the existence of fairy princes
there—or even ordinary men. At least none came near Cordelia. Every one
who visited her was a woman, old like her, generally unmarried or long
widowed. Young wives walking arm in arm with their husbands, happy
mothers with rosy-cheeked little boys and girls skipping beside them,
passed by the brown dwelling standing close to the street, its row of
front windows neatly shuttered, the shades lowered to the nicety of an
inch below the upper sash, the white curtains looped back in a geometric
curve. And yet Cordelia seemed to love children. When Nora accompanied
her to the shops on Main Street, Cordelia always stopped to examine the
babies left outside in their carriages. Both Cordelia and Nora, as only
children, had been denied all intimate experience with that most
clamorously egoistic creation of our planet, the young of the human
species, so that they saw none of the prose characterizing the chubby
infants over whom both of them cooed rapturous endearments.

Everything at Cordelia’s house was strange. Cordelia herself was totally
unlike Nora’s mother, only three years younger, who had kept the bright
ways of her youth until the end, in spite of widowhood and shattered
health. Cordelia, dressed in deep mourning, which increased the
sallowness of her face and the deep circles under eyes which were a
greyish brown behind thick-rimmed spectacles, following an endless line
of what she called duty from one day to the next, correct, reserved,
made no appeal to the riotous emotions which leaped underneath Nora’s
shy and quiet exterior. Nora’s childhood home—of which she had a vivid
memory although it had been broken up when she was only six—with its
erratic ways, the uncertain comings and goings, the disorder,
processions of friends and family visitings which had belonged to a
happy, shadowy past, would have driven Cordelia to distraction.

But the girls at school soon became Nora’s friends, and the strangeness
of her transplanted existence passed away. With the adaptability of the
young, she settled down in her new home. From the first she had loved
Maronac, lying close to the blue stretches of Lake Michigan, with the
sprawling car-ferries and passenger boats plying in and out of the
river, and whistles, bells, foghorns, the cries of seagulls, the gentle
dashing of the waves or beating storms so intimate a part of the life of
the town. She especially enjoyed the walk to her school across the
river, reached by passing through Main Street and over the bridge. She
read the German signs which hung below those in English on the various
business houses. Maronac, like so many towns in Wisconsin, had a large
Teutonic population. When she heard the bell warning pedestrians that
the drawbridge would open for one of the lake boats, she ran and leaped
across before the third bell sounded. Then she stood on the other side
watching the big boat slide past her, the men waving their hats to the
crowds on the bridge. Often she stopped to talk to the fat old German
bridge-tender. After she informed him that she was beginning to study
his language, he greeted her, ‘Guten Morgen, schöne Mädchen’; to which
she responded, ‘Guten Morgen, mein Freund.’

The chief advantage of Cordelia’s house was that it was only a block
from the public library. Every Saturday, while Cordelia worked at Saint
Margaret’s, Nora read in the library, returning late in the afternoon
with volumes tucked under her arm to read that night and on Sunday
during Cordelia’s succession of devotions.

Cordelia, busy with her church work, left Nora much to herself. Although
her ambition to serve in Saint Agnes’ had been snatched from her, the
Bishop’s High-Church reforms in the Kewaukee diocese had given her
plenty to do in her own parish.

After a visit to England in the year 1900, Bishop Welling had returned
to his see in knee breeches, gaiters, and a tall silk hat with a broad
brim turned up elaborately at the sides and laced with silk cords. He
was, in Scriptural phrase, like a man born again. And before all his
innovations of genuflections, holy water, the reserved sacrament, and
the ceremonial of the true Holy Catholic Church had been established,
his locks, already touched with grey, spread over his shoulders in a
fashion resembling the later portraits of the poet Milton. He had now
advanced beyond even an English model. The Bishop was a good man, much
beloved by both the clergy and the lay members of his diocese. He was
young enough to retain the necessary physical vigor for conflict, and
old enough to realize that, if he kept his temper and steadily imported
a succession of earnest young English clergymen with the correct views,
he would live to see his hitherto barren Low Church pastures blossom
with the beauty of the true faith.

At Saint Margaret’s a sisterhood had developed, bound by no vows, but in
its informal and voluntary way humbly following the Bishop’s new light.
As senior member of the Altar Guild, Cordelia had the responsibility
every week-day of preparing the altar for early communion. For the
Sunday services she was assisted by women, all of them unmarried, who
were not kept sufficiently busy at home. Every Saturday they scoured the
brass candlesticks and the flower vases, preserved the spotless purity
of the white marble altar, spread out the linen cloths, arranged the
flowers, set the holy vessels in the proper array, laid out the
vestments. They stopped in their labors for a lunch in the Guild Room
downstairs, and sometimes did not finish until late in the afternoon. So
has religion provided, since the beginning, an occupation for its vestal
virgins, who might otherwise grow weary in a world which has steadily
pushed them aside.

Sometimes Nora stopped at the church on her way from the library. She
sat watching the queer observances of the Altar Guild until Cordelia was
ready to go home with her. The women performed their work with covered
heads, Cordelia wearing a lace cap which had belonged to her mother.
Every time they passed the Cross, they dropped down quickly on one knee
and crossed themselves. Nora learned that the water which had refreshed
the altar flowers and that which had cleansed the communion linen and
the priestly robes must be thrown upon the ground, to pass away
according to nature’s formula.

She often went to high mass with Cordelia. Brought up in the unadorned
Calvinistic faith, she was fascinated by the ceremonial of Saint
Margaret’s. When the procession of choir boys passed down the central
aisle, preceded by the Cross, she closed her eyes quickly to hide the
tears.


                                   II

Cordelia had invited the Altar Guild to have the refreshment of tea at
her house after the hard Saturday labor, and Nora, now a girl of
sixteen, was helping her pass the cups. All of Cordelia’s regular
co-workers were on hand: Della Schuster, a red-cheeked woman of thirty
from the south side of town; Amy Henderson, in high school with Nora,
but soon to relinquish her church duties for mundane employment in the
grocery department of Weyhausen’s store; and Edna Tillotson, tolerated
because of her real gift for arranging flowers, and in spite of her
unreliability and her coarse jokes.

Since the coming of the new rector, Father Stokesbury, another of the
Bishop’s young English importations, tall, handsome, and unmarried,
Cordelia had found the Guild burning with a new zeal. Saint Margaret’s,
at least the feminine portion of it, was once more seeking salvation.

To-day Edna’s taste in humor displayed itself in a rapid census of the
young worshippers at Saint Margaret’s who were beginning to come out in
large numbers to the early service.

‘Poor young man!’ she began with the mimicry which her enemies found so
distasteful. ‘It’s so sad him living all alone at the rectory.’ Then the
real Edna emerged. ‘I wonder which one o’ them’ll catch him.’

‘I hope he won’t marry in the parish,’ Cordelia said.

‘He might be doin’ charity—makin’ one less old maid in Saint
Margaret’s,’ Edna cackled. Edna always laughed at her own jokes so
lustily that she covered any possible awkward pauses.

Before the echoes of her mirth had subsided, the bell rang, a loud,
determined peal. Nora was dispatched to the door. When she opened it,
the new rector stood facing her.

‘Miss Tait—does she live here?’ He looked down at Nora a little
uncertainly.

Cordelia’s front hall was a place which few men had invaded. The corners
of the rug showed no traces of having been kicked up by a rude masculine
foot. There was an unsullied freshness to the stair carpet. The silver
tray for visitors’ cards on the mahogany table, with a fine old mirror
hanging above it, had a nicety that only a well-trained man would have
respected. And, final proof of all, the hall-tree in the corner bore no
confused burden of hats and coats which all men alike have an
unreasonable prejudice against hiding away in a dark closet.

Father Stokesbury took several steps forward, twisted the light rug in
front of the door, and covered the card-table with his broad-brimmed
black hat.

In the sitting-room there was a clatter of china as the women rose, like
a startled flock of pigeons, at the rector’s appearance.

‘I hoped I’d be in time for tea,’ he said, shaking hands with Cordelia.

‘I think you know every one here.’ Cordelia beamed on her little flock.

The rector looked in Nora’s direction. ‘Except this young lady.’

‘Nora Deming, who lives with me. Her father was a Presbyterian.’

‘A heretic in our midst.’

Nora blushed with the vivid memory of her apostasy these three years she
had lived with Cordelia and attended Saint Margaret’s much oftener than
the Presbyterian church across the street. Of late she had been a
frequent visitor. The flicker of the candles, the chanting of the choir
boys, the rhythm of the prayers, harmonized with the dreamy world in
which she found herself at sixteen. And what made this flush of shame
continue to burn in her pale face was the consciousness that she
followed Cordelia to Saint Margaret’s to watch Stanley Morton, who
carried the Cross in the procession of high mass. Something in his blue
eyes raised to the holy burden he carried stirred her—like the colored
reproductions of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto in the books she searched
for in the library. When she met Stanley in everyday garments on the
street, she lowered her eyes and passed quickly, so that she would not
lose her vision.

‘We may get her confirmed yet,’ the new rector was saying hopefully, as
he settled in the Sleepy Hollow chair Edna had vacated for him.

Nora, unaccustomed to the jocular fashion in men, responded with a slow
smile. She felt a warm drawing power in this stranger with the dancing
young eyes. When she passed him his cup of tea, she volunteered shyly,
‘That’s the Bishop’s seat you’re in.’

He looked under him with a great show of concern. ‘Does that mean I
shall be bishop some day?’ he asked her, spreading out his hands over
his shoulders, where a bishop’s locks might one day be resting.

‘Nora calls it the Bishop’s seat because Bishop Welling always picks out
that old chair when he comes here,’ Cordelia explained.

Father Stokesbury made a rapid survey of the room, his gaze passing from
the picture of Queen Victoria and all her grandchildren on to the view
of Warwick Castle and then to the corner cupboard with its precious
Lowestoft china of a lovely blue, which Nora was never trusted to dust.

‘This room makes me feel perfectly at home,’ he said.

‘My parents were born in England,’ Cordelia stated proudly. ‘Yes, near
Warwick. Both of them.’ Cordelia was now launched upon her favorite
topic. ‘I’ve always felt as if I came from there too. I use my mother’s
old English cook book. I’ve never had another.’

‘Some say the English are the most abominable cooks in the world,’ he
declared solemnly. Cordelia could only look incredulous surprise. ‘We
have a national prejudice in favor of cabbage and its more aristocratic
cousin. Candidly, I loathe the whole cabbage tribe. I came to America to
get fed properly. Now your ices—I anticipate a whole summer of ices. And
tomatoes—a great delicacy—I’m told they’re cheap here. And peaches all
summer. Cheaper than potatoes. Fancy it. In London I’ve seen hot-house
peaches sold for two shillings each.’

Nora leaned forward in her chair. Were all men—that part of the world so
mysterious, so compelling and strange to her—like Father Stokesbury? The
gleam of fun on the surface, so akin to the smothered amusement at life
she buried under layer after layer of shyness and fear—it was a rare joy
to find it in Maronac—to find it anywhere. Sitting in the room cluttered
with the tea-drinking Altar Guild, Nora saw only Father Stokesbury, her
brown eyes deep red, then black with this novel discovery of kinship,
like a timid young bird exulting in the first consciousness of wings
that flew. Father Stokesbury turned toward her, their eyes met, and she
looked quickly away.

Again the doorbell broke upon the tea-drinking; the alien Plant girls
were introduced into the sanctities of Saint Margaret’s. They were, like
Nora, Presbyterians. Julia Plant, a large, almost fierce-looking woman,
was so shy that she never visited any one but Cordelia. At the sight of
the new rector, she assumed an expression even more severe, to conceal
her terror of strangers.

Father Stokesbury examined the visitors critically. ‘I can’t understand
why the heretics gather at your house, Miss Tait.’

Once more Nora raised her frightened eyes. Yes, he belonged to her
world. There was no doubt of it.

The Plant girls looked mystified. But Esther, disciplined to face masses
of human beings as a teacher of music and director of the Presbyterian
choir, had no awe of even an Episcopal clergyman. She began to tell them
about the return to town of Willy Blodgett.

‘I remember how fat he was,’ Cordelia said. ‘Always eating during school
hours. He brought a huge lunch to eat at recess every day—liver sausage
sandwiches, pie, bananas, and I don’t know what all. He was sticking his
head in his desk to pick at it.’

‘He’s still fat. He came out to choir practice this week.’ Esther
directed her remarks to the minister, a properly adjusted company smile
on her face. ‘Do you know his voice never changed? It’s a beautiful
soprano—high and clear. Just like a woman.’

‘Really,’ commented Father Stokesbury.

‘There’s Mrs. Bates. She sings just like a man—an octave lower,’
Cordelia said.

‘He wants to sing in the chorus, and when he starts singing, the row of
sopranos just shakes.’

‘We need a good soprano at Saint Margaret’s,’ the rector said. ‘But
every useful person in Maronac seems to be Presbyterian.’

Amy Henderson, who was a militant Episcopalian, shook her head
disapprovingly. ‘He’s too big and fat for a choir boy,’ she asserted
with emphatic conviction. ‘And he’d sound queer with the men. It
wouldn’t do.’

‘Do you remember that concert we went to years ago?’ Cordelia asked
Julia. ‘Willy sang a solo. I got to laughing so——’ Cordelia pulled off
her glasses and began to wipe her eyes at the memory. ‘That big fat man
and then that high voice coming out—it was too much for me. And then I
looked over at you, Julia, and you were just shaking. When you saw me,
you went right off.’

‘Willy can’t even shave,’ Edna Tillotson whispered to Della so loud that
every one in the room heard her.

‘Poor man,’ Julia remarked. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not like some men.
Those stabbers——’ Julia emerged from her silence with a trumpet blast.

‘Stabbers?’ All eyes were fastened upon poor, frightened Julia.

‘I was coming home from the concert the other night.’ Julia directed her
narrative exclusively to Cordelia, almost turning her back upon Father
Stokesbury. Julia feared men even more than women. ‘Over at Turner Hall.
Esther was staying afterward, so I went on alone. You know how dark it
is there on Sixth Street close to the bridge.’ In the excitement of her
tale, her threatening eyes included Father Stokesbury, who was polite
attention. ‘A man was behind me.’

Amy Henderson, who was very timid about going out alone at night, gave a
little shriek.

‘One of those stabbers,’ Julia pronounced in her most sepulchral tones.

‘What?’

‘Stabbers. It’s like a dagger, I guess. They stick it into people.’

Father Stokesbury, sunk into the comfortable folds of the Sleepy Hollow
chair, sat up suddenly.

‘They stab women,’ Julia explained. ‘This man—I heard him walking faster
and faster. Then he came right up. I felt I was going to scream. He had
one arm doubled up.’

‘What did he do?’ the Altar Guild demanded in a single voice.

‘I had my door key in my hand. I always carry it that way. I was all
ready to punch it in his eye. I swung out my fist——’

‘Julia Plant!’ breathed Cordelia in an outburst of admiration.

‘Just then two women turned sudden at the corner of Jefferson Street. He
saw them an’ just made off for the docks. An’ they said to me, “We
three’d better stick together. That man was one o’ those stabbers.”’

‘Have they stabbed any one?’ Father Stokesbury inquired politely.

At his question Nora was seized with hysterical giggles, but Julia’s
audience was too intent upon her reply to notice.

‘Not on this side o’ town. But over on the south side. Not far from you,
Della. An’ they’ll be here next. If that man hadn’t got scared off——’

‘Did you see his dagger?’ Father Stokesbury inquired again.

Nora, partially recovered from her paroxysm, looked toward him. His
mouth was very grave, but his eyes had a twitching uncertainty.

‘Of course not. They keep ’em hidden. The first thing you know it’s
sticking into you.’

The rector’s face disappeared behind a large handkerchief with the swift
eclipse of the moon by a stormy cloud. From behind it Nora detected
sounds suspiciously similar to a series of gurgling gasps.

‘They stab young girls, generally,’ Julia concluded.

‘Of course,’ Edna Tillotson sniffed. ‘Who wouldn’t know that?’ The
ignorance of her feminine circle at times was more than Edna could
stand. ‘You don’t think a stabber would bother an old bird like me, do
you, Julia? I don’t believe that man near the bridge was a stabber.’

Father Stokesbury rose abruptly and made a swift departure. Nora
observed that his face and his ears were very red. Cordelia followed him
to the front door, replaced the card tray, and bent down to straighten
the rug before she rejoined her visitors. A twinge of pain shot through
her knees. At forty-three she was lame and stiff after a day spent
working at the church.

‘He don’t seem like a clergyman,’ Edna was saying when she returned.
‘Not enough dignity. I saw him snickerin’ away when Julia was talking
about that stabber. Of course a man with his collar buttoned behind—he
ain’t any different from the rest o’ them.’ Edna, who had no particular
esteem for mankind, never lost an opportunity to state her opinion about
the latest erring representative.

An angry flush rose in Cordelia’s dark cheeks. ‘I hope you aren’t like
some folks, Edna, and begin criticizing a young man before he’s had a
fair trial.’

Nora, uncomfortably aware of the storm raging in Cordelia, began to
gather up the tea-cups. In a moment the Guild and the Plant girls
hurried away. Nora stood in the middle of the sitting-room, once more
seized with helpless laughter.

‘What does _ail_ you, Nora?’

‘They’re so funny. I——’

‘Well, I don’t see anything to laugh at. You wash the tea-things while
I’m getting supper, Nora. It’s late. Most six o’clock.’

Nora, in the little wash-room adjoining the kitchen, went through the
mechanical process of washing the tea-cups, her mind rioting over the
comedy of the last moments. Father Stokesbury had laughed too—laughed as
hard as she. He was probably laughing now. She could imagine him walking
home along the quiet street leading to the rectory in zigzag steps of
overpowering mirth. Nora bent over the dishpan laughing all over.

‘Supper,’ called Cordelia. ‘Come, Nora.’


                                  III

Old Mrs. Hill, the wife of a retired captain on one of the lake boats,
came to Cordelia whenever the consciousness of her burdens was too
intolerable to be borne at home.

Close upon supper she arrived, as usual. ‘I just had to get away,’ she
began; ‘Mr. Hill’s been under foot all day, and I got that nervous——’

Mrs. Hill had the sagged face and mournful expression of one who has no
doubts concerning her own oppression. ‘No one comes to see me,’ she
complained. ‘Even you, Cordelia. I wonder what your poor dead mother
would say if she knew how you were neglecting old friends.’

‘Sometimes I get tired of people,’ Cordelia admitted when she had closed
the front door upon Mrs. Hill’s grumblings.

‘I feel sorry for old Captain Hill,’ Nora retorted. ‘He’s lonesome too.
After being a boat captain—and now sitting at home. The next time she
comes, I’m going over to talk with him.’

The weary Cordelia was beginning to close the house for the night. In a
feminine household this is an elaborate ceremony of precaution. First,
all the windows downstairs were fastened. Then, Cordelia bolted the
cellar door which led into the back hall, next the front and the back
doors, and then in succession the kitchen, the sitting-room, and the
dining-room doors which opened into the back hall. At last she and Nora
started upstairs for bed.

Nora followed Cordelia into her room. She didn’t want to go to bed. She
wanted to talk to some one. She stood staring vacantly at the
photographs of Cordelia’s parents, the bearded man and the very
cross-looking woman, which had never changed their position on the
bureau. Then her glance passed to the crucifix of black and silver over
the table beside the bed and the photograph of Bishop Welling in his
silken robes and apron with the beautiful lace.

Cordelia, with the evening service to be read before she could close her
eyes, began to turn the pages of her prayer-book. ‘Don’t forget to bolt
your door, Nora,’ she said, looking up over her thick spectacles. ‘With
two lone women in the house, we can’t be too careful.’

‘Yes, I’ll remember,’ Nora promised, shaking hands according to a stiff
little ceremony she had inaugurated when she first came. Somehow it
wasn’t easy to kiss Cordelia.

She obediently locked herself into her room and slowly prepared for bed.
From across the hall came the murmur of Cordelia’s prayers. In bed at
last, she reached for the book which that morning she had hidden under
her pillow. It was ‘Tom Jones,’ and she had been repeating the trite
experience of bold maidens who have fallen in love with that sprightly
and adventurous hero.

She had excused her late vigils over the book—it was dreadfully long—by
the necessity of finding escape from the life she led at Cordelia’s. All
those women—their gossip and maliciousness—nothing happening. In ‘Tom
Jones’ something was always happening.

Cordelia had given her ‘Cranford’ to read, but a few chapters smothered
her. She got boys’ books from the library—‘The Count of Monte Cristo’
and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Treasure Island.’ Scott, if you skipped a
lot, wasn’t bad. But ‘Cranford’—worse than Louisa Alcott. The open
fields of Fielding brought refreshment, the inns, the highwaymen, Tom’s
fights, the dens of wickedness in London. Nora, sitting propped up in
bed, forgot her smarting, sleep-laden eyes, her cramped arms and legs.
How unmoral and unchurchly and unfeminine! Few women. And those not the
women found in the parish of Saint Margaret’s.

But to-night Tom and his adventures seemed less satisfactory—a little
low. Her thoughts—Nora dropped her book.

When you were old like Cordelia, you thought about being good, you did
piles of church work, and maybe dreamed about the joys of heaven. But if
you were young—it was shameful, but young people—at least some of
them—how did she know? Did the other girls at school, Nora pondered,
think about—about love and about boys who never even looked at them?
Like Nora gazing wistfully after Stanley every Sunday. But it wasn’t
Stanley. What was it then? And boys at school—Tom Baldwin who played
football and wore a bright crimson sweater—Nora had prayed he would
speak to her some day—actually prayed. Then she had put herself in his
way. But he was always with a crowd of boys. He didn’t even see her. And
the boys she had danced with at the church parties Cordelia took her to
in the Guild Hall—they weren’t exactly—not what one dreamed of—but——

Now, suddenly, a tall blond man with a lilting voice which went up and
down displaced Stanley and Tom Baldwin and all the other clumsy boys.
Father Stokesbury had none of the uncouthness of Maronac Harbor—the way
he had helped her pass the cups—he was a gentleman. Somehow he revived
in her the faint memories of her father, about whom her mother had
talked ceaselessly until the end. Her mother had wanted her to marry a
man just like her father. The careless ease and assurance the new rector
had shown. Mere boys—how she despised them! Her dreams were concrete,
swift, charming the uneventfulness of Maronac Harbor with new colors and
a fresh breath. Nora fell asleep, with ‘Tom Jones’ lying spread out on
the floor beside her.


                               CHAPTER II


                                   I

Nora always thought of Sunday as Cordelia’s day. She rose very early, on
dark, cold Sunday mornings, dewy dawns in midsummer, clicked about the
house in her neat Sunday shoes, and hurried over to the church to attend
to the last rite for the early communion service. At breakfast, with
Della Schuster from the other side of town a frequent guest, Cordelia
was generally abstracted. A few housekeeping duties held her until it
was time for the ten o’clock service. Then home once more. When she
covered her black taffeta dress with a large apron and began to get
dinner, Nora was conscious of the irritation Cordelia never quite
succeeded in concealing. But Nora had to be fed on Sundays as well as on
week days.

On the Sunday following the rector’s call, Cordelia stretched out on the
couch after dinner to read ‘The Churchman’ until she fell into a doze.

‘Now if Lizzie Guildford leaves me in peace,’ she sighed to Nora, with
forebodings concerning Lizzie, who had edged toward her after service.
Ever since Father Stokesbury’s arrival, she had been hinting that her
services in the Altar Guild were free for the asking.

Lizzie arrived just as ‘The Churchman’ dropped from Cordelia’s limp
fingers. She entered the room with a slight premonitory cough, glanced
at herself in the pier glass between the two south windows, and sat
down, smoothing out a light dress of summer silk, much too gay for a
woman of fifty in Cordelia’s opinion, with her ringed hands. She was the
richest woman in Maronac Harbor, living alone in the large house with
the mansard roof and the high tower which occupied a whole block on Main
Street, built by her father with some of the profits from cheating the
early settlers in the region.

‘Have you had Father Stokesbury to supper yet?’ Lizzie opened fire at
once in her subdued, ladylike tones.

‘No, I haven’t.’ Cordelia could be brutally direct with people she
disliked.

‘I think we’re going to like him. Don’t you?’ Lizzie coughed again.

‘I think so.’

‘He’s young, but really spiritual-minded. He’s so eager for all of us to
work hard for Saint Margaret’s. Of course I do what I can.’

                   *       *       *       *       *

‘I won’t have her!’ Cordelia stormed afterward to Nora. ‘She can’t come
in Amy’s place. I’ll lie—I’ll tell her I’ve got some one else.’

‘Of course,’ Nora agreed easily. ‘I have to lie most every day.’

‘Why, Nora Deming!’

Nora, glancing at the clock, reminded Cordelia that it was time to start
for Della Schuster’s, where they had been invited to supper.

Della lived on the south side of town in the German settlement. Her
mother, scorning the generation of her countrymen who had spread over
the American settlement of the north side, taking their German
beer-gardens with them, clung to her old-country ways and her cheerful
orange cottage in a street of blue, orange, and green houses with their
gay gardens.

At the river, Cordelia and Nora were delayed by the opening of the
drawbridge for one of the early passenger boats that had begun making
regular trips across the lake. When the rush of traffic was resumed, two
comfortable German citizens barred the sidewalk in front of them. The
women took to the street, Cordelia much enraged.

‘They treat women like cows,’ she blustered.

‘Hausfrauen,’ Nora corrected her. When she was studying European
history, she had interviewed the baker from whom Cordelia bought
Kaffeekuchen on the subject of compulsory military training, from which
he had escaped. But he had added laments for the cheap opera of his
native land, the good music in the beer-gardens, the annual song-fests,
and the submissiveness of German women. Even a good German lady got
demoralized on American soil. And as for the natives themselves—Nora now
understood perfectly the attitude of the Teutonic male toward women.

Della’s mother had further enlightened her. ‘Big young lady,’ she always
began. ‘Sixteen now. You get a fella yet?’ Nora shook her head. ‘You
don’t want to be old maid like Miss Tait. A good-lookin’ girl like you.
You watch out for nice fella. My Della’—Mrs. Schuster made a discouraged
cluck in her throat—’she won’t go to German church. A German fella—she
don’t want none. She gets left, I tell her.’

‘Not all girls want to get married,’ Nora volunteered.

Mrs. Schuster’s face spread into a wide toothless smile. ‘Ah, now,’ she
laughed. ‘Not want to. My Gott!’

Della was waiting for them in front of the house, prepared to display
her garden. It was one of the prettiest Nora had ever seen, like a big
fragrant nosegay, all colors, all kinds of sweet scents in an orderly
profusion of bloom from early spring until frost. Most of the flowers
for the church came from Della’s garden.

Mrs. Schuster, a big, comfortable woman, waddled to the front door.
‘Vell, vell,’ she greeted Nora with her usual formula, ‘how the little
one has grown.’

The house, crowded with rocking-chairs and ornaments, the sofa, piled
with cushions heavily embroidered with flowers and appropriate
sentiments by Della, kept the two women busy all of the time. Della,
with her garden, the house-work, and the Altar Guild, had solved better
than Lizzie Guildford the problem of the disposal of time. But her
mother scolded steadily at an old-maid daughter in the house, and
complained that Della left nothing for her to do.

Cordelia and Della settled themselves among the embroidered daisies,
roses, and sunflowers on the sofa and were soon launched upon a lengthy
discussion of their church work. Nora followed Mrs. Schuster out to the
dining-room, were the parrot was. He was a clever bird who could not
only repeat a number of words, but could even sing ‘My Old Kentucky
Home.’ Mrs. Schuster was now teaching him a little German.

When Nora stood in front of his cage, the bird winked at her solemnly.
‘He talks more than any parrot in town,’ she declared, turning toward
Mrs. Schuster.

‘Old maid—old maid—Della old maid,’ shrieked the parrot.

Mrs. Schuster laughed until her little blue eyes disappeared, and her
nose, like one of her delicious raised doughnuts, shook up and down.
‘That’s my teachin’ him,’ she admitted. ‘Della—old maid with parrot, I
tell her. Yes, he talks pretty goot.’

After Mrs. Schuster had pressed the last of a succession of cold ham,
pickles, cake, jelly, and cookies relentlessly upon her guests, Cordelia
had to hurry away to the evening service.

‘It’s like you was married to that church,’ Mrs. Schuster said at
parting. ‘My Della the same way.’

‘Old maid—old maid—Della old maid,’ the parrot called after them.

Nora surprised Cordelia by offering to go to evensong with her. She
liked to watch Father Stokesbury in the dimness of the altar, his face
ruddy in the light from the lectern against the snowy whiteness of his
surplice. She felt a little wicked as she observed Cordelia’s
absorption, her fervent breathing of the prayers, her knees set firmly
on the hard, uncarpeted floor.


                                   II

With the passing of the summer Nora discovered one day that Cordelia was
beginning to seem less old. She had relaxed the perpetual activity
crowded into hours which might easily have been empty, and sat down
sometimes without even a piece of sewing to occupy her, rocking back and
forth, staring in front of her. One hot afternoon in July she came
downstairs wearing a thin white lawn dress with the short sleeves and
neck cut out a little, revealing shapely arms and a firm white throat.

‘Do I look silly, Nora? It’s so warm. Of course the dress is out of
style. I haven’t worn it since the summer before mamma died.’

The rector had formed the habit of stopping for a cup of tea at
Cordelia’s whenever he happened to be calling in the vicinity. He
confessed to hurrying through his calls on the south side of town to be
back in time to abuse Cordelia’s hospitality. He told Nora it was Miss
Tait’s English blood which made her so kind to him.

‘Now you, Miss Nora, you run upstairs to read a novel when a lonely man
wants to be amused.’

There was the exquisite torture of seeing Father Stokesbury, and then
the awful moment when Nora realized she was unable to say a word. She
just had to run upstairs and hide herself in her room. There,
undisturbed by the necessity of making conversation, she could revive in
her memory the delightful smile which shone all over his face, even
though the hum of voices below stabbed her like pain.

Once, when she had stumbled toward the door which offered escape, Father
Stokesbury had followed her and said in a tantalizingly pleading tone,
‘Come, Miss Nora, please stay and talk to me.’

She could hardly get upstairs. She was trembling all over when she
reached her little carpet rocking-chair near the window. Did he care?
Did he want her to stay? But if the sight of her stirred him as the
sound of his voice her——No, he couldn’t joke that way. He, too, would be
dumb. Why should he care? He never saw her as she really was, capable of
amusing talk, full of smiles, free and easy. He saw only an awkward
schoolgirl twisting her icy hands in front of her, with not a word to
say. He didn’t care. He was just being polite. If she were
prettier——Nora went over to the mirror, swinging it back and forth in
its heavy black-walnut framework to see if she were altogether plain.
The girls at school said if she only did things with her hair——But what?
It didn’t matter. She made a difference to no one.

Father Stokesbury played cribbage with Cordelia in the evening. It was
his favorite game. He had a shameless way of inviting himself to supper,
and then staying on, hour after hour, bent over a cribbage board. Nora
didn’t know how long, because she went to bed.

Sometimes when she had moments of active resentment at the way a certain
man had invaded her chaste maiden reveries, she tried to think as badly
as possible of him to see if such measures of revenge would bring
relief. A clergyman who enjoyed playing games with an old woman like
Cordelia and drinking tea with a roomful of women was no real man. Nora
had her ideals of the world to which real men belonged, adventurous,
swashbuckling, emancipated. At least she had once made such limits to a
manly sphere. But when reality smashes into dreams——Father Stokesbury
had none of the rough masculine virtues and yet—there was so much fun in
him. His sober garb had no power of extinguishing his gaiety. He never
seemed bored by the Plant girls, or even by old Mrs. Hill, when they
intruded upon the cribbage games. He brought out his best stories for
Cordelia, who tried to laugh hard at the right time.

The old house, which had been so subdued during the long invalidism of
Mrs. Tait with the consequent procession of croaking and eccentric women
or church visitors, and had never surrendered to Nora’s youth, collapsed
before Father Stokesbury. The best silver was no longer kept hidden in a
strong-box upstairs. Cordelia’s old-fashioned jewelry was worn once
more, the quaint brooches, the heavy gold bracelets, the pearl and
emerald ring.

Old Mrs. Cooper, who visited Cordelia for two weeks every summer as a
rest from the Old Ladies’ Home in Kewaukee, where she found herself
happier than in the homes of her married sons, at once saw the change in
Cordelia.

‘She’s beginning to get over her mother’s death,’ she told Nora. ‘It’s
three years now. Poor Cordelia. She was always so prim and proper. Never
running around like other young girls. Always so good to her mother.
Stayed right by her. But she gave up her own young life. She really
never had a chance. I don’t suppose she ever walked out with any young
man.’

Mrs. Cooper liked the new rector. She went every morning to the early
service, stopping to chat with Father Stokesbury afterward. She made
airy speculations about a possible wife for him in Saint Margaret’s,
calling upon Cordelia’s advice as she went through her list. But
Cordelia, a faithful follower of the Bishop in all his High-Church
reforms, favored the celibacy of the clergy, and at most gave her
approval only to a marriage outside the parish.


                                  III

Late in August Lizzie Guildford returned from a tour of the East. She
appeared at church in the elegant finery that no dressmaker in Maronac
could have achieved for her. She had also imported a lorgnette, which
she flourished with the proper air of easy detachment as she followed
the service in her prayer-book. She held Father Stokesbury in a long
conversation at the door, where he was attempting to exchange morning
greetings with all of his parishioners.

At once Lizzie detected the rector’s frequent informal visits to
Cordelia’s house, and she discovered, without delay, three or four
afternoons a week, the necessity of consulting Cordelia on some
important matter which she prolonged until Father Stokesbury appeared.
He, assuming Miss Guildford to be one of Cordelia’s most cherished
friends, treated her accordingly. Cordelia, helpless in her rage, was
forced to keep up some decent courtesy to her guest. Lizzie soon began
to take the whole parish to her heart. She implored the rector to use
her extensive grounds for the Boys’ Club, which he had organized and
made his special charge. She also placed her tennis court, the only one
in town and hitherto restricted to a small group in her favor, at the
disposal of the young people, without qualifications. Nora, dwelling in
a churchly household, began to play there every afternoon with Eleanor
Porter, whose father had recently come from New York to take charge of
the Dry Docks. Rumor reported that Lizzie Guildford was at last opening
her purse strings. She had sent for a beautiful silver chalice set with
amethysts, which she presented, not to Saint Margaret’s, but to its
rector. She was so eager to do more than give money to her church that
she called at the rectory to discuss with her priest the possibilities
of service. Father Stokesbury in an ill-advised moment suggested Miss
Guildford for the Altar Guild to Cordelia.

‘I won’t have her!’ Cordelia snapped, forgetting all allegiance to a
spiritual overlord. ‘She’s no good. She wouldn’t do any work—just show
off. If she comes on, I leave.’

Naturally Father Stokesbury had a moment of pained surprise. The matter
was hastily dropped, and Lizzie continued to sigh for greater spiritual
usefulness.

Nora could see that her visits had become intolerable to Cordelia. She
was a malicious gossip, bringing out her insinuating stories in a smooth
and restrained voice in a way which infuriated the directly honest
Cordelia.

‘I suppose you’ve heard of Amy Henderson’s romance,’ she began one day,
while she was watching for Father Stokesbury’s belated appearance.
Cordelia said nothing. ‘She’s been getting the most beautiful flowers
all through the summer—carnations, lilies, and the most gorgeous roses.
I saw them when I was calling on her mother.’

‘I didn’t know you called on Mrs. Henderson,’ Cordelia interrupted.

‘I’m doing a little parish visiting at Father Stokesbury’s suggestion.
Mrs. Henderson told me about her daughter’s admirer. They don’t even
know who he is. Isn’t it romantic?’ Lizzie emitted a laugh that imitated
spontaneous girlish interest. ‘They’re sent from Kewaukee without even a
card.’

Cordelia maintained a forbidding silence.

Soon Amy Henderson’s mysterious lover began to compete with Lizzie’s
indefatigable spiritual activity in the town mind. Amy at church looked
just the same, her light hair a trifle more elaborately curled and her
face, always a vivid pink, a somewhat more pronounced carmine.
Uncritical people like Cordelia considered Amy very pretty. Since she
had been working in Weyhausen’s, she had more money to spend on clothes.
Her dresses became much more heavily trimmed with lace from bargain
counters, and on Sundays she wore a white hat trimmed with two pale-blue
ostrich plumes. Amy, like many blondes, considered blue her best color.
It gave her the innocent expression of a healthily tinted wax doll with
flaxen curls, an excellent style in dolls.

Amy’s romance, in time, took definite shape. The mysterious lover from
Kewaukee was forgotten in the fresh interest of Henry Shumway. No one in
Maronac Harbor knew anything about him. He had come from foreign parts
to take charge of the men’s department at Weyhausen’s, and he had made
his work an immediate success. Young men, always weak before the latest
novelty in apparel, began to buy their suits, neckties, hats, and shoes
from Henry Shumway. He was the type of man so irresistible to an
inexperienced girl, tall, dark, his hair curling back from his
forehead—his envious rivals suspected art there—and with a dimple in his
chin. His clothes, the necessary advertising for his business, were
always of the most recent mode. Amy, the only unmarried daughter of a
widow whose other children had married far beneath Amy’s ideals for
them, might easily sigh before the dazzle of Henry’s charms. But that
Henry, with all the ready signs of a ‘light of love,’ should at once
settle for life upon Amy, was more than Lizzie Guildford could believe.

Lizzie was expert in affairs of the heart, for she had been much courted
in her youth. But each offer filled her with the fear that she was
sought in marriage, not for herself, but for her money. In the end, she
had refused all her lovers. During this period of extensive visits upon
Cordelia, she dwelt much upon this fervid youthful period. She thought
now that perhaps she had made a mistake. There was one man—he had seemed
such an honest person. If she had married him, she wouldn’t be so lonely
now.

‘I think it’s disgusting of Lizzie carrying on all the time about how
lonely she is,’ Cordelia exploded to Nora.

‘But she probably _is_ lonely, Cordelia.’

‘She isn’t the only one. Blabbing that way about yourself and your
feelings—it isn’t decent. Why doesn’t she ask poor old Mrs. Cooper to
stay a few days with her? Mr. Cooper clerked in Guildford’s store for
twenty years.’

But Lizzie continued to be lonely in her big house. By Easter time she
had aroused the antagonism of the whole parish by her undignified
expeditions to the rectory morning, noon, and night. If she had been
younger, they would have thought she was throwing herself at Father
Stokesbury’s head. But since she was a woman past fifty, she was merely
making a fool of herself. To the amazement of the Altar Guild, Father
Stokesbury remained blind to Lizzie’s folly. He continued polite through
her long calls, followed the usual parish routine, and indulged in the
relaxation of tea and cribbage with Cordelia.

Amy’s romance remained hidden from public scrutiny until Edna Tillotson
went to Mattie Stellwagen to have a grey silk dress made for Easter.
Mattie told her, as a great secret, that she was sewing on Amy
Henderson’s wedding outfit. After much persuasion she showed Edna the
wedding dress of white crepe bespattered with expensive lace medallions.
Edna at once communicated her discovery to the Altar Guild, in the face
of Cordelia’s disapproval.

May passed, and June, but still Amy’s wedding did not come off. Hints
that Edna had made a mistake sadly ruffled her temper.

‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ she insisted.

‘Perhaps it was just a nice dress,’ Della explained, ‘and Mattie
thought——’

‘She told Mattie with her own lips it was her wedding dress.’

Lizzie made a second parish call upon Mrs. Henderson, but no one came to
the door, even though Lizzie heard suspicious creakings inside. She went
next to buy some tea like Cordelia’s at Weyhausen’s, where she waited
for Amy to attend to her order.

‘What’s this I hear about your wedding?’ Lizzie giggled.

Amy blushed, but only slightly. ‘I’m not telling.’

Unfortunately Lizzie did not know Henry Shumway, and Amy’s plans had to
mystify her a little longer. Mr. Shumway continued to serve as a
masculine ideal for Maronac youths, irrespective of his matrimonial
intentions. Whether he was informed of the interest the richest woman in
Maronac took in the manager of the men’s furnishings at Weyhausen’s
depended upon Amy’s discretion. In the meantime Lizzie continued to
flaunt her friendship with the rector of Saint Margaret’s in the faces
of the whole parish.


                              CHAPTER III


                                   I

Lizzie’s visits to Cordelia suddenly ceased. She avoided her at church,
sweeping out in the hushed elegance she affected, without a glance in
her direction. Nora observed her tricks with quiet amusement. When
Father Stokesbury went away for a month’s vacation in July, Lizzie
grasped a little respite from her ecclesiastical excesses, and absented
herself from Saint Margaret’s until his return.

Father Stokesbury had tea with Cordelia as soon as he resumed his parish
duties. Nora managed to blunder out that she was glad to see him again,
that they had missed him.

‘My dear, gracious Miss Nora. I’d almost be willing to go away again to
hear such words from you,’ the rector laughed.

But the following day he didn’t come to tea. Cordelia said he must be
very busy. Then the second day he didn’t come. Nora went to the front
window to look down the street again and again. The next morning when
she had finished cleaning her bedroom, stealing as much reading as she
dared out of the midst of her work, she came downstairs to find the
baking materials spread out on the kitchen table, but Cordelia nowhere
in sight. She called to her from the top of the cellar steps and looked
for her in the back yard. A few minutes later Cordelia returned, took
off the coat she had worn to cover her gingham dress, and finished her
interrupted baking. When she sat down to dinner, there were scarlet
spots over her cheek-bones.

She crumbled up some bread on her plate and gulped down a cup of tea.
Then she said, ‘I’ll leave you to wash the dishes, Nora. I’m going
upstairs to lie down a while. My head aches a little.’

When Nora carried a cup of tea to Cordelia’s room late in the afternoon,
she found the door locked. Cordelia’s voice sounded very queer and
strained. She didn’t want the tea. She didn’t want anything. Just to lie
quiet and not be disturbed. Nora could never remember Cordelia’s being
ill before. It seemed strange to have the quiet rooms downstairs all to
herself.

In the midst of her clumsy attempts to get supper, Mrs. Hill appeared at
the kitchen door.

‘Where’s Cordelia?’ she whispered cautiously.

‘Upstairs.’

‘Oh!’ Mrs. Hill seemed very much excited. Her old eyes had the feverish
glint of one entrusted with news too great to be borne. ‘Of course she
hasn’t told you. Lizzie Guildford tried to kill herself. With gas. They
say Cordelia was over there this morning.’

‘Was she out of her mind?’

‘It was your minister. She was set on marrying him. She asked him. Right
out, they say. Promised to deed over everything she had. And when he
wouldn’t——’ Mrs. Hill’s whisper grew into a lively hiss. ‘That ain’t the
worst either. She said it was Cordelia. Cordelia after him instead o’
her. She told it all over the parish. It’s spread all over town. I heard
it. And the Plant girls, and Edna. But this morning, when she thought
she was most gone, she sent for Cordelia. To be forgiven an’ die in
peace. That’s Lizzie for you. An’ they say Cordelia forgave her.’

Nora wanted to hold her fingers over her ears. Anything to shut out that
terrible story. Her lips curled in infinite scorn. ‘What fools women
are,’ she said.

Mrs. Hill shook her head. ‘You’re young. You don’t know. Just you wait.
The smartest ones often make the biggest fools of themselves.’ She rose
from her chair with a deep sigh. ‘Poor Cordelia. This’ll come hard on
her. That pride o’ hers. But no one’ll ever know. She’s upstairs, you
say?’

Nora went over and examined the steaming tea-kettle. ‘She took a little
nap after finishing up the baking,’ she said.

Upon Mrs. Hill’s departure, she carried Cordelia’s supper upstairs and
left it outside the door. Then she locked herself in her room. She
couldn’t eat a morsel. Maybe she was sick like Cordelia. Sick all over.
She would think of him no longer. Those mad fancies of hers—never again.
A man over whom women made fools of themselves. Lizzie Guildford—she and
Lizzie together. She dug her fingers into her burning cheeks. The shame
of it. Yes, and Cordelia too. She knew now—she saw—she understood why
Cordelia had changed so—become a different person. This was the end.
Never again would she think of him—conjure up before her late at night
in the darkness an image of blue eyes that crinkled with laughter and a
voice with endearing twists and turns.

The next day she stole off to go walking with Eleanor Porter before
tea-time. She could not trust herself to meet Father Stokesbury. If he
came——

Cordelia and Nora sat down to almost silent meals, Nora stifled by her
guilty consciousness of Cordelia’s failure to keep up a little
meaningless talk. She stayed away from the house as much as she could.

A week passed, and Nora saw the rector only at church. A weight of
constraint depressed the whole parish, while every one in low tones
discussed Lizzie Guildford. It was rumored about that Father Stokesbury
had stopped making calls, except where there was illness, and had shut
himself up in his study the rest of the time.

At last, Lizzie was well again, and departed for an indefinite stay with
friends. Nora wondered if Cordelia had seen her since that ghastly day.


                                   II

Amy Henderson’s mother was found dead in bed one morning. Amy sent at
once for Cordelia, who stayed with her most of the time until after the
funeral.

‘I didn’t see that Mr. Shumway to the service,’ Mrs. Hill reported to
Nora. ‘But he sent a huge wreath of white roses.’

The morning after the funeral, Nora, watching at the front window for
Eleanor Porter to come and play tennis, saw Amy Henderson starting for
the store.

‘There goes Amy as usual,’ she called to Cordelia, who was dusting the
parlor. Cordelia came and stood beside her, and together they watched
Amy out of sight. ‘I’m glad Amy’s got that young man,’ Nora observed
half to herself.

‘What young man?’ Cordelia demanded. ‘She hasn’t got him. She has
nothing.’ She resumed her dusting with a kind of rage.

‘I thought Miss Guildford said—and——’

‘Lizzie Guildford—what she says——’ Cordelia broke off suddenly, as if
she had been betrayed out of silence.

Eleanor’s shout sounded from the next corner, and Nora bounded out of
the house to escape from the knowledge of what Cordelia had tried
unsuccessfully to hide from her keen young eyes.

‘I’ll beat you a love set,’ boasted Eleanor, as they raced side by side
toward Lizzie Guildford’s tennis court.

By degrees rumors came to Nora which filled out what Cordelia had not
said. It seemed that Henry Shumway wasn’t going to marry Amy. He wasn’t
going to marry any one. At least not right away. He made love to all the
girls—even the waitresses at the hotel. An inexperienced girl like Amy
didn’t know any better than to take his empty gallantry seriously. And
those flowers that came from the mysterious donor in Kewaukee—Edna
Tillotson insinuated that Amy had sent them to herself.

As for Cordelia, age lay upon her once more, and her former chilling
reserve, when she resumed the mourning garments she had recently put
aside. Life was a steady course between home and church, back and forth,
as if nothing had ever disturbed the even monotony of its ways. The
house, too, settled back into its creaking joints as befits decrepit
age.


                                  III

Nora, returning from her daily walk to the end of the pier which
stretched out over the lake to the fog station, with its bells and
warning lights, saw a handsome collie pup bounding toward her. Roughly
friendly, he leaped up against her with joyful barks.

‘You beauty!’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘You dear young dog!’

Nora’s heart leaped at the sound of a familiar voice. ‘He is a fine
fellow, isn’t he?’ Father Stokesbury said. ‘The old Bishop gave him to
me. It was jolly nice of him, I thought. He said this chap would keep me
from being lonely at the rectory.’

Nora could not speak, but she lifted eloquent brown eyes to the young
man’s attempt at gaiety. There was something gone from him, the edge of
the fine buoyancy of his bright spirit dulled, the laughter less
infectious and bubbling.

If she could only have told him then, putting out her hand to this
lonely, discouraged young man, that she wasn’t like the others, that she
was his friend, and that she understood. She was desolate, too, very
often. His gaiety had helped her. He must smile in the same old way
again. Perhaps she could even have helped him to understand the poor
women who had complicated his position in the parish. They were very
unhappy, too. His brightness had uplifted them. They couldn’t help
liking him perhaps too well.

Yes, she understood. Knowledge of the emotional hunger of
women—especially women—came in a sudden glare of illumination. You could
be old like Lizzie Guildford or Cordelia, but there was something inside
you which kept young. It hungered for love—for the love of some man. Amy
Henderson and her pathetic dreams——Nora had once thought only the very
young of sixteen, seventeen, had hopes that life wouldn’t be dull and
sad. But she discerned now the truth that such hopes never left one.
Always you were tormented—always—by the wish to be happy—happy by loving
and being loved.

But Nora couldn’t put this into words. She felt a helpless choking at
her lips. She must hurry away. She couldn’t even tell him she was sorry.

Father Stokesbury summoned another gallant attempt at a smile before she
left him. Out of his hearing, the sobs escaped her. ‘The poor, poor
women!’ she wept aloud, her words lost in the boom of the lake as it
beat against the shore.

Beyond the sandy beach and on top of the hill close to Cordelia’s house,
Nora looked back. Father Stokesbury stood gazing out on the dancing blue
waters, the lively puppy close beside him, quite motionless.




                                PART II.
                            The Sacred Grove


                               CHAPTER I


                                   I

When Nora saw Petersfield College hidden away in purple hills, she
forgot Cordelia and Maronac Harbor. For her the venerable brick
buildings draped in ivy, as exquisite as an old woman swathed in fine
lace, the graceful tower above the trees, the sweep of grass and
shrubbery, were little more than a setting for the girls, girls her own
age everywhere, on the tennis courts, the walks, leaning out of the
windows, girls destined to be her friends.

The older students in the residence hall to which she and Eleanor Porter
had been assigned took immediate possession of them. After dinner they
were carried off to a spread in ‘Fuzzy’ Leland’s room. Fuzzy, dressed in
a white sweater and white serge skirt, with hair as straight as wire and
the figure of a twelve-year-old boy, was a champion tennis player.

Her room was the typical student domain at Petersfield. Banners
representing most of the colleges of the country and chaotically varied
in color scheme adorned the walls. Photographs upheld in fish-net took
on dust from year to year. Tables, window-sills, the floor space under
chairs and bed held the books out of which Petersfield appeared to have
been feeding the previous moment. Wicker chairs in a collapsible state
and the couch heaped with cushions held all of the fifteen girls who
were not on the floor.

Several of the guests were strumming mandolins and singing ‘Dear
Petersfield, thy hills we love,’ to the accompanying gabble of the rest.
There were rapid introductions, queries as to where the freshmen had
come from, much giggling, and references to mysterious and confusing
college events—Greek games—step singing—freshman song-fest—Michaelmas
play. All their talk buzzed around Petersfield.

‘You better get Miss Perkins. She’s a sweet thing.’

‘Not that horrid Lambert woman.’

‘I’m passing off French orals, girls. He’s such a darling. Just the
cutest——’

‘She’s brought eight trunks—fifteen evening dresses and three fur coats.
And a maid came with her to help unpack.’

‘I’m going to take life easy this year. You watch.’

‘As if she ever cracked a book! Listen to Margie.’

‘My own true love! My turtle dove!’ warbled one of the mandolin artists.

The girls began to help Fuzzy pass the food. There was a roast chicken
one of the girls had brought from home, some messy jelly, a
miscellaneous assortment of cake, cookies, lukewarm cocoa, very sweet,
pickles, chocolates. In spite of the fact that an interval of only three
hours had elapsed since dinner, the food all disappeared.

Fuzzy asked Eleanor and Nora if they played tennis. Eleanor, who had
tennis ambitions, confessed afterward to Nora that she felt weak at her
stomach when she talked to Fuzzy.

‘If she’d only like me,’ she whispered. ‘Do you know she’s one of the
most popular girls at college?’

Nora, after the quiet life at Cordelia’s, felt very tired when she got
back to her room. But as she leaned out of her window and listened to
the procession of girls singing as they marched around the campus, she
already felt the charm of her college.

For the first week the older girls took charge of the freshmen, advised
them about furnishing their rooms, informed them about various college
activities, explained the course of study. Night after night the
devastating spreads continued. Then at last the freshmen were handed
over to the faculty.

All of Nora’s teachers were women, some old, some young. The older ones
seemed nicer, their voices mellow and low. The young instructors were
restless, strident, metallic, inclined to be humorous over the mistakes
of freshmen. College classes seemed very similar to high school. One
went on studying the same old things: English—no change; history—more
work in the library; French instead of German; more Latin if you wanted
it or classes in baby Greek; geology instead of botany.

But college life made all the difference. It was wonderful. You sat in
chapel, squeezed in a great throng, while Prexy in college gown talked
about the great opportunities for women with trained minds and their
responsibilities toward the rest of the world. You stood on the library
steps and sang ‘Dear Petersfield, thy hills we love.’ At meals girls
from San Francisco, from Denver, Boston, Mobile, and Santa Fe sat at the
same table. There was even a girl from Hawaii. In class meeting you
seconded the motion made by a charming young person in a rose dress whom
you longed to know. You studied your lessons with three or four girls
piled on your couch, you walked in a squadron out on the country road to
the cider mill or picnicked in the grove overlooking the lake. Never for
a waking moment were you left by yourself.

After a few days the freshman class broke up into its component parts.
The upperclassmen had long since returned to their Olympian heights.
Groups were formed, depending largely upon the halls in which freshmen
lived, and also upon a common interest in tennis, plays, study. The
athletic crowd to which Eleanor attached herself swept over the
geographical borders of halls. The dramatic crowd fiercely guarded its
entrances against all freshmen except those who manifested a slavish
desire to perform the jobs disagreeable to the real stars. The society
crowd, always weak among the freshmen, began to imitate its chosen
leaders, who were already talking about Prom Week. The grinds, an
ignominious crew at Petersfield as at most institutions supposedly
designed for the higher learning, dug into their work and remembered
that a poet had been produced from the studious upperclassmen and
another intellectual luminary had been sent abroad by the college for a
year of study. Then there were those like Nora, undecided where they
would leap.

The freshmen, however, were united by their common drudgery. They took
no joy in their labors. To the query of upperclassmen why these young
lambs did not frisk gaily about on the college green, they always
answered, ‘No time. Too much to do.’ What puzzled them in their stray
moments was why their elders studied so much less. They gathered in
groups of four, five, or six after dinner and initiated a noisy evening
of toil. Studying by one’s self was too depressingly impossible. They
formed frequent conspiracies to complain to their taskmistresses about
their burdens, but they never did. Every one was against them. Their
neighbors wanted to sleep and put them to flight. They had to learn to
choose places for congregation close to meek or indifferent girls—or
very sound sleepers.

Sometimes Nora revolted from this intellectual gregariousness and crept
into deserted corners of the library or into some abandoned classroom.
Where was all this joy that one got from intellectual achievement? she
asked herself. Was it all some romantic tale created by the old for the
deception of the young? Professor Steele, the grey-haired head of the
history department, who sometimes lectured to the freshman history
class, told them the satisfaction of her life had come from the
production of a modest shelf of volumes now used by her students. She
seemed like an honest woman, but one wondered.

As Nora and her classmates looked about them, they discovered that much
attention was given to friendship at Petersfield. It was different from
the careless comradeship of the group in which one happened to fall.
Sometimes a girl had an older member of the faculty for her friend. She
worshipped her from afar, studied to please her, sent her flowers before
Christmas vacation, called upon her for a few scared moments in Faculty
Hall. She was called ‘my dear’ as a final reward. If the faculty friend
were young, she made an ideal companion for picnics, expeditions to New
York—only an hour away by train, a confidante to whom one entrusted the
problems of a difficult home life.

Miss Goodwin, the most popular faculty friend, was so universally adored
by freshmen that she was humorously designated ‘The Freshman Disease.’
She was neither young nor old, tall nor short. She wasn’t exactly
handsome, but her magnificent eyes could easily slay a victim. She
affected the masculine in dress, wearing strictly tailored clothes, and
mannish felt hats, shoes, and ties; her voice was full of chesty tones.
Her province was the æsthetic. She wrote poetic dramas which the
students acted. She read poetry aloud to choice spirits who flocked to
her rooms. She was delightfully friendly and informal. In an atmosphere
in which a freshman felt lonely and often queer, Miss Goodwin restored
self-respect and confidence.

Nora, much to the envy of the less fortunate, was assigned to Miss
Goodwin’s English class. But for some reason not entirely plain to
herself, she remained a cold auditor of her poetic and dramatic
displays.

‘No, I don’t care for her much,’ she stated frankly to those who
demanded to know if she wasn’t ‘crazy’ about Miss Goodwin. ‘She tires
me, I guess. I didn’t come here to take a course in Miss Goodwin, and we
don’t learn much English.’

From such apostasy the girls shrank away. Before the month was over,
Nora was transferred to another section. She was a little worried. Had
the fire of Miss Goodwin’s eloquence grown cold before her critical
young eyes?

The weaker of Miss Goodwin’s disciples dropped down to the lower plane
of friendship with other girls, usually members of their own class.
Friendship was the great human experience. Nora, observing these sudden
infatuations, realized that she and Eleanor did not fit into the strict
college interpretation of the word. Eleanor, trailing after Fuzzy
Leland, was already on the freshman tennis team. Nora, too, desired a
friend.

Nora was studying history in her room the night her neighbors had
adjourned to the assembly hall to hear a famous woman lecture on the
question of woman suffrage. In a community life quiet moments must be
snatched when they could be.

A knock at her door struck the moment of Robespierre’s ascendancy. Emily
Moorhead, a tall dark girl from the opposite end of the corridor,
perched on Nora’s couch.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, dear,’ she said, stretching out like a
sleepy cat. ‘I saw the light under your door.’

There was something about Emily which brought back to Nora her earliest
childhood terror. Waking up from a nap, she had seen crawling toward
her, with silent, crouching tread, a striped creature which resembled
the tiger in her alphabet book. Her screams had brought her mother
running into the room. But all the assurances that the visitor was a
nice tiger-pussy from next door could not efface an experience which
repeated itself always at the sight of a cat. Yes, Emily, languorously
sleek and purring, was exactly like a cat.

‘I’m so glad to find you alone, Nora. I want to know you better. Don’t
you often feel there are people about you—something inside of you
reaches out to them? You long for them.’ Emily dropped her lazy feline
pose and sat erect. ‘I’m like that. There are few people here I care
about, but those few——’ Emily’s tone was significantly tender.

Nora had been instructed by Cordelia to distrust a diagnosis of the
heart in this open fashion. She secretly hoped she didn’t belong to
Emily’s few.

Emily began to save a seat for her at meals; she made lengthy visits
after dinner when Nora wanted to study. She asked her advice about
clothes. But Nora felt no devotion growing for this new and inconvenient
shadow. She tried to avoid Emily, but with no great success.

One evening Emily stayed longer than usual. Suddenly she threw her arms
about Nora. ‘You darling. You don’t know how I love you, Nora. I want to
be your only friend—the only one you trust your secrets to. I’m so
lonely. No one understands me. I yearn to be loved.’

Nora detached herself violently and avoided the sight of Emily’s darkly
flushed face. ‘I don’t like people that way,’ she said coldly. ‘And I’m
very sorry, but I’ve got some work to do to-night.’

Emily slammed the door after her. The next week silly little Sally
Winthrop was walking through the corridors with Emily’s arm over her
shoulder. They were inseparable. Nora looked the other way.


                                   II

With the spring, many of the freshmen, Nora among them, developed nerves
and bad tempers. They complained that they couldn’t sleep at night. Mary
Hopkins surreptitiously dragged her couch across the hall to her friend
Mabel Witherspoon’s room. The next morning a very chilly housemother
superintended its journey back. The college physician gave the verdict
that injudicious study and disregard of the rules about exercise were
responsible for the decline in freshman morale. Her patients said among
themselves that it was too much Petersfield.

The college, in spite of its proximity to New York, prided itself upon
its seclusion from the world. The village which supplied the material
needs was three miles away. The simplicity of life many of the girls
would never experience again. But after eight months of sylvan peace,
the freshmen sighed ungratefully for the world. They regarded the
juniors and seniors returning with their chaperons on the nine o’clock
train after a day in New York with the awed wonder of mediæval villagers
gazing upon a pilgrim with cockle shell and staff back from a holy
shrine.

Talk circled around teachers, studies, other girls, summer vacation.
Boys were mentioned only in vague generalities. Except during prom week
the only males who invaded the campus delivered groceries, meat, or ice.

‘I’m going to flirt with the baker’s boy,’ Gladys Spencer threatened.

Could one be sure that one’s fellow freshmen never thought about love?
Nora had abased recollections of the hours she had wasted
dreaming—longing—that some day——Even at Petersfield—almost like a
convent—a nunnery—she could not entirely keep burning desires out of her
mental labors. If those ridiculous women had let Father Stokesbury
alone——He was the finest man she had ever known. Heroes, great figures
in history, King Alfred, and Cromwell, and Garibaldi, and Louis XV (she
had a catholicity in her ideals as a result of the freshman survey
history course)—they dazzled one’s imagination, but one sighed for some
real person. Alone on walks—wanting to be alone—to think——She wouldn’t
go through life like Cordelia and Lizzie Guildford, and then when it was
too late——Her dreams dealt with unrealities. A hero—something to attach
the virtues one admired to—a kind of spiritual clotheshorse for the
imagination to play upon. He looked a little like Father Stokesbury. Not
a clergyman, but with his smile and enigmatic blue eyes.

Of course one had moments filled with flattering theories about maidenly
self-sufficiency. When lessons went well. Then again——


                                  III

At the beginning of her second year, Nora met Cabell Westley, a
classmate from Georgia, who occupied the room just above hers. Cabell
was frankly bored with Petersfield. She dragged her feet when she walked
and powdered her nose during the class hour. Her favorite evening
amusement was to dress up in party clothes, and spend endless time on a
cluster of curls which she draped over her left ear. When she was
properly arrayed, she descended the fire-escape which crossed Nora’s
window. She leaped down from the window-sill airily, and surveyed her
friend studying.

‘You’re killin’ yourself, child. It’s my duty to give you a minute o’
rest. How’d I look, darlin’? Fit to kill?’ She pirouetted in front of
Nora’s mirror, singing in a monotone:

   ‘I’m dyin’ for some one to love me,
   Some one to call my own.’

Then turning suddenly, she added in an attempt at desperation, ‘I mean
it, honey. I honest am.’

Writing letters to her boy friends in Georgia and reading their replies
to an available victim demanded much of her time. For Nora, these
passionate declarations of love had an uncanny fascination. Cabell had
been engaged numerous times. Her fiancés, past and present, in an
alternating row of silver and ivory frames on her dressing-table, she
arranged and rearranged according to their place in her favor at the
moment. From day to day they bobbed up and down the line like
contestants in an animated spelling-match.

She liked to review their qualifications. ‘Nice boy. Wonderful eyes,
don’t you think? But such a jealous disposition.’ And of another. ‘He’s
got heaps o’ money. But drink! Honey, he’d swallow the ocean if you’d
sell it to him over the bar. And gamblin’! He’s no mamma’s boy to settle
down with. And I love my peace an’ comfort. A nice easy pair o’ old
shoes the mornin’ after a dance; that’s my idea of a husband.’

She explained in detail how easy it was to be engaged to two or even
three boys simultaneously, if a girl used her head a little. ‘Keep ’em
apart. One at Sewaunee. The other at Athens. An’ one in Atlanta.’

Between classes and before and after meals Cabell sauntered up and down
the corridors in her shambling fashion, seeking excitement and singing
her usual plaint, ‘I’m dyin’ for some one to love me.’

Nora heard a whistle and smelled tobacco one night after she had gone to
bed. A window above her was opened. There were stealthy words exchanged
with a deep voice below, suppressed giggles, and then high heels
clattered on the fire-escape. In the brightness from a light below, Nora
saw Cabell distinctly as she passed her window. She at once closed her
eyes and pretended deep sleep.

When Cabell’s midnight flights into the unknown with a village youth of
no untarnished reputation finally were made known to the faculty, Cabell
was doomed to return to Georgia. She made farewell visits to all her
friends, her jaunty cheerfulness quite untouched by the disgrace which
ought to have weighted her down.

‘Good-bye, honey,’ she said to Nora. ‘Now don’t you think naughty things
about poor little Cabell. She just had to keep in practice.’

From the first letter, Nora gathered that Cabell’s technique had
suffered little. After a second, Nora never heard from her again.


                                   IV

Eleanor and Fuzzy were patient with Nora’s attempts to be athletic. They
showed her about strokes, chops, and their deadly effective service.

‘You must keep at it,’ Fuzzy admonished her. ‘Swing your racquet in your
room every evening. I keep up practice that way all winter.’

‘Don’t think of anything but the game while you’re playing,’ Eleanor
added.

‘But I can’t help thinking of other things.’

‘Then you’ll never make a player,’ they told her.

Nora tried basket-ball next, indoor baseball, skating, and skiing, but
she went through them all in the same undistinguished fashion. She was
greatly disappointed, for she wanted to belong to the athletic crowd, in
her opinion the sanest and the most vigorous in college. They were a
handsome, cheerful group, with none of the sick fancies of Gwendolen
Morris, writer of exotic verse for the college paper, whose brains Nora
was forced to admire. But it was hopeless to try to compete with others
in brawn and muscle.

Her days were crowded with ill-assorted studies. Chemistry ate up her
time as relentlessly as mathematics her freshman year. But she was still
in the stage of believing what she was told, and did not discredit the
theory that the necessary mental discipline comes from the hated
subjects which are conquered with the greatest pains. She spent
beautiful spring afternoons in the nauseous atmosphere of the
laboratory, going over experiments again and again before they came out
correctly.

She left the laboratory late one afternoon and strolled up the hill on
the other side of the lake. When she heard voices, she dropped down
under a tree to escape company. She kept very still. The voices came
nearer and nearer. Nora closed her eyes. A low voice, a high piping
voice—Minna Horton and Gwendolen Morris in one of their interminable
debates. If they would only go on up the hill.

The low tones came from a spot not far away. At first she disregarded
them. Then a chance phrase interrupting her thoughts froze her into
immediate attention. The words of lovers—exchanges of devotion, undying
devotion. Nora opened her eyes. The two girls embraced, kissed each
other again and again. She was conscious of the drooping narrowness of
Gwendolen’s shoulders, the slenderness of her neck, as she threw herself
against Minna’s bulky frame.

Suddenly, the two girls fell apart. Whistles and catcalls echoed from
the hilltop. A young boy, who had been cutting grass with a scythe, was
shouting and jeering down upon them. The grin on his red face and the
cackling derision of his laughter were like the capers of a satyr
invading a nymph’s sacred bower. The girls fled to the protection of the
campus buildings.

Nora lay buried in the fresh spring grass, her hands pressed hard
against her eyes. Finally she roused herself to escape to her room. The
stream of girls passed her unobserved.

Minna Horton was an honor science student with ambitions to be a doctor.
Gwendolen was the literary genius of the campus. They had been intimate
friends since their freshman year, a little too exclusively interested
in each other, perhaps, but among the cleverest girls Nora knew. And all
the time possibly, this poison. Nora had a sick memory of the fungi she
had studied in botany, the rank growths, forms of life springing up in
unhealthy places, feeding on rot—slime molds found in damp earth and
decaying vegetable matter. Creation wasn’t all clean and pure. Nor human
relationships.

Nora had got her first shock in Maronac. A saloon-keeper there, a very
low man, had a meek little daughter who had gone to school with her. She
remembered the girl’s downcast brown eyes. Freda had suddenly
disappeared. The girls whispered. Nora heard them. Like Beatrice Cenci
and her father.

But girls—two girls. She couldn’t understand why she felt faint at the
thought. Emily Moorhead, her first year. Only instinct, like the swift
revulsion of a young animal sniffing at a poisonous weed, had held her
back.

It wasn’t their fault. They hungered for affection. Was it a choice
between this and pranks like Cabell Westley’s?

Petersfield was, after all, not very different from Maronac Harbor. It
duplicated the unequal proportion of sexes, the narrow conversational
boundaries, the emotional strain. The only difference she could discover
was that there were no old people at Petersfield—at least none of the
professors was very old—no babies, no dogs, and no cats except in the
college kitchens. Among the meagre sprinkling of men, not particularly
imposing, there was none equal to Father Stokesbury.

What were the girls to do? They wanted something which college had not
given them. Intellectual ambitions, the splendid women on the faculty,
the vigorous student body were not enough. But what—what else?

Nora herself was the same girl who had left Maronac Harbor. She had gone
on all this year perpetuating her freshman follies. Her arrogance still
isolated her. She had distrusted girlish intimacy because of Emily
Moorhead. She had scorned friendship with the women who could have given
her some of the lessons of age and wisdom because other girls fawned
upon their professors and used their favor for ulterior ends. The
intellectual hunger, the longing for companionship, which made her
suffer in Maronac were still unsatisfied.

And what Cabell had—what other girls wanted—the chance to be admired,
loved. Never in Maronac Harbor. No one had even glanced at her. Would
she finally, like Minna and Gwendolen—in her desperate need to be
loved——No, never. But what was she going to do?


                                   V

Nina Willoughby, a tall, slim girl who wore, with bored nonchalance, the
handsome clothes her family heaped upon her, had recently taken up woman
suffrage. She had marched down Fifth Avenue in a procession of
suffragettes, and her photograph had appeared in the ‘Times’ the
preceding Sunday. All Petersfield now worshipped her.

She was urged to organize college enthusiasm for political
enfranchisement. The place of the first meeting, to which Mary Howe
dragged Nora, was strangely enough a deserted graveyard. Nora, from a
section of the country fresh in its memories, had spent many an
afternoon reading the inscriptions of a preceding century upon the
lichen-covered brown stones lying flat in the tall weeds.

When Nora and Mary arrived, Nina and her subalterns already had a goodly
number of followers gathered around them. In the spring twilight the
birds, long ago retired to slumber after a busy day, were chattering a
lively protest at being disturbed.

A program of eloquent speeches resulted in the formation of the Woman
Suffrage League. At once the new reformers burned for action. Nora, on
the fringe of the crowd, listened in amazement to Nina’s proposal that
they prove the seriousness of their protest against the cruel exclusion
of woman from the public affairs of her community and country by
spending the night in the graveyard with no bed but a hard flat stone.
Shrill shouts of approval rent the still night.

A graveyard—sleeping there—votes for women—Nora tried to puzzle out the
connection. While she was still weighing this new college problem, one
of the officials of the Woman Suffrage League had separated her from
Mary, and she was stretched out on a tombstone, very hard and cold, with
the stars and a young moon shining down upon her. Her unaccustomed bed
got colder every moment. The weeds tickled her nose—made her sneeze. Her
back—her neck—it was as if some unseen monster were taking great icy
nips out of her raw flesh.

Next to her squirmed Frances Thompson, a freshman in Nora’s hall. ‘I
wish I could sneak home,’ she whispered. ‘I’d rather sleep than vote any
night.’

‘I won’t stay here,’ Nora whispered back. ‘I’m going to chuck it.’

‘Come on.’

The two bobbed up, and slowly, on hands and knees, began crawling toward
the stone wall near them. The birds began to scold afresh. A dog barked.
They stopped an instant, and then crept on. The tall weeds assisted
their escape, and the moon whisked under a cloud. A few more paces, and
Frances began to giggle. Nora gave her a frantic punch. They clambered
over the wall, their hands and legs cut by blackberry thorns. On the
other side, they halted, found out where they were, and then began to
run.

The chapel clock was striking. They flew over the rough ground. A moment
more, and they were inside the doors before they were locked for the
night.

Safely inside Nora’s room, they stood examining each other. Their faces
were scratched. Frances’s hand was bleeding. Nora’s pleated skirt was
torn by the last fence. Throwing themselves on the couch, they rocked
back and forth with wild laughter.

Nora began to rub her aching back. ‘It’s got—the—the print of Eliza
Cook’s obituary,’ she snorted between her seizures. ‘“Eliza Cook, died
in childbed 1801. Requiescat in peace.”’

During the next day, Nora observed her sleepy classmates under Professor
Steele’s all-seeing eye. They sneezed. There was a suspicious aroma of
camphor about them.

That night the New York papers came out with blazing headlines:

                     PETERSFIELD GIRLS MAKE PROTEST
                      NIGHT OF VIGIL IN GRAVEYARD
                            VOTES FOR WOMEN

So this was Nina’s scheme. Publicity for woman suffrage. Women were a
queer crowd. In England they heckled members of Parliament and fought
the police. They seemed to enjoy being dragged off to prison and
starving themselves. What would they start doing in America if fools
like Nina had their way? As for Nora herself, she was done with woman
suffrage.

Prexy was furious. For several days it looked as if the seniors who had
started the affair might not receive their diplomas.

Miss Goodwin’s latest poetic drama, fortunately, diverted the college
authorities from Nina’s escapade. The play was to be presented in the
new open-air theatre. Practically every girl in college was dragged into
it. Nora hurried away from laboratory to drape herself in Greek robes.
The play was written in the classical spirit, with the girls
personifying various abstractions never quite clear during rehearsals,
and with dancing throngs weaving in and out among the maidens declaiming
Miss Goodwin’s resounding hexameters.

The evening of the performance, the sun set over the pines in front of
the audience with a melodramatic arc of crimson and orange as the
opening songs began. Never, all the oldest professors said, had there
been a more perfect spring night at Petersfield. The white-robed
Grecians in their choral rites did honor to the trees, the flowers, the
fountain, the sky, and last to their own maidenhood, represented by a
tutelary spirit, Miss Goodwin, a little too stout for classic draperies.
As they circled round her, they sang a concluding devotional before the
final dance of the maidens ended the play.

‘It’s the true spirit of our colleges,’ Nora’s Greek professor announced
afterward. ‘Our reverence for girlhood, for maidenhood. Miss Goodwin has
placed our modern attitude in Greek form with real genius. But the
intellectual world has always been Greek. It’s the spirit of the mind.’

The play had been great fun. During the excitement of the past days,
even Nora had got loose from her moorings. She watched Miss Goodwin
seated even more securely upon her throne, her laurel wreath fresh and
shining, with a quietly amused smile.

‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ breathed the freshmen.

Nora, in the last expiring moments of sophomore scorn, curled her lip in
a final ironic quiver. ‘Wonderful,’ she agreed.


                               CHAPTER II


                                   I

Nora returned to college in the fall of 1914 dressed in a new suit
equipped with the latest embarrassment of fashion, a long skirt so tight
that the ingenuities of dressmaking had conceived a slit on one side
which permitted the wearer to take a mincing step. But over the gash in
the front of Nora’s skirt Cordelia had draped a pleated silk curtain
which covered Nora’s leg. On the campus, crowds of Petersfield girls,
all wearing crippling garments like Nora’s, some with the addition of
flounces at the top, which stuck out behind like the bustles of a
preceding era, learned for the first time that a war had begun in
Europe.

The adult world had been murmuring something about the assassination of
a certain European prince no one had ever heard of before, but a college
generation had not anticipated all this unnecessary fuss about it.
Petersfield in its leafy luxuriance of early September appeared
unchanged. But it developed that the war had already touched
Petersfield. Professor Steele and other members of the faculty had been
held in Europe. Some of the girls on holiday jaunts in France, Italy,
and Germany had not returned. When all of them finally trickled back,
they brought tales of lost baggage, terrible crossings in steerage
quarters resembling the coops built for travelling poultry, and rumors
of a stream of French and Belgian refugees already homeless.

Professor Steele at once hung a large violently colored map of Europe in
the hall outside of her classroom door, punctured with vari-colored
pins, which she moved from day to day. Strange names gradually took on
the familiar accents of friends. The Marne—not one of the girls had ever
heard of it before—turned out to be a river; Rheims—there was a picture
of the cathedral in the library; and of course one had a vague idea of
Antwerp.

A popular college sport developed from the crowds gathered around
Professor Steele’s map between classes. It was the ambition of the
student body to catch her at her daily pin-shifting. One would feel, a
jocular senior commented, almost like God, to be making pins jig up and
down in this apparently aimless fashion. The English and the French, red
and orange in Miss Steele’s scheme, developed a humorous habit of
jumping in one direction, then veering off in some mad chase, and
finally returning to their original position. It really was a huge joke.

The college, in a body, marched to the village church the first Sunday
in October to join in the prayers of Peace Sunday. It really was a
terrible bore, planned by Prexy, who thought the student body should try
to wake up the village. They marched back very hungry, with unbecoming
levity, to their college retirement, quite convinced the village had not
appreciated their valiant effort. The starving Belgians then obtruded
upon their customary peace. What would it be next?

During the dull November rains which drove the girls to the library,
Nora made her great college discovery. History had suddenly become the
most fascinating subject in the world. One day she had crept into a
seminar room, discovered empty in an idle scouting expedition at certain
hours of the day. Left alone with a pile of books, she experienced what
was akin to religious conversion. She left the library another person.
The war may have helped to lift the scales from her eyes; or it may have
been the transformation in Professor Steele, about which both faculty
and students were beginning to wonder.

A cold and detached scholar had suddenly caught fire. In the fall of
1914 she taught with a passionate earnestness which crowded her
classroom. Her big course for many years had been the political and
social study of modern Europe, upon which she had written three solid
volumes, highly respected in the world of scholarship. Every summer she
had wandered from one European city to another, reading in the libraries
of London, Paris, Berlin, tramping their streets, talking to the
professors in the international fashion which only the universities seem
to have learned. But in her weighing of evidence she had been so fearful
of rash judgments, of partiality, of her own conclusions upon subjects
never perfectly understood by an outsider, that her lectures had been
cautious and uninspiring. No one could tell what had made the change in
her. Her opinions about the war she kept to herself, preserving an
apparent rigid neutrality that the Executive of her country would have
approved. But Nora detected something which had never been there before.

Early and late Nora toiled in the library. The war had become a gigantic
spectacle, a new game for an initiate into historical mysteries. She
began to search for the source of this terrible hatred which was
destroying Europe. The raid of English seacoast towns, the threatened
German blockade, the Zeppelin raids on Paris, the sinking of ships
carrying American passengers, which a few sentimental professors at
Petersfield were using not only to prove the invidious cruelty of German
ingenuity, but also to develop an emotional reaction among the student
body, had different uses for her.

In Maronac she had lived among German people long enough to suspect
claims made for their diabolical supremacy. What surprised her was that
they had thought to do all these terrible things before their enemies.
Germans were slow-moving in Maronac, sentimental about Christmas trees
and their own music, and a little stubborn in holding to an old-world
attitude toward women. But they were good neighbors and hard-working
citizens.

She had a brief but vivid moment of emotion when she read in Cordelia’s
cramped and almost illegible handwriting that Father Stokesbury had
sailed for England to offer himself as an army chaplain. What relief!
The war had at least offered him escape from that pack of adoring women
who had drawn their tight cordons to imprison him in their female world.
But he had got back to the real world—the world of men. The soldiers in
the back lines—the hospitals—how they would be refreshed by his boyish
fun!

The war finally captured Petersfield undergraduates. Emily Moorhead
collected money for Belgian babies, and Gwendolen Morris wrote a poem
about bleeding France, Lafayette, and sister republics. In the library
Nora began slowly building up the impartial historical spirit. The dead
in Europe were still very far away.


                                   II

Since the collapse of the Woman Suffrage League, feminism had held
Petersfield only fitfully. When a famous Scandinavian woman came to
lecture the previous year, the intellectuals learned that the noblest
creature among women was the unmarried mother. But where in a place like
Petersfield does one find a glorious mate like the one described in the
lecture, and when he is found, how does one circumvent college
authorities?

‘Remember Hannah Dodsley,’ croaked one of the intellectuals not yet
converted to the new idea of having babies without husbands. Hannah, a
meek little freshman two years ago, had been sent home because she was
going to have a baby.

‘I don’t think many women will want them—that way,’ another suggested
delicately.

‘Do all women with husbands want babies?’

‘And if she has three or four already, does she want any more—with a
husband or without?’ queried one of seven daughters.

Evidently there were two sides to the question of maternal glory.

In the meantime the intellectuals sighed to make the world better. Since
the passing of the Home Rule Bill, Ireland promised to need them no
longer. They had always had socialistic dreams, but now for the first
time they called themselves the Socialist League. Ellen Standish, their
president, the daughter of a cotton manufacturer in New Jersey, planned
to take over the management of her father’s mill the following summer.
Other members formed equally ambitious programmes.

The new professor in sociology, Mr. Michael Powys, had some close
connection with their becoming pacifists. He was a phenomenon in
Petersfield, young, handsome, intense. His blue eyes burned with the
flames which reform the world.

Mr. Powys had been discovered in Europe early the preceding summer by
one of the more adventurous economists, who invited him to Petersfield.
Naturally the war held him on his native British shores. He was,
therefore, regarded as only another of the war casualties, and his
proposed courses of lectures struck from the calendar. But in January he
arrived unannounced, and with no explanations concerning his appearance.
It was rumored that the bribes and the prayers of a wealthy father had
got him out of England, where his views of non-resistance threatened to
make trouble. Although some of the faculty declared he was a deserter
from duty and a traitor to his country, it was difficult to pack off a
person of mature years who had been invited to Petersfield.

Not even for the first day did the new sociology professor show the
stealth usually associated with smuggled goods. He proclaimed his
philosophy with the compelling brilliance of a Broadway street sign. In
dealing with the problem of poverty, the subject of one course of
lectures, he offered socialism and the elimination of war as the only
salvation for a working population. His world, he explained, was not
Britain, but the toilers of every country, to whom he wished to give a
decent existence. His brotherhood idea was dazzling to the
intellectuals, who had long ago given up a religion which teaches the
same gospel. They rallied around Mr. Powys, Nora among them now, to
convert Petersfield.

In Nora’s dreams a very charming young man with flowing neckties
matching the deep blue of his eyes stood by her side in all her vigorous
plans to uplift her fellow men. During the class hour, too, she found
her attention wandering from Mr. Powys’s lecture to Mr. Powys himself.
His curly locks gleamed like sunshine in the bleak greyness of a winter
day. With his climaxes—and Mr. Powys made frequent use of climactic
effects—a ruddy glow coursed through his cheeks and made him as radiant
as a Greek god.

From Mr. Powys she learned rapidly the superior virtues of the poor,
their instinctive wisdom. For his pacifism she had a less immediate
reaction. The poor, being closer than fighting Europe, seemed enough to
begin on. Her intensive study of poverty and the stern precepts of the
twin science, economics, resulted in a chance to live during the month
of June in a New York settlement house situated in the most populous
section of the lower East Side.

Mr. Powys had made a similar experiment in surveying poverty at close
range.

‘While I was at Cambridge, I spent one long vac. in London. Down near
the docks, you know. An interesting region. For the depths of misery I
know no better place than Shadwell. Possibly Limehouse is a trifle
rougher. Of course there are no slums in New York equal to ours in
London.’


                                  III

Mary Howe, who believed in a varied human experience, convinced Nora
that it was her duty to attend Junior Prom. Mary provided one of her
superfluous party dresses and also Mr. Downing.

Importing men for Petersfield dances required elaborate manœuvres. Girls
with brothers were suddenly popular. The Prom crowd from the nearer
men’s colleges could be counted on annually for reënforcements. Any man
with fair skill in dancing, a dress suit, and the price of a railroad
ticket, could, if vouched for by a Petersfield girl or any remote social
connection of hers, be an acceptable guest.

Nora’s dancing partner was presented to her a few moments before the
grand march began. He danced well enough, did not immediately attempt
the persiflage that is common exchange at Proms, and had no conspicuous
deficiencies. Almost at once, however, he divined that Nora was one of
those strong-minded girls. Accordingly his first one-step was enlivened
by a running commentary on votes for women.

‘Of course they’ve got to serve in the army when they get the vote.’

‘But there aren’t going to be any more wars when women have the vote.’

Mr. Downing was much amused. ‘No more war. Of course women never have
any little wars among themselves. A woman’s tongue—why do we hear so
much about it?’

Nora looked stony. ‘You won’t hear any more from mine on this subject.’

Mr. Downing, being a polite youth, shifted the conversation to sport. He
let Nora know, without too much directness, that he was a long-distance
runner at his college, first stroke on the crew, and a player to be
reckoned with in tennis tournaments. Then he inquired about Nora’s
athletic prowess.

Nora wasn’t an entire success at the Prom. To men less obliging than Mr.
Downing she had little to say. The giggles of the successful girls
around her she had no marked ability to imitate. What was there to talk
about at a dance? And these college boys—they were like big clumsy
babies. Now if she had dared to ask Mr. Powys——Toward the end, the
muscles of her face ached in her efforts to keep up a battery of
cheerful smiles. She thought longingly of her bed as her feet rebelled
against the unaccustomed exercise.

So this was what girls called fun. They marked off the days on the
calendar until the supreme event of a college dance. They talked it over
for hours, days, weeks afterward.

The tiresome ordeal dragged to its conclusion. Nora gave Mr. Downing a
brisk good-night and hurried off to bed.

In the morning she had to hear the last sleepy trickles of reminiscence
about the dance. ‘Jack Downing said you were awfully good-looking,’ Mary
confided. ‘But I guess you were a little too high-brow for him. He
invited Sally Easton to his Prom after his first dance with her. Sally’s
an awful fool, but she’s pretty and she dances well. She thinks Jack is
just wonderful.’

The library was beautiful peace and security on a Saturday morning. Nora
hid herself away in the deserted seminar room and piled books all around
her.

Once more the monotonous college routine, as bad as the trench warfare
revealed by Professor Steele’s maps. The Eastern Front had become too
complicated even for undergraduate jokes.

Then May fête, delicious relief. A masque, reproducing in cheesecloth
and gilt paper the magnificence of the entertainments given in honor of
Queen Elizabeth, initiated a large proportion of the college into the
mysteries of dyeing and design. The fête, postponed for two days on
account of rain, finally came off the evening the news of the sinking of
the Lusitania reached Petersfield.

Final examinations mercifully obliterated the horror of the tragedy.


                                   IV

The glimpse of New York from the train window was all that Nora had yet
seen of the city, which was escape and adventure for Petersfield. The
tall apartment houses exposed to a traveller their shabby walls and the
dingy washings flapping on the roofs and in dark courts. The bedding was
spread out on the fire-escapes. Strange-looking people leaned out of the
windows, staring listlessly at the passing train. Children swarmed in
the streets, darted in and out of the traffic, as if they were playing a
grim game of life and death.

The settlement house, an old red-brick four-storeyed structure
indistinguishable from its neighbors, faced a street jammed with
pushcarts and the babble of foreign tongues. The children left off their
matching of wits with the vendor of chocolate and apples to crowd around
Nora and called out, ‘Teacher—Hello, Teacher.’

The residents of the settlement, gathered around the dinner-table,
presented strange contradictions to a newcomer. Mrs. Chambers, the
stately housekeeper, in a velvet dinner gown which revealed exquisite
shoulders and arms, was seated opposite the head resident, Miss Burton,
a weary-looking woman with a hard knob of grey hair perched close to her
forehead. Miss Saunders, a frivolous pink blonde elaborately dressed,
assisting Mr. Schwartz with the boys’ clubs, was an amusing contrast to
Miss Graham, in charge of the girls’ clubs, who came in after the soup
with her hair bearing the imprint of a hat worn all day.

While the others talked of their activities in a jargon full of terms
incomprehensible to Nora, Mrs. Chambers, in the fashion of a practiced
hostess, commented on the heat, the noise from the pushcarts, the
foreign quality of the East Side.

The street beyond Nora’s window was astir at one and two in the morning,
and children were still shrieking at their games. A queer odor like that
of old clothes stored in damp trunks filled her room, mixed with smells
of new food and seasonings. She longed for a single whiff of Maronac
Harbor or a stiff breeze from the Petersfield hills. Strange tongues
clattered in her ears. Then at last the neighborhood folded itself away
in its crowded dens, and Nora fell asleep.

The night classes, presided over by volunteer workers, met in the
schoolhouses of the district. Miss Graham assigned to Nora an animated
group of girls who seemed to be equipped with a knowledge of English
sufficient to talk about everything but the lesson. Having anticipated
the college generation in the generous use of rouge, they had the
appearance of buxom vitality, in spite of crowded living and working
quarters. Their main interest was to remind their teacher of the exact
time for the closing of the lesson, so that they could rush down to the
lower floor of the school building at the dramatic minute the boys were
being dismissed. An hour of dancing in the basement gymnasium followed
the classes. But the boys, in a neighborhood inclined to forensic
exercise, prolonged their debates long past the class hour. Often they
used the entire dancing period for a little extra oratory, and the girls
had to dance by themselves.

At the weekly settlement-house dances Miss Burton marched up and down
the two spacious rooms, probably once the drawing-rooms of a prosperous
Wall Street merchant, to keep the dancers from amorously remote corners.
Her lively interest in the courtship and marriage of the young people
made her eager to preserve a rigid system of etiquette which would
prevent any irregularity.

Even greater than her sympathy for young love was her enthusiasm about
babies. She was always capturing some clever young doctor and bringing
him to the clinic in the big bare room on the second floor of the house;
and she discovered nurses with the necessary variety of linguistic
equipment to pass on the doctor’s advice to the mothers. Miss Burton
herself presided over the weighing of the infants, as pleased over the
gains of the puniest ones as a juggler with some new feat. Women who had
never had children of their own seemed to love babies with the most
tender devotion. Cordelia had the same wistful interest as Miss Burton.
But the mothers of the numerous settlement progeny, while Miss Burton
was busy, displayed an alertness in collecting under their shawls the
free samples of babies’ food on display. They pushed and jostled each
other during the distribution of garments donated to the settlement, and
even grumbled at a huge share of the spoils.

Nora’s letters to Mr. Powys, written late at night, sometimes took on a
picturesque flippancy under her agile pen. Then she remembered the
ardent hopes which flashed from his beautiful eyes, and tore up what she
had written.

But contrary to his theories, Nora was sure that the poor had their
snatches of enjoyment. Only the settlement workers appeared to abstain
entirely from pleasure. The five older women, who during the summer
divided their time between the city house and a camp in the mountains,
were so tired that they were unable to respond to Mrs. Chambers’s
conventional ideas of dinner conversation. With all this propaganda
about the starving in Europe, their chief worry now was the possibility
that philanthropists would neglect the settlement. Mrs. Chambers
listened with a chilly aloofness.

After a tour of Fifth Avenue on her last day in New York, Nora, in the
home-going crowd of workers in the trolley, pondered once more over the
whole question of riches and poverty. Some of the poor she had lived
among were honorable and attractive. Others were not. It seemed to her
it would be easier to be good, if one had money. But here she knew she
was in unfamiliar country.

Nora experienced an unexpected pity when she said good-bye to her fellow
workers. Their courage in facing the problem of human misery was greater
than hers. Miss Burton and Miss Graham looked more exhausted every day.
Somehow they reminded her of Cordelia. The same unflagging devotion to
duty. The same sphere. She had expected that here in a great city, so
close to the beating of titanic forces, one became part of the bigness
of the world. But the borders of the settlement stretched no farther
than the parish of Saint Margaret’s or the peaceful groves of
Petersfield. Where did one find the strong winds of reality, the great
principles of a universal structure? One went on eagerly in youth, more
slowly in age, to find them, and they were always somewhere else.

Nora was only one of a long succession of college girls who had dreamed
of social service as her contribution to the regeneration of the world.
A few weeks brought disillusionment, and one had to try something else.


                              CHAPTER III


                                   I

Nora began her last year at college by signing up for two of Professor
Steele’s stiffest history courses, her programme bolstered up further by
an advanced economics course. Mr. Powys still brought the elated glow of
poetry into a sordid world, but Nora suspected his lack of the solid
ballast of fact. She decided to drop sociology.

Ellen Standish had spent the summer trying to convert her father to her
theories concerning factory management. She had secured a rest-room for
the women workers, but before her other reforms he remained adamant. She
carried the record of her failure to Mr. Powys. He, too, had a cotton
manufacturer for a parent, with the same inability to see the light. A
comparison of fathers made delightful conversation. Ellen soon developed
so proprietary an attitude toward Mr. Powys that Nora could no longer
decently have a share of him. Ellen followed him about, called him
Michael in confidential asides, and was hopelessly in love, as Nora and
other members of the Socialist League could plainly see. All of her
former independent spirit was gone.

Mr. Powys was not immediately responsive. During these weeks of
unrestricted submarine warfare, he was making feverish trips to New York
almost daily, conferring with unseen powers, and giving Petersfield
meagre crumbs of his time and careless lectures, which alienated the
serious students. Through it all, Ellen boasted that no man was so
willing a martyr to ideas as Michael Powys.

He departed early in December on a ship dedicated to peace, its
passengers embarking for Europe over a mine-strewn sea with the
immediate intention of ending the war. Just how their project was to be
accomplished was not explained in detail. Ellen was sure that with
Michael Powys on board the peace ship would do something. Miss Steele
was reported to have remarked that she never expected to see the return
of her dove of peace. Mr. Powys had escaped the British army once, but
they would surely get him this time. She viewed the peace ship as
another Children’s Crusade, equally pitiful and ineffectual.

On the subject of Pacifism, the Socialist League finally split. Ellen
and her converts went their way. The others were now attacking the
college curriculum in stormy sessions in a dusty room in the library
tower.

The dissatisfaction with the present régime had started the previous
spring. Nora Deming and Mary Howe refused to take part in the annual May
fête. They would not even sit in the audience dressed as Elizabethan
ladies or gallants.

Mary Howe was once more repeating the objections she had expressed then.
‘I’m tired of all this play-stuff. I’ve done it for three years. I’ve
celebrated Christmas, Easter, and May Day quaintly until I’m bored
stiff. All the silly plays—every one of them silly—the elaborate
costumes, the rehearsals.’

‘You have said a mouthful,’ her audience applauded.

Mary went on. ‘All this college tradition——All freshman year I was
lugged out rainy mornings to sing songs. I stood in snow banks singing
songs, and in the boiling sun commencement week. I can’t sing. I don’t
want to try. And the tree-plantings, the flower-fêtes, the water-fêtes,
the snow-fêtes. What’s it all for?’

‘To keep little freshmen from getting homesick.’

‘To make us love dear old Petersfield.’

‘To make us come back as alumnæ and sing the same old songs fifty years
from now.’

‘I want to be let alone,’ concluded Mary. ‘I’m a woman. At least I ought
to be. My mother had me when she was my age.’

The remnant of the socialists proceeded, after the destruction of
college sentiment, to reform the entire institution. The regeneration of
the world was temporarily suspended.

‘Two years wasted on required algebra and science,’ one member began.

‘Why don’t they relate science to life? Botany—mostly deep-sea ferns.
And chemistry—I never saw the good of it. There isn’t a course in food
chemistry. Now biology—a good stiff course in physiology ought to be
required. I think I know where my stomach is. Midnight feeds taught me
that much. But I’m vague about the rest.’

A courageous member blinked a little, and then plunged into a problem
which she felt it her duty to lay before her friends. ‘Take marriage,
for example. I’ll swear half the girls in this college don’t know what
it means. I found out last year. And yet most of us——’

An eloquent pause emphasized the truth of her words. The socialists,
overcome by reticence and ignorance, tried to look blusteringly
experienced, and failed.

‘We ought to have lectures with charts,’ persisted the courageous
member. ‘They tried it at Wendover last year, and two girls fell into a
dead faint. It’s disgusting—humiliating.’

Nora shifted to safer ground. ‘We’re treated like children. The faculty
is afraid to speak out. You remember how Miss Norris discussed Byron’s
amorous affairs and Shelley’s. As if we were schoolgirls. Why mention
them at all if they’re scared? It was the same way with George Eliot in
the novel course. We don’t even study Swinburne.’

‘Or Nietzsche. In philosophy they’re so afraid we’ll lose our religion
they never get over apologizing for the Rationalists. The way we slide
over those gentlemen——’

‘In men’s colleges it isn’t that way,’ explained the sister of a Harvard
undergraduate.

‘Oh, men!’

‘Women’s colleges are all wrong.’

‘Coeducation is too distracting. I went to a mixed high school.’

‘If we only saw men oftener. I don’t mean at dances. To discuss
problems. If socialist leagues in all the Eastern colleges met three or
four times a year——’

‘You speak of the Millennium, my dear.’

The general conclusions of all such sessions were identical.
Petersfield, artificially detached from the currents and floods of real
existence, offered a false security which was no preparation for life.
Life—life—how that word echoed in all college talk. But how was a reform
to be reached? The trustees and the faculty, at least so far as they
could determine, venerated the unchanged institutions of almost fifty
years. Revolution was hopeless.


                                   II

For seniors the immediate problem was to begin thinking about earning a
living. With social service as a career dismissed, there seemed nothing
for Nora but teaching. If she could be paid to study history year after
year, not in Petersfield, but in a big stirring place like New York——But
such jobs did not seem to exist in the files of the college employment
bureau.

Nora woke up at night in a torment of perplexity. This question of a
future brought back all the ferment of her freshman year. The delights
of youth—she had long ago discovered the falsity of the common
sentimental attitude—she could never be as wretched as she was now.

Is a person waiting for a train happy? Youth is like that. No security.
Hopes of something better beyond. All the nervous tension of
anticipation is the daily portion of the young. They use their studies,
sports, dramatics, like narcotics, to dull these sharp pains. But it is
life they want, an undefinable experience, all the more tempting because
of its vagueness.

Nora had begun to sign application blanks for teaching jobs and to write
careful letters to prospective employers. But she could force no spirit
into these deadly preparations for the future.

She was listening carelessly one day to a lecture on Henry James, for
whom she had once experienced a temporary enthusiasm. Professor Whitson
had observed that his novels showed the writer’s tragic detachment from
life.

‘In studying his biography, one is reminded of a person outside looking
through a window at men and women in a brightly lighted room,’ the
lecturer continued.

In a flash Nora saw that at Petersfield there was for her not even a
view through a window. Her fellow socialists denounced their college for
failing to equip them for the world they now aspired to conquer. Their
airy arguments revolved in her troubled mind and stayed there. She had
spent almost four years in digging through subterranean passages which
in the end brought her no promise of light. The money her father had
left for her education was almost gone. What had all her labor brought
her?

In the meantime, there was the history essay contest which Nora had
entered. The prize of two hundred dollars was one of the few tangible
rewards of scholarship at Petersfield. Miss Steele had so organized the
requirements that the winner was generally recognized as the honor
student of her year. Nora’s subject, chosen after much trouble, was
‘British Empire Building.’ Those entering the contest had been assigned
a quiet alcove in the library, where they could read without
interruption. At one of the long tables Nora worked beside Amelia
Donaldson, driven into excessive study by a spinal curvature and
restless mental energy. Amelia was always there before Nora; her
short-sighted eyes close to her books never turned in her neighbor’s
direction. She permitted only the interruption of meals, wrinkled her
forehead at the scraping back of the chair next to hers. She was writing
an essay on the ‘African Slave Trade.’

Through the January blizzards, while the Verdun guns were crowding the
headlines of every daily paper, the two contestants went through one
document after another. By Easter vacation Nora had exhausted all the
material on her subject in the college library, as well as a disorderly
heap of Mr. Powys’s tracts left behind for the Socialist League. During
Easter vacation, to be spent visiting Mary Howe in New York, she planned
to use the public library.


                                  III

Mary lived in an ugly but comfortable brown-stone front off lower Fifth
Avenue. Her father, a rare specimen of American, had no definite
employment except that of enjoying himself. Her mother was kept occupied
in the nursery most of the day.

On the very first morning of her visit Nora started out in search of the
library. Mary was sleeping upstairs.

‘You’re beginning rather early,’ Mary’s father suggested, as he politely
accompanied his daughter’s guest to the front door.

At five o’clock Mary was waiting beside one of the lions at the entrance
to the library to conduct Nora to Greenwich Village.

‘Daddy and mother are dining out for a night or two,’ she said. ‘We must
make the best of this chance.’

The Dragon was Mary’s choice that evening. A green beast with an
elongated jaw decorated the outside door and the interior, and a green
color scheme emphasized the complexion of the presiding deity.
Waitresses in shepherdess costume, possibly the dragon’s victims, were
exchanging pleasantries with a tableful of young men when the two girls
entered.

‘Now you mustn’t act stiff, or you’ll spoil all the fun,’ warned Mary,
not explaining further what the fun was.

They sat down at the end of the room, with a full view of their
neighbors. Middle-aged women in outward appearance as sensible as the
Petersfield faculty formed a goodly proportion.

‘We’ve come too early,’ Mary sighed. ‘It ought to be more exciting than
this.’

Soon a dark young man accompanied by a woman not very young, with a
drooping hat, dangling earrings, and a large jade ring on her first
finger, sat down at their table. Mary nudged Nora. The young man,
simultaneously with a careful study of the menu, draped his arm over his
companion’s shoulders. Her hand reached out coyly to meet one of his.
They began to talk in unsuppressed tones, Mary keeping up a battery of
nudges at the most momentous stages in their conversation. The woman, an
eavesdropper gathered, was describing a condition resembling
intoxication which she had experienced at a Village dance the night
before. She had then performed courageous and unexpected feats, now
chronicled with some pride. When the young man’s soup arrived, he
dropped the hand he had been holding. He was very hungry. During the
wait for the next course, he became fond once more. Throughout the meal
he followed the same alternation of satisfying love and an appetite.
Nothing was allowed to interfere with his enjoyment of his dinner, which
his companion paid for.

‘You see,’ Mary announced proudly, like a Greek chorus. ‘That’s the way
it’s done.’

Soon the crowd shifted. At near-by tables young girls, like them dining
alone, were every moment being approached by Villagers in broad-brimmed
hats, flowing ties, and incipient beards. Mary sat in a feverish glow of
anticipation. At last one hovered near their table, measured the icy
glint in Nora’s eyes, and retired.

Mary turned upon her friend. ‘You’ll never get experience that way.’

‘Experience——Is this experience?’

‘Of course. You’re driving them off. Look this way.’ Mary assumed a
come-hither expression which sent Nora off into wild giggles. ‘Well—I——’
Mary sputtered helplessly. Then she opened her bag, brought out a box of
cigarettes, and passed them to Nora. Nora shook her head. Mary lit one.
It went out. She tried once more, coughed, and then succeeded in puffing
out a thin column of smoke. A table of boys next to them, not very
different from the Prom crowd at Petersfield, watched Mary, and then in
pantomime reproduced her struggles. Soon their table was in an uproar.
But Mary, occupied with an uneasy cigarette, held primly in the exact
centre of her mouth, smoked on, the wild young men keeping away, in
spite of her designedly shameless conduct.

For a second venture, Mary arranged to meet Eddie Gaston at his favorite
Italian restaurant south of the Square. She had made his acquaintance in
Maine the preceding summer, and to him she owed some of her most
inspiring ideas. A tall youth with a mop of curls, similar to the
ambrosial locks placed on most statues of Jove by enterprising
sculptors, leaned against the doorway of a stuffy little place opening
into a street full of explosive children, lean cats, and a strong smell
of garlic. He looked like a poet. There was a battered beauty in his
ashen face. His brown eyes had the soft melancholy usually associated
with an interest in rhythm. Best of all, he talked like a poet. At least
like Nora’s conception of one. His swift wonderful sentences were full
of words she had hitherto confronted only in her researches in Roget’s
Thesaurus and some contemporary æsthetic criticism lent her by Mary as a
preparation for meeting Eddie.

In the flow of these exquisite sentences Mary was giving a cibarious
concentration to the greasy menu card. ‘Yes, they’ve got ravioli. And
chicken and spumoni. Order the same, Nora. They’re all wonderful.’

Nora was following the elaborate processes of Mr. Gaston. He had first
extracted from his vest pocket a leather tube, which he snapped open,
revealing an amber cigarette holder reposing on a red satin pillow. He
then produced an elaborately designed cigarette case; and when his
cigarette was fitted neatly into its amber cap and lighted, he was free
to transfer his attention to the wine list. He politely consulted the
tastes of his companions. Nora’s ignorance drove her to prohibition.
Mary ordered _vin ordinaire_. A graceful sweep of Mr. Gaston’s arm
brought the waiter, a very tall and blond Italian, who belied the
popular conception of his race. ‘A bottle of _vin ordinaire_ and a
Martini cocktail.’ The cigarette in its holder Mr. Gaston gave an
impressive flourish.

At the conclusion of his cocktail, the poet began to question his guests
about poetry. He hoped they didn’t like Rupert Brooke.

‘We’re all reading him,’ Nora admitted. ‘We love him.’

‘War sentiment,’ Eddie pronounced. ‘Gibson is better. His realism—at
least there’s some not bad observation at times. But Brooke——Of course,
all the war poets!’ Again Eddie’s cigarette spun a reënforcing curvet.
‘My god is Dowson. Ernest Dowson.’ Eddie tipped up his glass. He was now
drinking some of Mary’s _vin ordinaire_.

‘I like Housman better,’ Nora said.

‘Oh!’ Eddie commented, his exclamation rising and falling in a variation
of polite disdain. Eddie, Nora suspected, always deliberately chose a
poet of his own. ‘But Davies is a rare spirit, a wilder singer.’

Mr. Gaston ordered a whiskey-and-soda. He next fingered a small glass
holding an emerald-green fluid. He held it up to the light, twisting and
turning it, until it shot out rays, and then drank it in lingering,
voluptuous sips.

‘“That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,”’ murmured Mr. Gaston.

This last teratological touch was too much for Nora, fed on historical
documents and crammed daily with the horrors of a contemporary sphere.

‘I’m afraid even drinking won’t do that,’ she said with schoolgirl
bluntness.

But Mr. Gaston had now ordered a large cigar, which he was trimming with
a very new shiny cigar-cutter.

‘Oh,’ protested Mary. ‘I wanted you to recite some of your own poetry,
Eddie.’

Eddie’s delicate features, before the columnar substantiality of the
cigar, had the wraith-like evanescence of the spirals of smoke
gambolling over his curls. He faded away into complete silence. Mary was
describing the horrors of her mother’s parties. Both girls were suddenly
conscious of Eddie’s unresponsiveness.

‘I’m afraid we’re boring you, Eddie,’ Mary said.

Eddie was very pale. Every moment he was paler. He became a sickly
green. He was staring in front of him, one hand clutching an empty wine
glass. He made a valiant effort to be polite. ‘No—I—I’m not bored. I’m
only drunk.’ He rubbed his hand over his head, then half rose. ‘If—if
you’ll excuse me,’ he said hurriedly.

Mary’s monologue had come to an abrupt stop. Her eyes had the round,
questioning gaze of wonder. Eddie got out of his chair and fled.

‘I’m going to leave this minute,’ Nora announced.

‘No, you can’t. He’s ill, poor boy. We’ll have to wait until he feels
able to go home. Maybe’—Mary’s face shone with excitement—’we’ll have to
go home with him.’

‘I won’t.’

‘He may be in such a state he can’t go alone.’ Mary suggested hopefully.

‘I won’t go.’

‘You wouldn’t desert a poor young man that drank a little too much. He
gets so intense writing poetry. He’s just like ashes. I saw him that way
in Maine. Then afterward——’

‘He gets drunk, I suppose.’

‘Poets have always led very irregular lives. You know that, Nora.’

‘He’s disgusting.’

‘You wait until he recites some of his verse. It’s wonderful. You’ll
forget everything.’

Mr. Gaston’s return cut off any further argument. He sat down heavily.
When his glance fell upon his half-smoked cigar, he turned green all
over again. Hurriedly he summoned the waiter for a whiskey-and-soda.
Nora flashed signals to Mary, who tried to keep her attention safely
directed elsewhere. Nora’s chair dug at her back. Her head ached. She
had been shut up in this vile place hours—hours with the tormenting
length of weeks, years. Some Italians at the next table had started a
shouting din of song. A man near the window was trying to quarrel with
the waiter. Eddie Gaston continued to stare in front of him. In another
moment, if he didn’t make a second hasty flight, Nora knew he was going
to be sick. A low groan. Nora now felt a dizzy swell overtaking her. The
remnants of Eddie’s cigar sent up sickening fumes. She couldn’t stand it
any longer. She lifted her limp body out of her chair. Mary pulled her
back with a jerk.

‘More whiskey,’ Eddie demanded.

‘He needs it to set him up,’ Mary whispered. ‘Nora, if you——’

Mary heroically started a cheerful monologue, Nora staring at Eddie
opposite her, surely now in the lowest depths of sickness. But the
whiskey gave him a sudden reviving spurt. He straightened up in his
chair, patted his curls, turned his head cautiously. Mary seized the
favorable moment to nod to Nora that Eddie was, for the time being,
restored.

‘Well,’ Mary remarked tactfully, ‘perhaps we might be going.’

Eddie’s attention was directed to a cigarette still clasped by its amber
holder. He reached for it, gathered together all his scattered powers,
and, after an uncertain fumble or two, abstracted the one from the
other, got the holder back into its case and into the correct pocket.

‘Well,’ sighed Eddie with the satisfaction of a real conquest.

The waiter cut short the beginning of a feeble argument as Mr. Gaston
was paying the bill. He got the young ladies and the poor young
gentleman into their coats and conducted them to the door. Mary hailed a
taxi-cab mercifully pausing at the corner and gave a strange address.
During the short ride, Mr. Gaston began to recite the sonnet which had
come to him only that morning. Yes, he was sure it was that morning.

   No murmur from beyond the iron gate
   That guards the world of deeds steals here, no rue
   For burning words or anger’s bitter brew:
   We are immune from sorrow, now, and hate.
   Let cool winds find my throat insatiate;
   Let glaucous hollows gleam as the retinue
   Of pale gold sunrise-clarions sound elate;
   Let keen blue swords of beauty cleave me through!

   So calm comes dropping slowly down, and sorrows,
   Desires unsated, melt like fevered dreams
   From days untroubled and unstirred tomorrows:
   In one dissolved wave of peace there streams
   Our mingled effluence; and, clinging girdless,
   We greet the dripping dawn with lips drowned wordless.

He went on and on. The search for beauty, the futility of wasted youth,
the bitter bitterness of love—one felt all this in the succession of
verses which poured from his lips.

When the taxi stopped at Mr. Gaston’s door, he turned to Nora. ‘I’m
going to begin life on a higher plane,’ he told her, ‘a higher plane.
I’ll begin to-morrow. A poet—his sacred duties—his——’

‘I think he’d better,’ Nora agreed, as she watched him climb the front
steps, clinging to the rail. ‘He can’t begin any too soon.’

‘I hope he gets upstairs to his room safely,’ said Mary. ‘He’s very
poor. He lives by writing—articles for the papers—book criticisms and a
poetry column. It’s killing for a poet—that kind of drudgery.’

‘He ought not drink up his money.’

‘He’s a real genius. The only one I’ve ever known. But mother won’t let
him come to the house. He came once when——’

‘I don’t believe I appreciate genius.’

‘No, you don’t, Nora. Here you had a great chance to—to——’

But Nora never saw Eddie Gaston again. And what is more significant,
never heard of him again. Mary Howe’s experiences went that way.


                                   IV

The morning after the May baskets had been hung on the doors of faculty
and class officers with the singing of appropriate Elizabethan melodies,
Nora was summoned to Professor Steele’s office.

Miss Steele placed a chair for Nora in front of her desk. ‘Miss Deming,
the committee has read your essay. It puzzled me, as well as the others,
that a young girl in the midst of this present emotional crisis should
be—so—so detached.’

Nora tried to evade Miss Steele’s direct glance. ‘I—I can’t help it,’
she faltered. ‘I’ve always been detached.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I—maybe
it’s because—after my father and mother died—I felt detached.
Cordelia—the friend who brought me up—she’s very good. But she’s
detached, too.’

Miss Steele looked down quickly toward the papers on her desk. ‘I wasn’t
criticizing you,’ she said. ‘I meant to give you high praise. The
committee awarded you the prize unanimously. It is excellent work.
Remarkable for an undergraduate.’ Miss Steele cleared her throat. ‘It
made me decide——We want you in our department next year as an
instructor. It will mean some drudgery at first, years of study, and
then——’

‘But I—I’m not good enough.’

Miss Steele rose and went over toward the window. ‘You are interested in
modern history, aren’t you? And in its foundations? I’ve followed your
work the last two years carefully. Except for a temporary aberration in
sociology’—Miss Steele’s face twisted into a reluctant smile—’you have
been the only student with no bias—no hasty conclusions. Of course it
means you are an historian.’

‘I—I don’t know.’

‘But you mustn’t go into it—into historical study—with the idea that—it
is hard to tell you.’ Miss Steele seemed to be tortured with the duty of
a shamed confession. ‘I must warn you—before you decide—you mustn’t make
my fatal error. Since the war began—they—my colleagues saw the
change—that I——But I couldn’t explain. For years I had been embracing a
fatal delusion.’

‘You thought there wouldn’t be any more wars.’ Nora leaped to the truth
without waiting for Miss Steele.

‘Exactly.’ The older woman’s voice was dry and hard. ‘It has been the
folly of my generation to take evolution too seriously. Unconsciously I
applied it to history. As I studied the past, I saw the world passing
through various evolutionary stages—that slowly—then—perhaps in my time
war would go—and then——’

‘But Greece and Rome—and Japan.’

‘Yes, I forgot them. I was a student of modern Europe. I didn’t go far
enough back. And I limited myself more and more to that patch of western
Europe which for me had become the world. I forgot the Balkans and
Russia and Turkey. Of course it was all childishness.’

Yes, Nora could understand now why they thought her essay was detached.
She hadn’t forgotten certain things. But it was remembering—not having
delusions—which made one feel so alone sometimes.

‘So you must have no hopes, my child. It’s my duty to warn you. The
world will go on making the same errors. Not even different errors. We
record the same stupid folly. Our function is to record—to interpret.
But if you start out—not a dupe—the sweep of the past, the glimpse of
the present—watching it—like a spectator at a play——’

‘But I——’ From these chilly heights Nora in the warm ardor of her youth
shrank back afraid.

‘Will you join us? I’m beginning to—please don’t think me foolish—the
war—I’m not young any more. I feel so tired. I want some one young to
start where I left off. You’—Miss Steele reached for Nora’s hand and
gave it a stiff, embarrassed jerk—’Nora, I want you to go on with my
work. There is no one else here I trust. I——’

Nora’s eyes, from whose burning directness her contemporaries looked
away sometimes, were lifted to Miss Steele’s face, a hard, furrowed face
which had attempted to build up fortifications for a too sensitive and
timid spirit. Miss Steele, so aloof on her lecturer’s platform, so
self-sufficient in her study, producing scholarly works, Nora had
admired. But this weary old woman reaching out for the sturdy support of
some one young, she loved.

‘I—I’ll do what I can,’ Nora heard herself saying in a clear, ringing
voice. ‘If you want me, I’ll come.’

Hurrying across the campus, with the spring breeze spreading out her
muslin dress like a cloud, she had the swift upliftment of a young
immortal entrusted with an urgent message for a stupid world. She passed
Faculty House, where three deliberate, stiff-gaited professors were
walking back and forth involved in a discussion of some infinitesimal
college business evidently carried away from a committee meeting. Their
academic tones, which years of the process of delivering authoritative
information produce, swept Nora down to the baffling indecisions of the
mortal plane. In an instant of rash folly she had dedicated herself to a
future represented by the women she saw before her.

She turned and fled from the campus. To the east a path led to open
country, with fruit trees in their pale green fringing the hillside. Up
toward the hilltop she ran, breathless and terrified. What had she done?
Why? She didn’t want any more of Petersfield. She must escape—go far
away. As she looked behind her, the regular ranks of red-brick buildings
were like prison walls, waiting to enclose her, to keep the fresh air
away from her, rob her of youth and hope. No, she wouldn’t. She would
tell Miss Steele she had changed her mind. She wanted to do something
else—something big and free. But what? Against this wall Nora’s wild
spirit beat. She reached the hilltop and threw herself down in the grass
under a sprightly apple tree flaunting the luxuriance of its prime.

In the college paper the winner of the history essay was announced as
Nora Deming, class of ’16, of Maronac Harbor, Wisconsin, who had been
appointed to an instructorship in history. This official bulletin of
campus news, every year close to its last gasp of an existence bounded
by college seasons, was crowded with interesting items. Below Nora’s
honor was spread out the array of college engagements. The class of ’16
displayed a roster of unusual length. Among the names was that of
Eleanor Porter, engaged to Fuzzy’s brother, athletic like Fuzzy, and so
solidly established in his father’s automobile business that they could
be married at once. Petersfield had also disposed of Eleanor’s future in
less formal fashion than Nora’s, but with equal sureness.

On the evening that Nora’s honors were published, Mary Howe beat against
Nora’s door. ‘Come to Amelia’s room quick. She’s carrying on fearfully
about not getting the prize. Almost hysterical, I guess. She wants to
see you.’

Amelia sat huddled over her study table, her eyes red and swollen. ‘Why
did you take it away from me?’ she accused Nora. ‘You didn’t try so
hard. And I—I didn’t have anything else. You—you with everything.’

Nora stood rigid in front of Amelia, quite untouched by pity. ‘How do
you know I had anything else?’ she demanded. Then, turning away, she
closed Amelia’s door between them.

Nora marched in the long procession of academically gowned seniors to
receive her diploma. She was a B.A. from Petersfield, who shook hands
with Prexy and received the congratulations of the faculty. Her next act
was to superintend the moving of her battered furniture to the wing of
Faculty House occupied by the young instructors, known among themselves
as ‘scrub faculty.’ She stood in the barren room for a moment. This,
then, was life, of which her Socialist League had so feelingly spoken.
So extravagant a waste of words over so little.


                                   V

In Maronac, Nora found that the war had already laid its insidious touch
upon the long-established peace of the American and German settlement.
Once more the river formed an impassable boundary. The Germans on the
south side of town, who sent money to their starving relatives abroad,
were bewildered by the strange tales circulated against their
birthplace. Their sympathies soon became the subject of much bitter talk
on the north side. They were traitors, aliens, ungrateful for all the
United States had given them. Father Stokesbury had been in a training
camp the last time he wrote to Cordelia. Britain needed more soldiers.
He might be in the trenches by this time. To Cordelia the war was now a
holy cause.

But Cordelia still continued her Sunday visits to Della. She and Mrs.
Schuster had domestic battles to settle. Della’s mother was pushing her
old-maid daughter into a marriage with a widower, the father of three
children.

‘It’s all Della hears,’ scolded Cordelia. ‘He’s a good enough man, but
he’s twenty years older. I know he is.’

‘My Della’s bein’ courted by a goot German man,’ Mrs. Schuster announced
to Nora on her first visit. ‘A fine fella.’ She wore the cheerful
expression of triumph which confirmed Cordelia’s worst fears.

‘But who will take care of the garden if Della leaves you?’ teased Nora.

‘I’ll have some goot grass. All them flowers—they’re no use to me.’

‘But living all alone——’

Mrs. Schuster only grinned. ‘I’ll keep the parrot. He’s a goot boy.’

The parrot shrieked back, ‘Della old maid—old maid.’

‘Silly boy,’ Mrs. Schuster said. ‘Silly boy.’

By the end of the summer Della was married in Saint Margaret’s, her
three stolid step-children in the front pew with Mrs. Schuster staring
solemnly at the bride in a long veil and all the conventional
habiliments of a wedding ceremony. In the pew with Cordelia and Nora sat
Amy Henderson, taking an hour off from Weyhausen’s to see her old fellow
worker on the Altar Guild married. If Amy had bitter memories as she
looked at Della’s bridal array, they were hidden by the elegance of a
blue crêpe dress which gave her the vivid pink freshness of her
girlhood. A salary of twenty-five dollars a week, an unprecedented sum
for a woman to earn in Maronac, may have helped her to forget. Old Mr.
Weyhausen recognized real capability. Lizzie Guildford occupied her
usual place with the same elegant superiority, never looking in the
direction of her neighbor. Except for her studied hostility, one would
think she had entirely forgotten the tragedy which joined her to
Cordelia. Father Stokesbury’s successor, a timid little Cockney
hurriedly produced by the Bishop, mumbled the service at galloping
speed, and soon the wedding guests were leaving the church.

At the next wedding in Saint Margaret’s Nora was one of Eleanor’s
bridesmaids. Mrs. Porter after much trouble had persuaded the Bishop to
read the service. He was very feeble, and his voice broke several times.

Nora found Cordelia stretched out in the Bishop’s chair when she
returned from the wedding breakfast. ‘I hope I won’t be going to another
wedding for a long time.’

Cordelia looked up. ‘Yes—two this summer. But Mrs. Porter is so
relieved. There was no one for Eleanor here.’ She turned away from Nora.
‘There’s no young man that you——’

‘No,’ Nora answered sternly.

‘You think you’ll like to—to—stay on there where it’s mostly women.’

‘I’ve got my work to do,’ Nora reminded her.

‘Yes, work—it helps. But——’ Cordelia’s fingers fluttered over a letter
on the library table. Nora saw her gather it up, and conceal it under
her white apron. ‘I heard this morning—from Father Stokesbury. He’s in
France close to the front—any time——’

Nora shrank from the revelation in Cordelia’s face. ‘It can’t touch
him,’ she said. The memory of her girlish dreams made a swift tug at her
heart. ‘Any one so—so alive. He can’t die.’

Cordelia had stumbled toward the hall door, and was gone.


                               CHAPTER IV


                                   I

In late September a mob of freshman girls surged into the history
amphitheatre where Professor Steele every year delivered the two general
lectures which introduced first-year students to a prescribed diet of
‘history survey.’ Nora, sitting in the front row with the other members
of the department, experienced a fresh stab of panic as each new group
passed through the swinging doors. Out of this mass she was to build her
future.

The first lecture was a dramatic and brilliant description of Rome
before the barbarian invasions. In rapid summary Miss Steele presented
the elements of its power, its political organization (which embraced a
territory curiously similar, Nora observed, to the present possessions
of the Allied armies, now that Russia was falling away), the amenities
of life, the heights of culture reached by its citizens with their
triumphs in architecture, sculpture, and literature. She then descended
to the weakness of this apparently invincible empire; held together by
no actual unity, dependent upon mercenary armies, forbidding political
discussion, enjoying luxuries bought with slavery and the misery of the
common people, sinking into a general intellectual decadence,
indifferent to science, indulging in the vain shows of gladiatorial
combats. A comparison of this ancient decay, concerning which none of
the freshmen, with the bloom of health and home still upon them, seemed
to be greatly excited, might have been made with Rome’s modern
successor. But Miss Steele’s audience, not yet inured to the fatigue of
hour-lectures, were beginning to look toward the clock.

On the following day Professor Steele devoted her time to a description
of the modern states of Europe as they were before the barbarian
invasions. West of the Rhine dwelt ‘Chaos and old Night.’ Italy, France,
Spain, and England, even beyond Hadrian’s Wall, all possessed some of
the culture emanating from Rome. Then the barbarians came. At the name
of the Huns, so recently revived in popular memory, even the most
indifferent of the note-takers lifted an inquiring head. Greece had
fallen before Rome, Rome before the Vandals and the Huns. Miss Steele
went no farther. If the painful building of a new civilization were to
go the same way, the autumn of 1916 had not yet made clear.

The bell rang, the freshmen scrambled toward the door, breaking the
silence with the scraping of chairs and the clatter of released tongues.
The Roman schoolboy, informed of the approach of wild tribes from the
North, was probably equally indifferent to the great catastrophe.
Petersfield freshmen, involved in the intricacies of a crowded
book-store and new subjects, and suffering general geographical
bewilderment in strange scenes, had no time to contemplate the future of
Europe.

After the two lectures, Nora was assigned her portion of the history
flock. Professor Steele, who had no theories about coddling the
apprentices in her department, stated that freshman history, making a
general survey of the foundations of the modern world, was a liberal
education for her young instructors, and she gave them four sections.

Twenty-five or thirty untamed girls tumbling into a classroom appeared
to Nora not as human beings differing little from herself only four
years ago, but as fillers of chairs, with feet that always moved, as
rows of staring, sneering eyes in faces fixed in a succession of
grimaces at the slightest possible excuse for amusement. Nora heard a
high, unnatural voice going on and on by means of some kind of internal
machinery she was not conscious of directing. To her surprise these
meaningless and jumbled sentences were being taken seriously by the
restless throng before her and transcribed into note-books. By the end
of the first day she went to bed with pains shooting all over. By
morning she collected her jaded powers and crawled through another day.

Across the hall Mr. Powys had gathered a fresh crop of sociological
enthusiasts about him and was injecting into them his brand of hope for
the world. When Nora reached a painful pause, she heard his voice
ringing out with the old vigor she remembered.

Mr. Powys’s return was a surprise to all Petersfield. He was a drooping
peace dove. His blond hair had a kind of limp dejection which reminded
Nora of a young chick rescued from a hearty spring rain. From Mr. Powys
she got no succinct information of the peace ship or its manœuvres. He
had done his duty, and now he must have a moment or two to recover
before he decided on the next desperate venture. He brightened only when
Nora mentioned Ellen Standish.

‘Miss Standish has been wonderful—wonderful. So sympathetic. She made me
feel that my coming back mattered—that I was really needed here. I
couldn’t have returned without some such hope.’

Nora finished at last the agony of her first week of teaching, with the
blessed interval of Saturday and Sunday for recovery. In the meantime
fellow instructors took the burden of their jobs with a nonchalant
toleration, conversing light-heartedly at meals, which they consumed
with a normal quantity of enjoyment. They at least represented the
promise of a brighter future.

In her room all of Saturday Nora sat bent over a table heaped with books
dealing with the barbarian invasions. The volumes of Gibbon lay in a
pile on the floor beside her. Each fresh tome brought new confusion to
the task of reducing these spreading hordes within the confines of two
recitations. It was like arranging an animated antheap in some kind of
law and order.

Miss Ewing across the hall, a small dark woman from Georgia, with a
sallow face which suggested perpetual malaria, frequently interrupted
Nora’s labors.

‘Don’t work too hard, my dear,’ she warned her daily. ‘Take it all
comfortable and easy.’

Miss Ewing herself viewed life as a race. She had a bounding step close
to a run which carried her across the campus in a loping trot, precious
to undergraduate humor. An intellectual eagerness brought a flush to her
dark face, a sparkle to eyes of an otherwise commonplace grey, and drove
her to accomplish a phenomenal amount of labor. She was a
bacteriologist, with a love for science which gave her the solace of
religion, even though it had cut her off from a sheltered life and the
conventional marriage sacred to Georgian traditions.

She left her germs one Saturday afternoon to take Nora on a long country
walk. She swung off with her characteristic speed, not halting in the
ascent of the steepest hills. She darted into blackberry hedges to
follow a strange bird and chased after the moths which fluttered in
front of her.

When darkness settled upon the two, they stood on the brow of a hill
many miles from Petersfield.

‘Good evening, Vega, my dear,’ Miss Ewing said, looking up toward a
blue-white star above them. Then with a fine disregard of the sacredness
of the dinner hour in Faculty Hall, she pointed out, as they trudged
along, the serpents, dragons, dogs, kitchen utensils, and adventurous
human beings in which stars conveniently arrange themselves. Nora went
to sleep that night thinking of the Great Square of Pegasus in the
northeastern sky.

But on the next morning began a fresh contest with the swift march of
events in a history survey course. While the freshmen still followed the
last straggling barbarian invader, their teacher was a lap ahead in the
tangles of Christianity. In the distance of two or possibly three days
loomed the great figure of Charlemagne and a powerful Papacy.

Nora, in a dash from her classroom to the library to anticipate other
cub history instructors using the same books, collided one day with
Professor Steele, who was writing another book and therefore gathering
material with the greed of a squirrel carrying away nuts to his hole.
The head of the department looked very cross at her newest instructor.
The undergraduates had learned to give Professor Steele plenty of space
in her blind plunges from her study to the library, and her classroom.
She counted on their indulgence.

‘Well, Miss Deming,’ she snorted, straightening her hat.

Since her interview with Nora the preceding spring, she had given her
neither advice nor assistance. In choosing Nora Deming, she had paid her
the compliment of standing above the need of either.

But if Miss Steele had measured the despairing uncertainty of the shy
young person who hurried away from her, she might have spared a minute
from her documents. After the sureness of her powers a few months
earlier, Nora had descended to a pitiful and feverish questioning of her
ability to transcribe what she knew on the slippery surface of the
freshman mind. After a glowing account of the salvation of learning by
the Christian Church—and Nora was always glowing when she presented her
latest mental conquest—a shaking hand had risen before her
half-conscious gaze. ‘But isn’t this the Dark Ages we’re studying?’

It was Molly Abbott, with curly hair and a very charming smile, who had
read history virtuously in the library the night before instead of
attending freshman sing-song practice, for which act she was fined
twenty-five cents. The freshman has a love for anti-climax, for a
question which makes her appear to her instructor not as one of the
herd, but as an individual.

How is that great chasm between the teacher and the learner to be
bridged, especially where the one in authority is new in power and
undisciplined in gauging the mental stretches of her victims? What young
pedagogue has not started out with great intellectual ambitions,
determined to admit no compromise, to make all who should learn burn
with a zeal for learning? How does the spark strike fire?

Nora’s freshmen shook their heads and looked silly when she asked them
searching questions. They complained that she worked them too hard,
expected too much outside reading. Some of them cultivated for classroom
use a sullen, rebellious expression. And before them, Nora knew, lay the
peaks of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Nora was now grappling
with the Crusades.

As her infant historians tumbled out of the classroom, she pondered over
the state of their minds. Were they looking down upon the world with the
detachment of an aviation photographer whose lens reproduced the exact
proportions of hills and valleys? Or were they stuck in some morass of
detail from which they could not escape without her help? What
philosophy of history were they constructing for themselves? And what
philosophy had she, herself, harassed by the thought of keeping a lesson
or two ahead?

Did she want to go on? Did she like to teach? Sometimes at night, when
she was very tired, so tired that she felt sure a few hours of sleep
could never bring back the necessary vigor for a new day, she dreamed of
an existence better than this fretful haste. Cool, deliberate joy—where
did one find it? Reflection in sunny places?

Then she was very lonely. She still had the herd instincts of her
undergraduate days, and her instructorship so elevated her above the
student plane that even her old associates in the Socialist League
examined her with an appraising eye. In her classes she had squeezed the
humanity from the frigid young person the freshmen saw. They passed her
over in their search for a deity, and found Mr. Powys and Miss Goodwin.
All of her faculty contemporaries were as busy as she. Miss Ewing’s
bacteria made her their slave. There was no companion for a chance
interval.

Miss Abington, a next-door neighbor, attracted Nora. She was a shy woman
who nodded to the new history instructor when she passed her in the
hall, but for weeks went no farther. She looked very unhappy, unlike
Miss Ewing, whom science completely satisfied. Miss Abington, who taught
art, wore a green smock, moccasins of dull green suede, and her coils of
blond hair were confined by green velvet bands. She was generally
followed by her two cats, a huge Maltese and a tortoiseshell, against
which the older members of the faculty muttered dangerous threats. But
according to rumor Miss Abington possessed a special dispensation signed
by the President to keep her pets as a preventive against the nervous
depression she suffered from constant association with human beings.

Miss Abington finally invited Nora to tea one rainy Sunday afternoon. In
her own rooms her shyness suddenly left her, and she was a delightful
hostess. Her sitting-room wall was covered with her own work; portraits
of cats principally, but also paintings of flowers, and of gardens full
of sunshine, green spaces, flowers seen through tall grasses, with the
suggestion of a cat lurking in the shadows.

‘Yes,’ Miss Abington admitted, as Nora walked soberly around the room,
‘my two passions are flowers and cats. First, cats.’ To reënforce her
words the Maltese stalked out of Miss Abington’s bedroom toward Nora.

Nora backed toward the door, an uncomfortable chill passing down her
spinal column. ‘But I don’t like cats,’ she had to confess. ‘I’d rather
be in the room with a tiger.’

‘And this is Francis Bacon—a perfect gentleman.’ Miss Abington grabbed
her pet. ‘There. He weighs twenty pounds. Tremendous. And here is my
other child.’ The tortoise cat twisted itself over the rug. ‘Martin
Luther. They have terrific battles. Science and religion. Eternal
conflict. I named them first, and the pugnacity developed later.’

Nora now stood against the door, ready to spring out into the hall if
either feline made friendly advances. Miss Abington gathered science and
religion into the folds of her smock and carried them into her bedroom.

As they drank tea, Miss Abington confessed that the tragedy of life lay
for her in the fact that she spent her time talking about painting
instead of painting.

‘But you have painted a lot.’

‘Summers. And very badly. In three months one can do very little. And in
this academic atmosphere one sacrifices the emotions to the intellect.’

‘But your intelligence doesn’t help you to paint?’

‘Oh, no. I know too much to be a good painter. So I chatter about art to
crowds of girls who will clutter up museums and repeat my twaddle.’

The paintings of cats were beginning to have a delicate bloom of fame in
New York galleries. Miss Abington confessed that she kept nineteen cats
in her summer studio, none of them handsome, but all ‘so delightfully
cat-like.’ She studied every changing expression with the ceaseless
patience of a portrait painter until each animal had an individuality of
feature and soul transferred to the canvas. But being a tactful and very
kind woman, she kept cats out of her conversations with Nora. She
herself had a similar aversion to moths, marked by an almost morbid
sensitiveness to their destruction by frost as the autumn came on. As
she passed a street lamp at night with the ghostly creatures still
fluttering in steadily decreasing numbers about the light, she whispered
to Nora, ‘No, I can’t stand it. I can’t watch them suffer.’ Rebellious
against the slow methods of hard weather and starvation, she made wild
plans of her own for their quick death; but it was difficult to
circumvent Nature. ‘Even man goes the same slow way,’ she admitted. ‘But
I shall take swift means to end myself. I don’t consider it a sin.’

The destruction of mankind in Europe was daily being accomplished by
means other than famine and hard weather. Nora was now reading books on
the Industrial Revolution. In England greedy squires had encouraged
their laborers to have large families for the benefit of the estate.
Mill workers viewed a numerous progeny as a means for larger aggregate
earnings. High food and low wages fought the old battles. A surplus
population spreading over a great empire had not afforded enough relief
for the little island groaning under its burden of people. Was Malthus,
whom Victorian sentimentalists had resented so violently, right after
all, and must the world have these periodic checks of famine,
pestilence, and war to keep down the swarming millions?

In the midst of Nora’s speculations came the news that the United States
had declared war against Germany. The students, who since Nora’s time
had vacillated between indifference and spasmodic sentiment, became
martial overnight. The Socialist League gave up its last feeble flicker
of pacifism. Nora’s freshmen grew restless and indifferent. In their
schoolgirl circle was the prospect now of brothers and friends in
officers’ training camps. The boys they had danced with at West Point a
week ago were now glorified, heroic men. Among the faculty, enthusiasm
for the war was somewhat tempered by sober considerations of the
thousands of dead in Europe.

Amelia Donaldson was arrested in New York for making anti-draft speeches
on the street. The professor of English literature, Miss Hays, had
settled Amelia as a teacher in the New York Labor College which she had
sponsored from its start. She told every one that Amelia was at last
very happy. But with the declaration of war, Amelia saw the students she
was giving economics and general culture snatched from her for bayonet
practice. There was nothing for her, then, but soapbox oratory.

Petersfield got first-page headlines in the New York papers. Amelia in
jail gave defiant interviews to all the reporters. Mr. Powys made a
flying trip to New York to furnish bail. He rescued her from martyrdom.
Amelia must be reserved for greater struggles.

His action divided campus opinion. The most excitable faculty members
wanted a ‘dangerous alien’ removed. Several of the trustees got stirred
up. But Miss Steele put aside her manuscripts for a few days to make a
fight to save him. In action she was a forceful figure, with unexpected
strategies in managing the trustees and a barrage of sarcasm to crumple
her faculty foes. Miss Hays carried Amelia off to a labor colony for the
summer with the hope that the problems of education would keep her from
street-corner agitation.


                                   II

By fall Petersfield had stepped in line to help win the war. Both
faculty and students in a large room in the science building scraped
bandages and prepared other hospital supplies. Red Cross drives consumed
most of the undergraduate energy. Miss Goodwin was coaching a play, the
proceeds to go to war relief. Every evening the faculty met in the
parlor of Faculty House to learn to knit. Women who had previously spent
all of their evenings in the laboratory or the library now bent over
wooden needles held awkwardly, making clumsy stitches which generally
had to come out. Mufflers in a variety of ripples and waves, sweaters
too large or too small for the average soldier, socks that remained in
the same indefinite stage of completion tumbled from under stiff
professorial fingers. At the same time silly girls of eighteen or
nineteen were achieving remarkable results in purling and fancy stitches
with little effort. Intellectual and manual skill, sadly enough, seldom
travel together.

Gradually the custom developed for one of the women to read while the
others worked for their country. To convert the American public to a
state of mind demanded by conflicts involving both hemispheres, amazing
chronicles were appearing, combining the realism of wholesale
destruction with a sentimental patriotic appeal. Soldier-authors, who
described in detail the putrefaction of death on the battlefield, the
torture of victims in barbed-wire entanglements, the wrecks of men in
the hospital beds, also recorded the spiritual elation of war, the hopes
of a new world, the glorious philosophy of death. War humor developed a
little more slowly. Untainted realism was still far from advisable.

From these readings Miss Steele was notably absent. She gathered all war
books into her phrase ‘garbage,’ declared she did not know how to knit,
and was too busy to learn. Miss Abington stole quietly away from the
first knitting meeting enlivened by war literature.

‘I can’t bear it,’ she whispered to Nora with a twisted, tortured smile.
‘I must try to think of other things.’

As the winter went on and the faculty staged grim contests in knitting
the greatest number of sweaters and socks, needles clicked steadily
through faculty meetings, Miss Steele looking on with scornful
amusement. Unlike the other professors she did not permit students to
knit in her classes. They quoted her as saying that a little information
about the past was not amiss in these troubled times, which she refused
to complicate further by the mental disease of divided attention.
Clearly enough she was not a patriotic woman.

Petersfield girls were giving a large share of their time to being
patriotic. They threw themselves whole-souled into each new drive and
fad, were photographed in Red Cross uniform, cracked jests over the
novelty of meatless and wheatless days, and made picturesque use of the
latest mob developments. When the march of events dragged somewhat, they
read war verse. Rupert Brooke had fallen before unworthy rivals
truckling in cheap and hysterical emotion. There was much
letter-writing, much pride in the possession of the photographs of
potential heroes. The trains were crowded with girls going to New York
to say good-bye to fathers, brothers, cousins, lovers, leaving for
distant camps. Handsome uniformed boys on leave appeared on the campus.

The old life could not go on in the same way. The faculty looked on with
a romantic sympathy for young love making holiday, blind to the
consequences of lavish permissions granted the undergraduates to spend
the day in New York. Not all went there to deliver tearful farewells to
lovers embarking for France. Some consoled themselves for want of lovers
by a day of change and adventure. They prowled about in strange places,
investigated Amelia’s laboring classes, and ate at Greenwich Village
restaurants, where they cultivated cigarette-smoking. They brought back
to the campus an assertiveness which came out in meetings agitating
greater undergraduate powers in college government. The bolder spirits
broke rules, and their followers in a body supported them and clashed
with faculty authority. Miss Steele refused to serve on a committee
appointed to investigate the cause of this new spirit. With her book in
full swing she had no time to waste on a committee searching for
something under their very noses.

Nora, who had given up her struggles in knitting after the completion of
a muffler rejected by the Red Cross, was also watching the rapid
appearance of a new order. During her second year of teaching she was
less driven by her subject. Her students ceased to be mere receivers of
painfully acquired lecture material. They had become individuals, caught
up in all the difficulties she had once suffered.

A freshman from the South confessed to Nora, as an excuse for inadequate
information about the causes of the French Revolution, that she had
stayed up all of the preceding night to argue with her room-mate from
Boston.

‘There’s two things we’ve got to get settled right away,’ she
explained—‘God and the Civil War.’

At the moment American soldiers were being killed in the front-line
trenches. Miss Ewing was expecting to hear every day that her brother
had landed in France.

‘The war doesn’t touch you,’ she reminded Nora. ‘You are very
fortunate.’

In Miss Ewing’s words Nora detected an unconscious superiority. Elevated
above the rest of Petersfield were those chosen ones who had relatives
on the way to the front. In the parlor of Faculty House women like Miss
Ewing of the inner circle of supreme devotion to their country drifted
together. Nora, overhearing their talk of commissions, ports in England
and France, the expectation of cablegrams, envied their intimate
participation. She had not written to Father Stokesbury, who sent
Cordelia letters full of humor from a French village not far from the
front. When her students consulted her as an historian about the war,
they were surprised to discover her bewilderment.

‘But I thought every one knew we were fighting to save Europe,’ one
young thing commented.

‘Save from what?’

But such a question was too much for a mere freshman.

The President in his message to Congress had presented his Fourteen
Points. They were read aloud, one by one, in the faculty parlor, during
the knitting, each decorated with comment and debate. Miss Ewing, a good
Southern Democrat, stood behind her President with a fervor which soon
made him in her eyes a saint, the savior of a war-torn world.

‘He’s the great man of our age,’ she affirmed to Nora, ‘the great man.’

But the New England Republicans did not agree with Miss Ewing. They were
violent in shouting a shrill warning to persons in danger of being duped
by sickly idealism.


                                  III

Ellen’s engagement to Michael Powys was precipitated into matrimony by
Amelia Donaldson’s importunate passion for Michael. From the day he had
rescued her from prison, Amelia had sent fervent epistles to her
deliverer, beginning on the high plane of sociology, but soon declaring
deathless love. Then she got ill. At last she threatened suicide. In
this crisis Nora was hastily summoned to New York to see Ellen and
Michael safely married.

When Nora returned to Petersfield, Cordelia’s letter was awaiting her.
Father Stokesbury was dead.

Never for a moment had she thought he could be killed—that death could
take any one—young, smiling, with a jest for everything. No, it couldn’t
be.

Father Stokesbury was the only splendid man she had ever known. She
could have loved him if——Why had she let those women keep her away? If
he and she——Racking sobs tore at her throat. He was a stranger. She had
never known him. No one in Maronac had pierced the enigmatic aloofness
underneath his sparkling exterior. Now it was too late.

If she could have seen him before he left Maronac——A memory of his face
in repose—the strained intensity—the troubled depths——What bitterness
had taught him that persistent raillery—that humor edged with sadness?
If she had talked to him—found out if he was sure he was embarking upon
a holy mission——Or was he like her—full of doubt? If a man fought to
save the world and his soul, the last moment would bring upliftment. But
if he had gone reluctantly—urged on by a duty which society forced upon
the young and the strong——There was the torment. She would never know.

The damning memory of the war books read in the faculty parlor—the
loathsome pictures——She mustn’t—one would go mad thinking of it. If he,
like some of them—slow death—not the swift proud end. No, she couldn’t
think of it.

Why should this man bring to her what her mother—her wasted mother, with
a sigh and a smile for her over the last struggling breath—had not
brought? The relief to her, that strong childish memory. And this
bitterness now.

At the end, if he had known some one loved him—some woman. If one is
greatly loved, death is not complete annihilation. The memory in the
other heart—a flitting, tenuous visitant in the midst of all the boring
duties in the world—even that——If she had loved him—even if he hadn’t
known—given him her best——But she had thrown away her chance. And for
what? Even Cordelia had something precious left her.

In the next days Nora tried to bury herself in her historical studies.
She found herself again and again staring at her book—not reading a
word. She detected Miss Abington and Miss Ewing examining her with
furtive, pitying glances. She knew what they were thinking. If it had
only been that——

On the library steps, she met Professor Steele with an armful of books.
‘Have you settled on any particular line of study?’ the older woman
inquired with her characteristic abruptness.

Nora informed her that she had almost decided to take eighteenth and
nineteenth century English history for her province.

‘Very good, very good,’ murmured Miss Steele, her eyes fixed upon the
library door. ‘Very inauspicious time. You’ll have to wait until after
the war to go to England.’

A few days later, Nora received a formal announcement from the committee
on scholarships that she had been awarded one for a year of graduate
study. She went at once to Miss Steele’s office.

‘I don’t see what I’ve done to deserve it,’ she exclaimed breathlessly.

Miss Steele looked up calmly from a mass of papers she had been
examining. ‘Good brains are scarce, Miss Deming. You really had very
little to compete against.’ Then, when she had completed a crisply
directed oration about Nora’s scholarly plans, she added: ‘Very bad time
to study. Our universities are demoralized. But I was afraid if you
stayed here much longer, you’d begin to think Petersfield was the world.
It isn’t. Last year your black despair gave me no concern. But this year
I’d begun to detect a tendency to be satisfied here—to settle down. A
grave symptom in the young.’

Nora saw the mocking smile lurking beneath Miss Steele’s solemnity, and
smiled too.

When she visited Knickerbocker University in New York to make plans for
her studies there in the fall, she had a moment of terror. Petersfield
had not prepared her for the crowded corridors and impersonal machinery
of a university. But it was this intellectual stronghold she must try to
conquer. She was like a nun, who, after running away from her cloister,
looks back with longing to the security there. And yet in the tumult of
the streets, with the confusion of traffic and the bright colors of the
foreign uniforms which now made New York like a European capital on
parade, she experienced what had never come to her in Petersfield.
Excitement, novelty, change. Her eyes were blinded with tears as she
made her uncertain way to the subway, nearly upsetting the box of a
flower-vendor selling clusters of pansies on the sidewalk.

‘Flowas—nice flowas,’ he invited customers in a soft foreign voice.

She selected a bunch and fastened them on her coat, like a banner to
give her courage as she made her first timid excursion out of that
sacred grove for maidenhood which Petersfield had been. In the
bewildering glare of sunshine, she blinked, hesitated an instant, and
then plunged forward with a firm step, her flowers nodding before her.




                               PART III.
                                 Actæon


                               CHAPTER I


                                   I

Nora, following the sidewalk which pierced Knickerbocker University,
passed between rows of buildings uniformly red brick, rising storey
above storey, all close duplicates, as if designed from the original
plan of an architect inspired to construct the largest number of
classrooms and the maximum of windows, sunshine, cross-ventilation, with
the smallest consumption of New York ground space. It came down to a
genius of economy in utilizing the very precious and rocky fragment of
Manhattan Island which the University had gobbled up just in time.
Accordingly, Knickerbocker University had anticipated the modern factory
in its construction, proving that culture does not always lag behind
industry.

But to one fresh from the groves of Petersfield, Knickerbocker was
dispiriting. Nora must wait to penetrate its inner life. Hidden springs
gushed, overflowed from a source having no connection with this barren
exterior. She must be patient.

In the September sunshine the people hurrying past her made her feel
cheerful, uplifted. It was they who mattered. All of them, one guessed
from their brisk, business-like air, had something important to do. They
were vital people whose existence mattered. The young men—were they
students—would they walk daily the same pavements, read in the
library—like her? Only the youngest ones. This was war-time: two
officers walking together, with the nervous, alert expression she was
sure they had cultivated, reminded her. And the last building before she
crossed the street, the windows open, boys in olive-drab uniforms sat
looking out. The S.A.T.C.; she had forgotten. If the war lasted long
enough, they would be soldiers. Without them the University would be
deserted—only professors and a few men physically unfit. These
youngsters—doing something to them—hasty plans—but universities must be
used some way. A crowd of boys in a window high above the street were
throwing down wads of paper to make the girls hurrying for the subway
look up at them.

Nora crossed the street. A broad business thoroughfare and a tangle of
trolley lines separated the dormitory for graduate women and those in
the professional schools from the rest of the University. The same old
sex division. Men’s dormitories on one side, a long row of them, the one
for women on the other, obeying the scriptural order, ‘male and female
created he them.’ The women’s hall, being an architect’s latest dream,
was even more gaunt and towering than its prototypes. Its windows in
unvarying rows going up and up—one of them hers—all representing some
woman huddled behind each glass pane——No, she wouldn’t live there. One
decision, at least, was easily made.

In her bag was a list of neighborhood apartments with rooms rented to
students. She would try these. She had a long block of the busy street
before she made the initial plunge of the first address. A shoe-shining
place with rows of hats in the window, its open door, men coming in and
out. All New York men looked smart and well-groomed. Nowhere else was
there the same correctness of detail. Here men made an art of middle
age, the rough tweeds suggesting the brown of early fall, with the
sunshine bringing out bright threads interwoven like autumn leaves, the
glossy hats in soft tones, the gleam of freshly polished shoes, the
socks in a harmony of dull tones. How stupid the clothes of men were
elsewhere! How alive here!

The women passed her unobserved. It was the men she saw. Women—she had
watched too many women. She was relieved that she had decided not to
live in that stuffy women’s hall. Of course it would be stuffy. Places
filled with women—only women—always were. All the vitality squeezed out.
Respectability and lack of adventure did it.

With her trunk and bags still at the station, Nora had a whole day to
look around. No haste—the luxury of it.

In the first apartment house an ebony elevator man, in a new uniform,
the collar very stiff and shiny with braid, immediately guessed her
errand.

‘Room, Miss? Miss Johnson—I guess she’s filled up. But Miss
Walters—eighth floor—she’s got a nice room. Pleasant lady. Take ye up,
Miss?’

Miss Walters, dressed in a street costume, opened the door. ‘A room. Oh,
yes. Just for yourself?’

She swung back a near-by door, presenting a view of a very small dark
room, opening upon a narrow court. She went ahead to turn on a
rose-shaded lamp. The lamp, with the yellow walls and white wicker
furniture, helped to give an impression of light, but at ten o’clock in
the morning the room was naturally full of gloom.

‘The last roomer stayed four years,’ Miss Walters began. ‘She loved this
room. So girlish, she said. The light furniture and the cretonne——’

‘But I couldn’t study in such a room.’ Miss Walters was politely
non-committal. ‘I thought I’d like a place with morning sun.’

‘Sun is very hard to get in New York and very expensive.’

Sunshine and fresh air a luxury. A new idea. Then she remembered the
settlement neighborhood.

In the next apartment the ominous smell of some disinfectant assailed
her. Across the court a woman was drying her hair with a fan. It seemed
indecent to live so close to people.

The trained nurse, generally away all day, with a room to rent,
conducted Nora into the presence of a young man without a collar, who
was pounding a typewriter. ‘Don’t mind him,’ Miss Jones said, observing
Nora’s hesitation. ‘He’s leaving to-day.’ The floor was strewn with
paper, sheets of it thrown loosely everywhere.

‘No. I don’t mind being exhibited,’ he said, pausing. ‘I don’t pay my
rent promptly, so I have to leave.’ He gave Miss Jones a meaning glance.

‘He’s an author,’ Miss Jones murmured confidentially as Nora backed out
of the room. ‘You didn’t let me show you the closets—two of them.’

The rent was ten dollars a week. Of course it was impossible. If the
author had been staying and there had been some kind of hole for her to
creep into—living in the same apartment with a man who wrote might give
her something.

All the decent rooms she saw were beyond what she could pay. ‘Haven’t
you a girl friend who would share the room with you?’ chirped
prospective landladies. Twilight was coming on, and she had to find a
place for the night. There was nothing but the women’s dormitory. Nora
tottered back on aching feet.

The matron assigned her a room whose unrelieved walls, wash-basin, and
concrete floor brought weary tears. Once more she was baffled. Herded
with hundreds of women. The same old thing all over again. Would there
ever be escape from such a life?

In the cafeteria downstairs the clatter of dishes and the voices
spinning in circles and dizzy waves around her choked her as she tried
to eat some corned-beef hash and tough buttered beets. Women, tired like
her, sat at bare tables, their hair falling in limp wisps over their
faces. Most of them were not young. The sagged resignation in the sallow
faces belonged with airless schoolrooms, high-pitched, nervous voices,
blackboards, clouds of chalk dust. Why had they come here?

The trolleys, the trucks, the fire-engines clanging up and down as if
bent on mad exercise, the milk carts, kept Nora awake most of the night.
Toward dawn she slept. When she opened her eyes, the breeze was blowing
out the sash curtain, and from her couch she could look down upon miles
and miles of streets, full of golden light, all astir with the activity
of a new morning.

Nora learned that the professor Miss Steele had advised her to study
with was on some war committee in Washington. Two of the others were not
to be found in their offices the first time she called. One very bored
young man talked to three or four women waiting in the hall, disposing
of them efficiently together to save valuable time.

‘It’s just our money they want,’ said one. ‘I wonder why I came.’

The professors Nora saw were very polite in a formal, almost scared way,
but they did not urge her to take their courses or advise her about the
offering of their colleagues. Evidently a graduate school was like the
cafeteria. The food was spread out, and you could take what looked good
to you. But a cafeteria meal was too often an unbalanced array of dishes
snatched at in a crowded line. No proper proportion of protein,
carbohydrates, and starches one heard about. Not at all what one wanted.
The history courses she registered for were probably not much better.

The lectures the first days were discouraging—all facts. Some were a
repetition of Petersfield. No new point of view. Nora took down notes in
a mad race with the lecturer; then her pen lagged, and she stared around
the room. Most of the students were women. The men were the discards of
the draft board, or wore wedding rings, sometimes ostentatiously. As
Miss Steele had said, this was an inauspicious time to begin graduate
work. The University was apologetic, uneasy. The war might last another
year. Professors were dispirited. Those who had tried to get over to
France champed fretfully over the drudgery of going on with the old
sing-song lectures. Those who felt civilization must be kept going raged
in secret over the rows of meek female faces before them.

From many of the classroom windows Nora could watch men drilling on the
athletic grounds. The papers were full of alarming news about an
epidemic of influenza brought from Europe which was spreading in the
training camps. In a few days men from the dormitory across the street
were being carried out by attendants with handkerchiefs over nose and
mouth. The epidemic had come. Women in Nora’s hall were ill. Many were
frightened. They were advised to keep outdoors and away from the subways
and theatres.

Nora in the airless library began thinking about germs. The library
encouraged low prospects. It was huge, unmanageable, slow. One waited
hours for books which, at last, were announced as not in.

At last she found a quiet reading-room; and by degrees she adjusted
herself to the University. In the basement of the library was a place
where tea was served every afternoon. Women, snatching a little
refreshment before they returned to their books, talked to Nora. At a
corner table every day sat two young men with the curse of feeble health
upon them. At least a kind of transparent unsubstantiality characterized
their tense frames. They appeared to be engaged in an argument prolonged
from day to day. Nora drank two cups of tea in lingering sips and bought
a second piece of currant cake. Tea on a dark, rainy day, the moist,
comforting warmth of it going down a throat parched by the dust of the
library books. The throat muscles relax. The soreness is gone. The pain
behind burning eyeballs pounds less, disappears. One sits in a cosy glow
enjoying the third cup.

The cell of a room in the dormitory was slowly taking on familiarity.
She liked to wake up in the morning with the sunshine on her face. It
was a peaceful place to study. Over the tall buildings rosy clouds came
at sunset. She could see Jupiter in the twilight from her window.
Jupiter—his ‘mild and magnificent eye’—where had she read it? Some poet.
Browning. Mars had risen by the time she came up after dinner. By
leaning out, she could just see its candle-flame gleam in the sky. Miss
Ewing had taught her the stars and the planets. What splendid women
there were at Petersfield!

Her neighbors dropped into her room to talk after dinner, determined to
keep the conversation away from influenza. They were less cheerless upon
acquaintance, often with lovely smiles and unexpected humor. There was
beauty in a few faces, so delicate that it was easily overlooked at
first. Mental restlessness was commoner than intelligence, but one found
both. They had such amusing reasons for coming to the University. Miss
Andrews, from Trenton, New Jersey, was threatened with a nervous
breakdown and had to give up teaching for a year. She drank hot milk
before going to bed at eight o’clock every night. Most of the others
wanted a change. Year after year in the same place. In New York
everything happened. They had heard of a graduate student who married
one of the professors; in anthropology, they thought. The theatre, the
opera, the orchestras—everything in New York. Then one had professional
ambitions—a better job. Nora was considered a remarkable person to have
taught in a college so young. How was it done? And Petersfield. A
college job was more than they could expect. Learning for itself—the
pleasure of grappling with tough intellectual problems—they did not talk
about that. Wasn’t Professor White hard to follow? He was scholarly,
but——


                                   II

Armistice Night. Nora was standing near Times Square in a mob of
revellers. Horns tooted. Confetti fell everywhere. It was a wild time.
Men and women joined hands and danced in the street. Noisy boys,
spreading out in a long line, swept little groups of bystanders into a
circle with deafening shouts when their prisoners tried to get away. The
police on proud-stepping horses curvetted in and out of the crowd. The
war was over. More noise. Clacking toys, whistles. Children got lost and
howled. Women fainted in the street. Hawkers sold pancakes, coffee, hot
dogs. Peace had come.

‘Those with dead—are not here,’ Nora’s companion said.

In the tumult Nora was thrown against her old Petersfield friend Helen
Spring.

‘Well, it’s over at last,’ Helen began. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? I heard
you were in New York. So you’re living near the University. You don’t
like the dormitory? If I’d got hold of you, I’d have begged you to take
half of my apartment in the Village. Amelia Donaldson just rented it.
Yes, she’s still in the Labor College, and awfully excited about it.’

Helen herself was taking up psycho-analysis with a remarkable man. She
intended to do startling things to people, mental cases, when she got
going. Helen, plump and easy-going, was not the popular conception of a
worker in abnormal psychology. She had been one of the milder members of
the Socialist League.

‘Amelia’s as crazy as ever,’ Helen chattered on. ‘She’s a case to begin
on. You must come down soon. We’ll both want to see you.’

Upon Nora’s visit she found Helen’s rooms looking out upon a little
garden, very charming with their long, low proportions and a
wood-burning fireplace. An old-fashioned four-storey house had been
converted into a coöperative apartment by some enterprising women who
sold each floor to members of their sex engaged in some unusual but
approved employment.

‘It’s a fascinating place to be,’ Helen said. ‘The most interesting
people.’

‘Maybe Amelia won’t care to see me,’ Nora ventured when Helen suggested
rapping on the door connecting with Amelia’s rooms in front.

‘She wants to see you. She said to be sure and call her.’ A man’s voice
could be heard. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Helen explained. ‘He’s always
there.’

Amelia put on a bubbling show of delight at seeing an old classmate. She
was more animated and full of talk than in her college days. Behind her
stood a tall, ungainly young man, rather handsome in a swarthy way.

‘Only Tony,’ Amelia laughed by way of introduction.

Tony took a chair in a remote corner of Amelia’s apartment. Its black
furniture and deep blue hangings had an intense look like their owner.
Nora asked Amelia about the Labor College.

‘And you’re still studying, Helen tells me,’ Amelia remarked next. ‘I’ve
given all that up. There isn’t time in my life—at least not now.’

The young man kept his eyes fixed upon Amelia. They had the expression
of a faithful dog not always well used.

‘Who is Tony?’ Nora asked when they were back in Helen’s room, seated
before a blazing wood fire.

‘Amelia will tell you the next time she sees you. She’s reclaiming him.
He’s just out of some school of correction. His gang—they’re all in
gangs—those Italian boys south of the Square.’

‘He doesn’t look over eighteen. Is he in love with Amelia?’

‘She lets him hang around. He’s here by eight o’clock some mornings. He
cooks her meals—runs errands—polishes her shoes——’

‘So that’s the way she reclaims him?’

‘Well, he was stealing automobiles before. At least his friends were.
Poor Tony seems too stupid to get away with much himself. Perhaps having
a mistress——’

‘You don’t mean——’

‘My dear, psycho-analysis makes one suspect the purity of human
emotions. I trust no one and nothing. And with an over-sexed woman like
Amelia, I’d believe anything.’

‘Some one ought to warn him.’

Helen laughed. ‘Amelia’s up to something. She’s no fool, you know. And
the poor boy is flattered that an American above him socially——’

The next time Nora visited Helen there was the man’s voice on the other
side of the door. Then a terrible sound, like the howling of a dog. A
rap on the door, and Amelia asking them to go to a strike meeting with
her. It was near by. One of the men from the Labor College was the
speaker. Tony did not appear, and the three women walked away together.

The dingy hall rocked with the noise of the crowd. Children ran all
over. Babies crawled over the filthy floor or ate sticky messes which
got smeared over their faces, even in their hair. The smells. No
bathrooms. Nora knew that from the settlement. And the toilets in the
dark halls. The oratorical man who took charge of the meeting reminded
Nora of the boys who debated in the night-school classes at the
settlement. The same glib tongue shooting off eloquence without logic or
common sense. The crowd were a flock of sheep taking in everything he
said. When he got through, the gabbling tongues threatened a riot. Nora
was afraid.

‘Is the speaker a garment-worker?’ Nora asked Amelia. The strike seemed
to be involving garment workers.

‘No. He was trained at our school to be a labor-union leader. We need
young men who can talk well.’

‘I should think they’d prefer one of their own workers to direct them.
If I were an electrician or a plumber——’

‘A man from the ranks has no social sense. He doesn’t understand
industrial organization or capitalistic exploitation. He’s too close to
the economic struggle. He can’t forget the week’s pay check. We must get
Vicky Hamilton, organizer of the lady needleworkers, to explain things
to you. She belongs to the old Philadelphia Hamilton family. It’s very
useful to have such a name to use in labor ranks.’

When Amelia went back to her quarters, Nora and Helen heard Tony’s voice
again.

‘You see,’ laughed Helen.

‘Can’t you do something?’ Nora’s voice was desperate.

‘What can I do? It’s not my affair. I blame Petersfield for people like
Amelia. If she hadn’t been bottled up there—brooding for four
years—overstimulated mentally—all that feminine atmosphere. I don’t
believe in college communities. It’s the soil where Sapphism
flourishes.’

‘There wasn’t any at Petersfield. I never saw it.’ She hesitated. The
satyr laughter of the gardener’s assistant—a cat twisting its back and
purring—‘Well—maybe two cases,’ she admitted.

‘You were too innocent to suspect.’

‘So you question all friendships between women. It’s a dangerous point
of view.’

‘I didn’t say all. But too often.’

Helen was looking for mental sickness everywhere. It was the way of
psycho-analysts. Freud—exaggerating one theory. Nora had read enough of
him to know.

Greenwich Villagers went to meetings, lectures. Their thinking they
apparently left to others. Nora was carried off to listen to some new
kind of theory nearly every time she came down to sit in front of
Helen’s fire. Opportunities in New York—they mustn’t be neglected.
Sticking off at a university with the dead ideas in books—Nora must be
rescued from all that.

An Irish poet was addressing the Twentieth Century Club to which Helen
belonged. This was better than the thought-control crank last week.

Zoe Ryder was going with them. She was a gentle little woman brought up
on a large plantation in Virginia. Her childhood had been very lonely.
Her people were land-poor. All her education had come from an ignorant
governess and an old-fashioned library. She got up North and took
nurse’s training to make money in the quickest way. She had great
success with mental cases. Helen had met her at one of the clinics.

Zoe had just come off a very bad case. They were trying to cure a young
man—it was drink—his mind gone—all kinds of money. She had been shut up
alone with him on a country estate with only the servants to call upon.
The night nurses had set him off raving crazy, and they had to leave.
Only Zoe could manage him. She had a kind of hypnotic influence. But she
was so tired. One night he crept out of bed and got away. She followed
him in the darkness with a flashlight. She didn’t dare ask for help. It
was a hilly country, with marshes not far away. She wasn’t afraid of him
or the black night—but if he got into the marshes. That was the terror
for her. She got him back. He was too weak now to walk far. But the next
morning she saw that she must have a rest. Her patient was turned over
to a strong man and put into a strait-jacket.

The Irish speaker had beautiful, beseeching brown eyes. He wanted his
countrymen to be reasonable. He reviewed Irish history. There had been
mistakes on both sides. He wanted to go back to dear beautiful Ireland
and find peace. Then the fairies would return, and he could write his
verse.

Zoe sat next to Nora. During the talk Nora had felt a hand pulling at
her arm, but she wanted to hear what the poet was saying. She was
charmed by his mixture of fancy and shrewd common sense.

When he was done, Zoe whispered to her, ‘You see—that man over there—the
tall dark one.’ Nora examined a dignified man filling the opposite
corner. ‘He’s been staring at me the whole evening. I’ve been so
uncomfortable.’

‘I didn’t notice. He’s been looking at the speaker.’

‘No, no,’ Zoe insisted. ‘Let’s hurry away. He’ll try to speak to me
afterward.’

‘I suppose Zoe told you about the man staring at her,’ Helen remarked
when the two were alone. ‘She’s got persecution mania. Try to start her
on something else. Men are always following her on the street. Of course
she wants them to. She’s such a quiet little mouse I’m sure no one
really notices her. She’s tired out.’

‘Nursing’s too hard for her.’

‘And she won’t take anything but mental cases. It’s the excitement, I
guess. She writes charming verse for children. I want you to see it.
Full of humor—a kind of twinkle—and the sadness so close to the surface
of a child’s life. But this other thing—it gets stronger all the time.
Maybe if she had a little money and time to write—she might get over
it.’

Zoe appeared like a little brown bird chirping on a sunny winter
morning. This hallucination was terrible. If Helen with her new ideas
could only do something. But Helen insisted that not every one could be
saved by psycho-analysis. She was progressing far enough to see that.

Amelia introduced Nora to Vicky Hamilton, organizer of the lady
needleworkers, at the Dragon, with its memories of Mary Howe, now in
France dancing at the Red Cross parties with young officers. Miss
Hamilton had her hair cut short like a boy’s, and her handshake was
painfully gripping. They continued their discussion of industrial
problems in Amelia’s room. Tony for once wasn’t there.

Vicky crossed one leg over the other, lighted a cigarette, which
curvetted around one corner of her mouth as she talked. ‘You people up
at the University in the dissertation belt,’ she began anew, ‘you’re all
theory. There’s theoretical sympathy—emotional sometimes. But that’s not
enough. You’ve got to get down here with the crowd and start the
machinery going.’

‘That’s what I’ve told Nora,’ Amelia said.

Vicky, it developed, had domestic problems dragging at her industrial
efficiency. ‘Mother and brother have come up to New York for the winter.
I won’t live with them. I told them so. I refuse to have my comings and
goings questioned. I must be free—live my own life.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Amelia.

‘You’ve heard about Bess Leland’s baby?’ Vicky inquired of Amelia.

‘Yes, it’s come. A boy. Bess stayed at the office until six. And the
baby was born before nine. Easy—no pain. What motherhood should be.’

Bess was secretary for the Birth Control Association. It was wonderful
having a courageous woman like Bess down there—helping the cause by
showing that women, even with all the knowledge for preventing
conception, had babies. But only when they wanted them. Bess was
maternal. She needed children. This was her second child. His father was
a free-lance writer for a radical weekly. The father of three-year-old
Gloria was an actor, once considered by Bess the great luminary of the
theatre. Drink had dimmed his light, and he was now in the movies,
supported between jobs by his fifth wife.

Bess, with a photograph of Mary Wollstonecraft on her desk, had long
been a foe to marriage. She loved freely, without the constraint of
municipal bureau registrations or the fettering mediæval sanctities of
the Church. The degeneration of one glorious mate did not vanquish her.
For there could always be another. One was never disappointed exactly in
the same way a second time.

Both Vicky and Amelia agreed that men were satisfactory only as lovers.
As husbands and fathers they sneaked away from what society considered
their duty. Only women were parents. They clung to their young, needed
them.

This was the Socialist League of Petersfield in its early stages. But
these people acted, whereas Petersfield only talked.

Vicky in her unrestrained voice was deep in some pathological aspect of
pregnancy when Tony entered the room. He scarcely knocked. Nora hurried
away.


                                  III

The women at the dormitory reminded Nora of Cordelia and the Plant
girls. The ignorance—especially of the older ones—was almost
unbelievable. Petersfield, shut away as it was, had at least heard
echoes from a cosmopolitan centre. They trooped in timid little parties
of three or four down to Greenwich Village. Every one at home would ask
them about it. They tried the Barnyard, the Dragon, and all their
facsimiles with an endless variety of names, hoping each time that
something would happen. The wild air of Bohemia might at least blow over
them. But always the same disappointment. Bad air, dirt, men who looked
like automobile salesmen and flirted in a loud, clumsy way with the
waitresses, crowded dance floors, with never a chance to dance. One sat
almost smothered against the wall, waiting and waiting, and then at last
went home. Cheated—cheated.

A crowd from the dormitory went to the Night Court, another New York
novelty. Nora went with them. At midnight they sat in a stuffy, dimly
lighted room, sickly expectant. Why had they wanted to come? An old
woman stood facing the judge. She was a whimpering creature in a rusty
black bonnet and cape, a hard-working widow who took lodgers. This girl
couldn’t pay her rent. Out of a job and every week the same tale about
waiting for the money her husband was going to send her. Yes, she
admitted she had threatened to turn the girl out. She had her living to
make. And if the young woman started behaving bad with one of the
lodgers—this young man who turned out to be a detective and got her into
all this trouble—how could she help it?

The detective took the stand. He’d been sent to the house. The old
lady’d been carrying on suspicious. He got the goods on her. The young
woman was handed over to him by this old customer, who took charge of
the whole affair. His language had none of the polysyllabic evasiveness
still used by even such modernists as Helen and Amelia. For the
primitive relations of human beings he used plain language. ‘I told her
to take off her clothes,’ the hard voice said. ‘She had on only——’ The
words cut Nora like a knife.

The young woman told her story. It was tragic enough. There was a
lingering prettiness in her face. She spoke in a whisper. An abandoned
wife, her last cent gone, making a choice between the street on a
January night or the bold hints of her landlady. The old woman made the
bargain. She was in the clutches of a crone who knew how to work her
trade.

The judge made a caustic speech. The accused, who employed the
sentimentality of widowhood, children who would do nothing for their
poor mother, her own white hair, to plead for her, deserved no pity. A
helpless young woman, in her ignorance coming to a cheap lodging-house
she thought was respectable, trusting some one who pretended to be her
friend, had been used to carry on a profitable business. The accused was
sentenced to hard labor in the work-house.

Nora wanted to go. She couldn’t stand any more. But the others shook
their heads, and leaned forward in their seats. Two women dressed in fur
coats and simple black hats, an air of restrained elegance about them,
spoke in quiet tones. But they, too, were guilty of running disorderly
houses.

‘They weren’t even painted,’ one of the group commented as they stood
huddled together on the snowy street.

Past them reeled a woman very drunk shouting lines from ‘Paradise Lost.’

Returning from the opera a few nights ago several of them had seen with
their own eyes women stopping men on the street, choosing dark places
away from policemen. Women in flashy clothes with flowers in their hats.
That kind always seemed to wear flowers.

On the subway to-night after two o’clock a woman opposite Nora and Mary
Whitson attracted their attention. Her hair was too yellow, her brows
heavily pencilled, her cheeks and chin flabby and old in spite of the
paint.

‘She’s out of luck,’ Mary confided. ‘Getting old. It’s trade on the
streets for her now. The others—“kept” women—I meet them in the park.
Fattening like geese in a pen. They’re always alone dragging a little
white dog behind them.’

‘How do you know?’ Nora insisted.

‘I can tell. It’s in their eyes.’

The party collected in Nora’s room afterward. There was so much they
must talk over. Women talking together late at night, sitting about in
faded old dressing-gowns, brushing their hair, suddenly become very
frank. In the morning they remember that nice women never think about
sex. It wasn’t that they wanted to put on any superior airs. A girl who
was good because she’d never had a chance to be anything else—what
virtue that way? But had the old standards disappeared? Were women like
men taking experience, good and bad, as it came?

The plays they went to turned all their ideas upside down. They were
preoccupied with sex and the new attitude. The critics, commenting on
the downfall of the Puritanic censorship of the stage, prophesied that
at last something would happen to the American drama. But the graduate
women, so innocent and inexperienced, were bewildered. They went over
the whole question once more. All this sentimentality about harlots and
the daring irregularity of the new woman—to what was it leading?

‘It’s out of date, then—the old-fashioned virgin purity business?’
inquired an uncompromising little creature from Vermont. ‘What they’ve
held over us all these years—it’s a fraud, then?’

They agreed that their lack of experience had not been exciting. But
what else was there?

Mary Whitson lingered in Nora’s room after the rest had gone. ‘I’ve
never even been kissed,’ she stated boldly. ‘And I’m twenty-nine.
Sometimes I think—just to know what it’s like—even if I didn’t care for
the man.’

At the beginning of the second term new men suddenly appeared in the
history classes, dismissed from the training camps in this country. They
wore the desperate earnestness of those who must make up for lost time.
Nora wondered what they thought of the droning professors with their
lecture notes, yellow sometimes with age. She speculated often about the
date of the last new thought. Miss Steele had warned her of the drudgery
of graduate study until she began to steer her own boat and commanded
the attention of the big men. This must be what she was to expect. But
how dead, how dead it was! She remembered the words of Ezekiel which
Newman had written on the view of Oxford hung in the Oratory at
Birmingham: ‘Son of Man, can these dry bones live?’

For while Nora’s professors were fluttering old lectures, their country
was churning with party hatreds, and the American people were running
this way and that like a panic-stricken crowd caught in fire. The
President had sailed for Europe, and the Peace Conference was in full
swing. Nora found that she had to give up reading the morning papers.
They upset all her work for the day. Instead she gathered several of the
better weeklies representing a divergence of opinion and pondered over
them Sunday mornings in her room. The discussions she had started with
the women in the dormitory she had been wise enough to discontinue.
Those from the South had Miss Ewing’s blind devotion to the Democratic
Party which closed their eyes to all but one point of view. New England
Republicanism was becoming more and more bitter. And Nora had no
illusions about the idealism of her own section of the country, sitting
snug in the fertility of its cornfields, wheat lands, and green
pastures. All it wanted was to be let alone and continue prosperous. She
made secret plans to talk to the men seated near her in the history
lectures. But they were too aloof and shy. The professors, on their
elevated platforms, were even more remote.

Nothing but the contradictions of the weeklies. The President
bewildered, baffled. One couldn’t tell. A chance word caught on a street
corner, on subway platforms, the top of a bus. But how futile are the
words of the man in the street those know best who dream of real
democracy. At last a kind of makeshift Covenant, the League of Nations,
which radicals like Amelia and Vicky said was better than nothing. The
left wing of the weeklies made no such concessions. The President
returned, rode through the streets. It wasn’t a triumphal procession.
Nora stood in a vast throng and cheered. One hoped that there would be
no more war. Hope was something.


                                   IV

Amelia was beginning to neglect Tony. He wept like a whipped little boy,
throwing himself on the floor in Helen’s room, even when Nora was there,
and cursing Amelia between his sobs. One day he took a stiletto out of
his pocket and threatened to kill himself.

‘Tony, you silly boy,’ Helen said.

Amelia had no time for Tony now. She sent him away—told him not to
bother her. Garrison Smith, a lecturer at the Labor College, spent every
evening in Amelia’s room talking very late. Now that the war was over,
he was free to agitate a scheme for uniting the union-labor forces of
England and the United States. He was sailing for Europe soon. He also
planned to study schools for working-men abroad.

‘Garrison certainly works his personality overtime,’ Helen said of him.
‘But I admire the way he manages everything. During the war he made
mince-meat out of the Draft Board. Amelia and I almost die over his
stories of what he told them. But I wonder if she’s a match for him.’

Amelia, however, seemed very happy. She was the kind, Helen repeated to
Nora, who needed a man to keep her going. With women she was pale,
moaning over her aching back, hysterical in argument. But men brought
out a playfulness in her, a lightness close to humor; her cheeks
flushed, her eyes sparkled.

Garrison Smith was frequently summoned to different cities to confer
with those concerned in his British schemes. He wrote lengthy letters to
Amelia asking her advice about knotty questions, telling her again and
again how much he needed her, how he had grown to depend upon her. These
letters she read to Helen, to Nora, even to Tony at the times he slunk
back to her for comfort.

One Saturday afternoon Helen, Nora, and Amelia were picking violets on
the aqueduct. They sprang out of the green grass in great luxurious
patches. The flower-picking was Helen’s idea. Every spring she made a
pilgrimage to this violet haunt, and picked and picked. Only darkness
put an end to her greedy desire to have every blossom she saw. Amelia
had scruples about touching wild flowers. To her it was a kind of
murder. Then, too, her back wasn’t equal to the strain of stooping.
Nora, after gathering several modest clusters, joined Amelia stretched
out full length on a sunny hillside, close to a bank of violets.
Amelia’s eyes were half shut. A smile flitted over her face. Then she
sighed, a lazy, contented sigh. Nora wondered what made Amelia so happy.

Amelia stirred, but the eyes which looked up at Nora sitting near her
had the emptiness of a sleep-walker’s gaze.

‘It was so—so wonderful—our love——’ breathed Amelia, still smiling her
lazy, happy smile.

A queer, throaty sound escaped Nora’s lips. Amelia looked around, like a
child roused suddenly from peaceful dreams.

‘Well.’ Amelia’s voice lost its sleepy softness. ‘I mean it. You—you
don’t know—you don’t know anything about it.’ Again the happy look.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have shocked you. But I’m so—so full of it. He went
away early this morning. I may never see him again. That doesn’t trouble
me. We had last night together.’

‘And you can tell me this?’

Amelia’s lips curled into something close to a smile. ‘It may do you
good.’ She met Nora’s direct, scornful look without lowering her eyes.
‘And those like you. Your stiff little world. I was there once.
Tight—tight like a drum—and hard. I wouldn’t go back to it——’

‘And what changed you—got you out of my stiff little world?’

‘Michael Powys. He was the love of my life.’ Amelia’s voice softened.
‘At least that first quickening of love in a girl——But how he made me
suffer!’

‘The way you make Tony.’

‘Tony—that baby. He doesn’t suffer. All show. But if he did—is it only
women who should suffer?’

‘You’re using Tony for revenge then—revenge for what you——’

‘Perhaps. Poor Tony.’

‘I can’t believe you.’

‘Well—a woman finds it convenient to have some kind of a sighing lover
trailing after her.’ This was the old, bitter Amelia. ‘Men are that way.
The sight of another man pursuing the woman they’re after—it adds zest
to the chase. Garrison saw—and other men will—that I——I’m disgusting
you, Nora. But I don’t care.’ Amelia sat upright and fumbled with a knot
of hair falling over her neck. ‘If I had your charm, Nora Deming, and
your beauty—there is beauty hidden away in you somewhere. You’re a fool
wasting it all the way you do. Going on and on—using your brains. As if
they mattered in a woman. You’ll put on spectacles in a few more
years—that red hair all on fire here in the sun—it’ll be dull—grey. I
can see you that way. And you—like ice. You don’t understand. You turn
up your nose because I—I with no beauty—no charm—a disgusting weak
body—snatch what I can. I have. I will again. No one can make me believe
I do wrong. Right and wrong—they don’t exist for me.’

Helen was approaching them. ‘Such richness!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve got
flowers to take back to everybody.’

Nora got Helen between her and Amelia on the walk to the subway. She was
sickened by the torrent of words Amelia had poured over her. Something
burned in her, like a hot coal placed on raw flesh. So this was the
defiant new woman insisting upon her place in the world.

Tony was waiting in Amelia’s room. He bounded out of the door when he
heard their steps on the stairs, like a lonely child who had waited long
for its mother.

Helen in her sitting-room bent over her flowers. She spread out in a row
on her couch the little nosegays she had fastened together with tough
grass, and got down on her knees before them.

‘The darlings—the darlings. How cool and sweet. Violet time in spring—I
live for it, Nora. It’s my Easter every year. We women without
religion—we must have something. Woodsy—woodsy sweetlings,’ she crooned
to herself.

Nora, stretched out in Helen’s big chair, watched Helen getting bowls
for her treasures. At last they were taken care of for the night. In the
morning she would distribute her flowers among the friends looking out
on bare city streets. She began to murmur the chosen names.

Nora interrupted her in the midst of them. ‘Helen—tell me. Do you think
Amelia is—just right?’

‘She told you about her farewells with Garrison, then?’ Helen laughed.
‘I thought maybe she wouldn’t. She thinks you’re so easily shocked,
Nora.’

‘Yes, she told me.’

‘Poor girl. She saw him off this morning. That’s why I asked her to go
violet-picking with us.’

‘She came right out with it.’

‘Yes, Amelia is very frank. And honest, too.’

‘I don’t see how you can stand having her here—close to you this way.’

‘She doesn’t bother me. And just because I happen to be a born old
maid—maybe I’m fortunate. I’m not sure, though. But how can I judge what
works best for a girl like Amelia?’

‘I don’t believe she even loves that man.’

‘Garrison? Well, maybe it’s better if she doesn’t. You know what I think
about him. He’ll love many times. A generous lover.’

‘How could he? I feel sick all over.’

‘Yes, you would. I’m sorry, Nora. Here, take some of my violets back
with you. For those graduate women of yours. They need flowers more than
Amelia.’ Helen’s queer little chuckle was over some joke she kept to
herself.

In the adjoining room Tony was laughing, a boyish laugh full of joy.
Nora went back to the dormitory with a generous portion of Helen’s
violets. Helen made her take them, gave her a cool little peck on the
cheek at parting, and laughed once more.


                               CHAPTER II


                                   I

By September the United States had welcomed most of its heroes home.
Nora, sitting in her history lectures, observed a new group of men,
shabby some of them, with army shoes and often the army flannel shirt
completing a civilian costume of a shiny coat strained at the shoulders
and trousers threatening collapse in the seat. There was sturdiness and
hardness about most of these men, as if, having conquered fear, hunger,
disease, and vice, they asserted an animal vigor which set them apart
from other men. But there were cripples too; legs and arms missing.
Crutches and canes tapped in the hallways and lecture rooms. In the
faces of some there was strain, suffering, a transparent pallor. They
collected in little groups in the rear of Nora’s history classes,
talking together in low tones, deliberately closing the exchange of
their experiences not only to the women, but equally to the married men
and the fledglings fresh from college.

But from the first day, Nora detected a new spirit in the University.
Even the professors were changed. The old droning tones had disappeared.
They may have been frightened last year or only disheartened. Or were
they, like actors roused to play their best before a good audience,
conscious of the men sitting in the back rows?

Never before had places of learning been crowded with so serious a
student body as in the fall of 1919. Perhaps they never will be again.
At last there seemed to be earnest concentration upon education, a
hunger for new ideas and enlightenment. Every man returning from France
seemed sure of one thing—that for the complications of life, stripped
now of its former vapid American idealism, he must know more. In the
tensity of the classroom Nora built up these speculations.

Among the history lecturers was Professor Nicholson, with grey hair
straggling over a face that had a curious, unconquerable youth. In what
the other professors said one found the same new note of radicalism
creeping in, subtle generally and evasive, but there for the discerning.
They, too, made frequent comparisons with modern events, clarifying and
interpreting both old and new. But, in spite of these resemblances, he
stood out above them. The first day she could not quite catch the
difference. Was it a closer reality he reached, a more intense
experience?

The women around Nora whispered that Professor Nicholson had been
studying in England when war was declared. At once he offered himself as
an ambulance driver. Later he enlisted as a private. He had seen hard
fighting in the Argonne drive, been wounded. Nora wondered how much
these women knew. He was a small man, slight, almost delicate, and the
eyes and sensitive mouth did not suggest ambulances or shell fire. But
the nose, large, aggressive, riding over the fine lines of the rest of
the face, was not that of a dreamer. One of Nora’s neighbors repeated
what a man who had studied under him before the war had told her. He was
just the usual scholar then, a good lecturer, but all brilliant theory
like the others. The war had changed him.

The opening lectures in a course dealing with nineteenth-century England
pictured manufacturing and agricultural England before the Industrial
Revolution. The vividness of phrase, the pictorial and dramatic effect,
were unforgettable. Miss Steele’s conception of the historian, a kind of
recording angel, looking back, seeing in the present both the past
and the future, but not a cruel recording angel—pitying,
understanding—Professor Nicholson seemed like that.

Behind Nora sat a unique specimen of graduate student, handsome,
fashionably dressed, his well-set-up figure and lean muscular frame
suggesting a steady programme of games and exercise rather than hard
work. From his conversations with his companion Nora pieced together
those first days a fairly complete biography. He had been studying at
Oxford when the war broke out, offered himself for British service at
once, and was later transferred to an American regiment. But he
described a machine-gun attack in the style of a tennis match, a polo
game, or a drag-hunt. Fighting was the duty of a gentleman, disagreeable
sometimes, but a game, an adventure.

In the basement room of the library Nora, snatching a cup of tea,
watched a man at the same table turning over the pages of a green paper
pamphlet as he sipped coffee. On the chair beside him were crutches. She
remembered that he was in one of her classes. As he read here and there,
he scowled and muttered to himself, unconscious of her watching him.
Something about the peace conference, Nora gathered from a chapter
heading.

‘Have you found something good about the war?’ she asked him at last.

He looked up, still scowling. ‘What every one will be thinking five
years from now.’

She looked at the author, the most famous of British dramatists. ‘I’d
like to get the book,’ she said.

‘I brought it back with me. You can’t get it here.’

‘I’d like to read it,’ she persisted.

‘You wouldn’t like it. No woman would.’

‘Do you think all women have the same opinions?’

‘Well—they’re idealists. They wouldn’t care for this straight stuff.
I’ve been home six months.’ He laughed.

‘I don’t pretend to know anything about the war. I’ve heard nothing from
any man who was actually there. I watch all of you talking together——’

‘If you’d like to read this—I’m through with it.’

She thanked him, and he hobbled away.

The book gave Nora a new boldness. She came to her classes late, the
seats in front all filled by the women who strove daily for those
closest to the lecturer. A vacant chair was to be found only in the rear
of the room. The men were talking. She caught stray words,
unintelligible slang, foreign phrases.

‘I can’t—I can’t believe it was for nothing,’ a strained voice said
behind her. ‘Being wounded—suffering the way some of us have—all for
nothing.’ The other men were silent. ‘I won’t believe it,’ he concluded
in the same grey tones.

How could a woman know what these men thought except by the crime of
eavesdropping? If she could only talk to them. Between them and her was
an invisible wall, stronger than stone and mortar.

Another time she heard; ‘But it all ends the same way. It was hell, but
not one of us would have missed it. Nothing in the end. Months wasted.
Everything here gone to the bow-wows. But those who didn’t get into the
scrap are outside. They know it. They don’t belong to our generation.’

Professor Nicholson had finished his introductory lectures. He was now
plunged into the intricacies of a new age, with its machinery in
factories, its locomotives and steamships. The classes were set to
drawing steam engines and spinning-jennies. When they had recovered from
the first bewilderment, they visited a cotton mill in New Jersey,
located in a gaunt town where smelly canals, a river stagnant with
refuse, and tenement houses built of a gloomy native stone swarmed with
the children whose parents were employed in the mill. It was not a
cheerful introduction. The mill itself was almost overpowering to those
who had never seen the textile industry at first hand. The smells, the
terrible heat in some of the rooms, the thundering noises were a
revelation of the heights to which human endurance could be stretched.
The preparing rooms were the most revolting. American cotton, the
dirtiest and the poorest on the market, was a tough proposition, some of
the men said. They got together and talked with Professor Nicholson, in
spite of the noise, when the foreman walked ahead. Nora tried to push
herself near them.

She caught a reference to the steel strike, which now made newspaper
headlines. The noise shut out the rest. Men talking together about vital
things, the facts without sentimentality, what happened from day to day,
and women on the outside exchanging the same twaddle. It was hopeless,
unfair, but what could she do about it?

A woman sticking close to her kept repeating: ‘I think it’s
dreadful—dreadful. I never knew it was like this. The only mill I’ve
ever been in was a flour mill—such a nice clean place.’

In the carding-room cotton fluff drifted like snow over the hair of the
girls, their faces stolid, almost inhuman. The atmosphere in which they
toiled eight hours daily had a stench like burned salad oil. The air
vibrated with the continuous screeching roar of the machinery. But when
the foreman’s back was turned, the girls’ lips moved.

Professor Nicholson afterward described the Apex Mill as above the
average, with good lighting, a fairly modern ventilating system, and
excellent vacuum apparatus for clearing the cotton fluff out of the air.
Although it wasn’t ideal, the general management was decent. The
problems of shifting foreign labor and competition with the Southern
cotton mills, with lax State laws and child labor, complicated the
policy of many employers. Nora remembered the reforming zeal of Ellen
Standish and her obdurate father. Perhaps Ellen had not been entirely
fair with him. The professor seemed to be straining himself for an
almost superhuman fairness, a little dark man near Nora remarked.

The lectures on industrial England were soon crowded with men. Extra
chairs had to be brought in. Professor Nicholson, his clear voice racing
over swift sentences, presented his material by running comments on
contemporary problems. He quoted novels Nora had never read, eloquent
with the misery of adjustment, the exploitation of the helpless, the
greed of capitalists whom the new era had given sudden power. He read
lines from a poet Nora thought she knew. This was the stuff men wanted
in a university. Some of the women were bewildered by the mechanical
terms and scientific conceptions.

‘Is this history?’ one of them inquired of Nora.

At the close of the hour the men in the back seats crowded around the
lecture platform. They got very much excited over the discussion of
issues raised, their voices loud, their eyes and arms enforcing what
they said. From chance phrases one guessed that they were fighting the
war all over again. These men transformed all they heard into their own
experience. As all roads lead to Rome, so did all history for them speak
in what they themselves had seen. And Nora on the outside could only
gnash her teeth in silent rage.

Nora sought out Professor Nicholson in his office. She was not satisfied
with her courses, she explained. They were too narrow, not giving her
the sweep of vision she must have. He listened while she reviewed what
she had studied, what she had tried to do the year before.

‘You’ve got a big job——nineteenth-century England,’ he commented when
she was through.

‘I know—I know very well. But I want to really understand—why England
was what she was—the attitude of other countries to her—all of it. I’ve
started——’

He advised her to go to literature. English—she knew fairly well. But
German and French——

‘Of course I’m outlining a job for life,’ he smiled, the baffling
freshness in his face. Freshness—youth—it was ideas, fresh ideas, caring
for them more than for life, which made a man look like Professor
Nicholson.

‘That’s what I want,’ she gasped eagerly, ‘a real job.’

Nora met the crippled soldier again in the basement refreshment room and
returned his book.

‘I agree with you,’ she began.

‘Really?’ His tone was almost rude.

As she was trying to frame a reply, another man sat down beside him.
‘Well, Perkins. How goes it?’

Mr. Perkins attempted an awkward introduction. ‘My friend John Harper.’

‘Nora Deming,’ she helped him. ‘Mr. Perkins and I have been talking
about the war.’

‘That’s what he and I talk about, too,’ the stranger said. He had a way
of looking straight at one when he talked that was a little
disconcerting at first. He was a graduate student in economics like
Perkins, he informed her. He had decided when he got out of the army
that he didn’t want to go back into business.

‘I was one of these efficiency experts,’ he said. ‘Office manager for
the Zenith Rubber Company. I enlisted because I got bored stiff making
patriotic speeches.’

He and Perkins laughed, and Nora, after a moment, joined them. Mr.
Harper was the first young business man she had ever known. One of the
new school strange to her. The business men in Maronac, even Eleanor’s
father at the Dry Docks, were leisurely in speech and action. The young
man evidently rushed things through. He spoke rapidly, examining his
listener with his restless eyes, never entirely serious, however.

Nora came upon the two men in the same place the following day. Mr.
Harper was starting a story.

‘I was telling about a German prisoner brought in by some men in our
company. He got down on his knees to the captain. A butcher with ten
children, he said. Fat as a sausage—middle-aged. We let him go. He
started off—looking back at us like a—a rat. Then he began to run. The
lines were so close together we could watch him almost up to his own
gang. All safe. He turned. Waved to us. His deliverers.’ The story was
interrupted by laughter. ‘Then he—he went right up in the air. Blown to
bits—pieces of him going straight up. We’d stuck a bomb with a time-fuse
in Fritz’s pocket. It went off just the right minute—inside his own
lines.’

Both men were laughing.

‘Do you think that’s a funny story?’ Nora inquired in amazement, looking
first at one and then at the other.

They were now roaring with laughter. ‘Killing,’ Mr. Harper explained.
‘Let me tell you the game we played with Hun prisoners that jumped on
the running-board of our staff car. We stepped on the gas and shot them
off like bottles in a row.’

Nora rose. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t learned war humor yet,’ she said.

Evidently a new kind had developed. A man limping across the campus
remarked to his companion, ‘They say the main advantage of a wooden leg
is that you can hold up your sock with a carpet tack. But even better—I
don’t have to change the sock on my game foot. It can be regarded as
more or less permanent.’


                                   II

On Sunday afternoon Nora was invited to Professor Nicholson’s to tea. A
stuffy, overheated room filled with people, too much furniture, and an
overdressed, gushing woman fussing about among her guests. In the
confusion Nora discerned two or three graduate students grouped around
Professor Nicholson. Mrs. Nicholson at once began describing to Nora her
terrible sufferings while her husband was in France.

‘I never thought I’d live through it. The days—the nights worse. Of
course he didn’t have to go. But I never complained.’ She finished with
a grimace, intended for a smile, which made Nora inwardly shudder. ‘I
suppose you’re crazy about my husband. All his students are. It’s all I
hear—how wonderful he is.’

She then turned to the woman on the other side, evidently an old friend,
and began an exchange of gossip, mentioning some of Nora’s professors,
in a high-pitched voice.

Before Nora left, she had a few moments with Professor Nicholson. He
expressed regret that he had been unable to talk with her, hoped to see
her again soon to hear how she was getting on. Then she left, dismissed
with another grimace from her hostess, and a hard throaty sound
caricaturing laughter.

On her way back to the dormitory Nora met Mr. Harper, who asked if he
might join her. After a few preliminary remarks, he began to talk of
himself. In the midst of his economic studies he was trying to get
caught up with the new books. His friend Perkins was a great reader. But
both he and Perkins floundered in places. In the realm of ideas, the
discussion of contemporary problems, they felt safe enough. But all this
art stuff——

Nora in a spirit of mischief advised him to read ‘The Tragic Muse.’
‘James, you know,’ she explained.

‘Is that he-man stuff?’

‘I don’t know. It depends on the man, you see——’

‘All this diagnosis of the soul since the war. I’m not much for that.
Wells—in those first books. He started me going—that man.’

‘But did he carry you very far? I like my ideas dished out straight. Not
lost in all his verbiage.’

‘Of course Shaw,’ went on Mr. Harper; ‘there’s the giant of the crowd.
And I’m reading Tolstoy.’

He hovered at the door of the women’s hall until Nora had to ask him in.
He looked around with his appraising glance. She could see that he was
amused. He settled himself on the nearest sofa, not quite at ease, but
making a pretense of boldness, as the graduate women filed past slowly
enough to make an examination of him and Nora sitting there.

‘It was the army that got me out of business,’ he was finally
explaining. ‘Queer how it was, too. I was on to all the tricks. They’re
the same ones. The only difference is that business is efficient. Things
move along. In the army it was an unholy mess. I never wasted time
hating the Germans. They were a devilish smart crowd—a lot o’ them. But
the colonel of our outfit—when he wasn’t drunk——’

‘I understand,’ Nora said.

‘Well—lugging him out of one scrape after another——Orders one day. All
off the next. What my poor men had to stand—I was swearing blue devils
most o’ the time. Old Jack we called him—old Jack loved power. To make
us hop around just to see us hop—that was the man. I got some of my old
stuff handed back to me. Business organization—it means driving men
under you. I was good at it. But the army got under my skin. I couldn’t
come back and see men scared to death—white-collar slaves—jumping around
when I snapped my fingers. If I go into business again—I won’t be a
slave-driver. I haven’t got it thought out yet. But in a year here——You
ought to hear Doctor Lewis lecture. Industrial Problems. It’s great
stuff. The man knows what he’s talking about. He can’t fool me.’

The dinner bell rang, and Mr. Harper rose. ‘D’you ever get out of this
place?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Nora assured him.

‘Could you—would you give me the pleasure—a show or something——’


                                  III

Everywhere Nora went she met John Harper, always correctly dressed and
with something new to talk over. In the dingy basement room, up in the
history stacks where she foraged around for books, and in the
reading-room used by economics as well as by history students. His
energy carried him everywhere. When she left the library before dinner,
he, too, was ready to leave for the day. At first she regarded these
encounters as accidental. Then something in the way he looked at her, a
new softness in his sharply darting eyes, made her self-conscious and
shy.

‘Can’t we have dinner somewhere?’ he suggested, standing on the steps of
the dormitory. Inside Nora knew a business meeting was awaiting her.

‘Thanks very much. Yes, I should like to. But I must hurry to my
meeting now.’ The closing of the door gave her a sense of relief, of
escape.

Three solemn young men on a sofa balancing tea-cups were facing two
women in the parlor. Nora, the vice-president of the Women’s History
Club, arriving late, was being introduced by Miss Stark, the president,
a very energetic woman, to what she learned was the executive committee
of the Men’s History Club.

‘I feel so sorry for all these young girls coming to New York and never
meeting any of you young men here at Knickerbocker,’ Miss Stark was
saying.

One of the young men looked interested, a second cautious, the third,
also the president, alarmed.

‘I didn’t come to Knickerbocker to meet young women,’ he declared, with
a candor Nora could not help admiring.

As the discussion developed, she had a confused recollection of Miss
Stark’s theory that the two societies devoted to historical studies
should become one.

‘It doesn’t seem fair for us women to miss the lively discussions you
men have,’ the secretary, Miss Fleet, said, with a smile which swept
over the trio on the sofa. Miss Fleet in Missouri, Nora suspected, had a
way with men.

‘Our meetings are very dull,’ the interested young man observed.

‘Perhaps the young women would liven them up for you,’ Miss Stark
ventured.

‘Scholarly discussions are never lively,’ the president remarked, with
finality, looking around him as if he wanted to escape.

‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea for the two clubs to join, Miss
Deming?’

Nora started. Miss Stark was looking to her support.

‘I—I hadn’t thought of it before. I don’t know. But the men don’t seem
to want it.’ Her glance was directed toward the president. He appeared a
little flustered.

Miss Stark drew herself up proudly in her high-backed chair. ‘I never
knew before there was sex in history.’

‘There’s sex in everything,’ the president said firmly. Then, reaching
for a battered hat, he rose and shook hands solemnly with Miss Stark,
concluding with a stiff jerk of a bow. The cautious young man was beside
him. The enthusiastic young man was still talking to Miss Fleet about
the book he was writing, but, when they were close to the door, he, too,
scuttled away.

‘Why didn’t you help me out?’ Miss Stark turned upon Nora.

The women’s club was stupid enough. But whether the addition of men
would help it any was uncertain. An unwieldy organization, trying
clumsily to be wise, or, better still, according to Miss Stark, to be
sociable, did not attract Nora.

It was clear enough the men didn’t want the women. Men serious about
their work usually preferred to keep to themselves. They could be
violent with their own sex, if they had to be. But with women—that
outworn chivalry. It would always keep men and women apart. Chivalry may
have gone along well enough when fair ladies kept to their bowers behind
castle walls. But now, when women were getting into everything, a man
had to look out. If he could fight her like another man——But he could
only despise her and wish she’d stay in her place.

And what women studying history at Knickerbocker had anything to
contribute to the men’s discussions? Was there anything that they really
yearned to have dragged out into the fierce light of real mental combat?
Around Nora daily buzzed girls from every State in the Union, many of
them, as Miss Stark had hinted, crazy to meet young men. They were open
about declaring, for any one to hear, just why they had come to
Knickerbocker University. Studying was an excuse for being in New York.
New York was crowded with young men, they had thought back home. But
once in the great city, tucked away in a woman’s hall, with the matron’s
experienced eye upon them, existence had no immediate flame. They joked
before Nora about sitting beside the good-looking men at lectures. They
asked them the time, borrowed their newspapers, appealed to them when
their fountain pens went dry. But graduate students were nuts—most of
them—and even the handsomer ones hadn’t a cent. Far more alluring the
hall just across the street, that wide, relentless barrier. The girls
had recently been experimenting with lamp signals. Two or three gathered
in one room. Then they began turning a study-lamp off and on in a new
kind of wig-wagging game. A quick response from Knickerbocker
undergraduates. Between them a code was developed. Meetings were
arranged on near-by corners. One girl returned from a Greenwich Village
dance at six in the morning. The matron was growing suspicious. The
older women in the dormitory must have told tales.

Women past their first youth have so little sympathy with the adventures
of their own sex. There was Miss Johnston on Nora’s corridor. She had
become a joke, a kind of tradition. No one knew how many years she had
been studying at Knickerbocker. She had long ago taken every course
offered by the history department. A new series of lectures roused her
like a small boy hearing a fire-engine. Off once more. One more subject
to conquer. She was engulfed in some vast scheme in which she wandered
over anthropological wastes and historic dawns to prove her theory. Her
book, when it was done, might run into three volumes. Once she had hoped
to crowd it down into two. In all this she was supported by the earnings
of an elderly uncle, who had once dreamed of scholarship and had got
stranded in business. His niece read on year after year—miles and miles
of books—and told him all about her latest and best conclusion.

Then there was Anna Downing, waiting day by day for the arrival of her
brother’s body from France. He had been a captain, a much-loved older
brother. Her face fell into deeper grey lines, she drank more cups of
coffee, and her eyes glittered uncomfortably for those who talked to
her. Only last year she had been the wittiest of Nora’s neighbors.

Alice Conway was a poet. At least she wrote verse and studied
philosophy, a not infrequent combination. She had recently got the
notion that the dormitory women were making derogatory remarks behind
her back—saying her mind was affected. She wanted them to know she was
as sane as anybody. If she found the person who started the story about
her not being quite right——

All of the women Nora knew studied too much, with the conscientiousness
they should have outgrown with pigtails. Their chief satisfaction was in
recounting how many pages they read daily, how many consecutive hours
they toiled in the library, how late they sat up over their work. They
admitted that they were always tired—nothing seemed worth while. If they
went to a symphony concert, the music shot nervous pains all through
their bodies, like an electric shock. And the theatre—what they had
looked forward to more than anything else—probably they had been too
tired to go.

Why do women cling to the phantom—that most deceptive phantom—the joy
one finds in the play of the mind? They cling to it long after all other
hopes are gone. Happiness or intelligence in women—which is rarer? Do
any women have both? The Brontë sisters—genius and wretchedness. What
they did—walled around with the stony barriers of a limited experience.
Elizabeth Barrett—but was she really intelligent? George Eliot—getting
revenge for the stiff provincial conscience of Marian Evans by
tormenting poor little Hetty Sorrel. And the women of power.
Catharine of Russia—Queen Elizabeth in England—giants both of
them—relentless—using men for their own determined ends. But when were
they happy?

The little blonde girl from Tennessee worked harder than any one. At
least the strain bore down upon her more. She had gone to a very poor
college. She realized that now. Most of the time she didn’t know what
the professor was talking about—just chaos. She read sentences in
reference books again and again, but she couldn’t make them out. What
was the matter with her? She appealed to Nora. At night her throat ached
so. She couldn’t sleep. Maybe she ought to go home. But no, she couldn’t
do that.

One night all of Nora’s floor was roused past midnight. People rushing
back and forth. The poor little thing from Tennessee had jumped out of
her window. She was dead when they found her on the pavement below.


                                   IV

John Harper said women couldn’t stand the strain of too much study—at
least not many of them.

‘They go straight off,’ he said, seated across the table from Nora in an
Italian restaurant south of the Square, not unlike the one where Nora
and Mary Howe listened to the poetic raptures of Eddie Gaston that night
so long ago. ‘The reason, clearly enough, is that they don’t really want
to study. Now if you force yourself to do a thing—put on the screws
tight—there’s trouble. Like this poor girl you told me about. Collapse.’
Mr. Harper, with none of Helen’s agile psychological terms, had the
latest theories.

‘Yes,’ Nora agreed, ‘but what about the women who really prefer the
intellectual life to everything else—their professional career whatever
it may be? What of them?’

‘Let them have it,’ he declared generously. ‘They’re the minority.’ He
looked across at Nora with his disconcerting directness. ‘Is that what
you prefer?’

Nora blushed, looked down at her plate. ‘I—I don’t know. But my
friends—several of them who have already done splendid work—it’s the
first rank—competing with men——’

‘Women in business—really good ones—I met them once in a while. But they
were hard. And at Knickerbocker—well——’

‘The good ones are there. Not many, of course. But how many really good
men are there either?’

Nora took John Harper one Sunday afternoon to have tea with Helen
Spring. They got on famously together.

‘He’s a real man,’ Helen observed to Nora afterward. ‘I like him. I’m
glad you’re meeting men up there at the University.’ She sighed. ‘After
a whole week of women——But, of course, that’s my job.’

Helen had taken her first position, a good one she was told by her
superiors, in a home for fallen girls, concealed under the euphemistic
name ‘Rest Cottage.’ But its inmates never rested. They were like caged
lionesses waiting to escape back to their old life. They put on the
proper conversions. They told Helen sobbing stories of early
temptations, cruel parents, poverty. All that was true enough. But their
emotion didn’t conceal their hatred of the peace of Rest Cottage, where
they were safe, well fed, and employed in tasks designed to be
unexciting and corrective.

To a scientist convinced that the new psychology will immediately
minister to a mind diseased, Rest Cottage was discouraging. But one
found there every form of mental variety. It was a remarkable
laboratory. The inmates, properly pigeonholed by the staff of
psycho-analysts, were a most satisfying group of individuals for
scientific purposes.

Helen’s speech during the first experiments in her new job was an almost
unintelligible jargon to laity like Nora. Simple introverts and
extraverts, objective extraverts and introverts, emotional introverts
and subjective extraverts. It was as bad as old Polonius and his
classification of plays. ‘“Pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”’ jeered
Nora. ‘“Manics, dementia præcox, paranoiacs,”’ she recited.

‘You keep quiet,’ Helen threatened, starting off next on libidos, which
were equally various—collective, unconscious, desexualized, introverted,
extraverted, excessive—many more.

But gradually the job got hold of Helen. She wanted to cure those poor
creatures. When all the analyzing was done, what next? They didn’t want
to be different. Gradually Helen suspected what they did want. The
husband of one of the psychologists knew what they wanted most. To the
pretty, lively ones, he gave it. One of Helen’s patients confided that
he felt sorry for the girls. He was such an affectionate man, she added.
All the time he encouraged his wife to go on with her remarkable cures.
It was a terrible mess. And Helen, knowing all that horror, had to keep
quiet.

Then Zoe Ryder refused to go on any more cases. She’d starve first. But
before beginning the process of starvation, described as painless by
those who have tried its early stages, Zoe borrowed money of all her
friends. The money she used for her new business venture of making
lamp-shades. Out of scraps of silk she contrived boudoir lamps of every
color and design—as delicate as flowers. Parchment and paper, cretonnes,
chintzes—she contrived an endless variety. They were all charming.
Before Christmas she had more orders than she could fill. But sitting in
a little back room in Greenwich Village making lamp-shades got tiresome
long before spring. For a change Zoe lived in luxury and ease, sat in
Washington Square, and began to write a play, with all the neighborhood
Italian children swarming around her. A friend got her the offer of
being a permanent nurse to a delicate child, but Zoe would not listen to
flattery about her magic ways with children. She made the rounds of her
friends a second time, less successfully, but still she got enough to
keep the play going. She would never make another lamp-shade. She
quarrelled with Helen, who made the suggestion. A tea-room in the
Village, where only creative artists came, was now her great ambition.
If she could get the necessary capital——In the meantime actors were
begging her for parts in her new play. She was a pathological case,
Helen stated, scolding Amelia for lending her more money.

Vicky’s Lady Needleworkers had been out on strike all winter. Vicky told
them to hold firm. They hung on, eating less and less, trying to stretch
out the union relief fund to the utmost of its capacity. Then they came
to Vicky, who had been leading their fight so valiantly. They couldn’t
pay her salary. They reminded her that last year they paid every cent.
Three thousand dollars. But Vicky couldn’t live without money. She would
have to resign. Her mother and brother, still keeping guard from the
windows of a Park Avenue apartment hotel, might have tided her over. But
that would have meant the regular life appropriate to those regions. The
needleworkers were sorry. She had lent elegance to their cause—a real
lady and all. It was too much to expect she’d keep on with them. But
they’d hoped——

Amelia was furious at Vicky’s desertion of these plucky fighters.

‘She’ll never get another job at three thousand dollars a year because
she was born a lady,’ commented Helen sagely. ‘She’s lazy—untrained.’

‘And dishonest,’ added Amelia. ‘She’s tried to conceal the fact that
she’s been living with Max Goldberg all winter. If she’d been honest
about it——’

‘Well,’ Helen excused her, ‘she knew he’d tire of her soon. He generally
demands more intelligence than she’s got to show. Don’t be too hard,
Amelia.’

When Nora told John Harper about Miss Hamilton’s treachery to the
needleworkers, he was much amused.

‘What else did you expect? There’s no one so keen about money as those
who have had it. Your friend is a good business woman. No nonsense about
her. I respect her. She’ll come out on top. And the needleworkers—when
the trades get rid of their snobbery and sentiment, they won’t need
ladies to manage their scraps for ’em.’

There was something hard and relentless about John Harper. Was it only
masculinity? Nora had known too few men to be sure. If only—something
about him—not quite. How disgusting she was! How narrow and stupid! She
revolted from her own thoughts.

While Vicky looked for a new job, Amelia used the bits of leisure left
her by the Labor College in getting Tony married off to somebody. She
was bored with Tony—not only Tony, but all Italians. They were
materialistic—at least on American soil. The Russians were her next
hope—the only people who in the twentieth century still have souls.

‘Well,’ sighed Amelia as the sixteen-year-old bride of Antonio d’Angelo
floated out of the church under a canopy of bridal veil and orange
blossoms beside her beautiful new husband, ‘I kept him out of the gang.
She can take care of him now.’

Amelia was busy soliciting funds for a new colony of rare spirits to be
started in the country, providing a combination of intellectual and
manual labor, and in connection a school for the poor, Russians
preferred.

‘Hasn’t that been tried before?’ asked Nora. ‘Some of the colony don’t
work. Others get tired of one another and start fighting.’

‘All of us will dress in grey—a neutral shade,’ Amelia persisted,
thinking only of her newest enterprise.

When the news of Garrison Smith’s marriage to an English socialist came,
Amelia had just been informed that the son of a fabulously rich father
had inherited more than a million dollars to lay at the feet of the
colony. Amelia had no time for anything else. Garrison was hardly
mentioned.

‘It’s a blessing she’s got this other thing,’ breathed Helen. ‘Don’t say
anything against her colony, Nora. You’ve got your young man caught. I
can see that.’

‘Helen!’ warned Nora, turning crimson. Nora had brought Mr. Harper down
to tea again. ‘Don’t you say that. If you do, I’ll never—never see him
again.’

‘Don’t be a fool, my child.’

The rush of events warned Nora that John Harper must soon be reckoned
with. This determined young man, who had been successful in everything
else he had undertaken, was in love with Nora. Any one could see it. It
burst out of him everywhere like a riotous flood, Helen, looking
straight at Nora with a defiant air, told her.

Nora began placing obstacles in the way of his frequent invitations, but
somehow he climbed over them. Often she was relieved when he did.
Dinners in quiet restaurants away from the noise and the smell of the
cafeteria, surrounded by people without the scars of intellectual
struggles, examining a menu card with no thrifty eyes on the price list,
spinning away from dinner to the theatre in a taxi without watching the
expensive revolutions of the metre, enjoying a play or a concert
unhampered by the cramped discomfort of balcony heights—were luxuries
Nora had come to count upon during the winter. More than that was the
stimulation of talking to a man with vigorous opinions, whose
prejudices, even if they were irritating, were at least never feminine.
There was the new sensation of not having to look out for one’s self, to
cross the street with no fear of cars darting out of unexpected corners,
to walk along a dark passage without even a shiver of trepidation, to
escape in companionship one’s own doubts.

‘But you can’t go on this way forever,’ warned Helen, who had studied
all of the uncertain ways of men and women.

Nora and John Harper, walking home briskly from the theatre, crossed the
park. Under the trees, with their lacy shadows over the path, there was
escape from the glare of the lights and the steady traffic, a thin
quietness with a lazy, pleasant hum beneath it. Nora did not see the
lovers on the benches locked in heavy, passionate embraces, nor the
homeless men slinking off to a dark corner to find a bed away from the
policeman’s beat. She paused close to the Japanese cherry trees in the
height of blossoming.

‘How sweet—sweet,’ she murmured, turning to her companion.

They stood breathing in the scented spring air. She took a step forward,
but strong arms held her back, enclosed her.

‘At last—my darling,’ he breathed close to her cheek. He was crushing
her against him with his rough, masculine strength, outraging some blind
fighting instinct in her.

‘No—no!’ She tried to free herself, trembling with rage.

‘I love you,’ he went on, not releasing her, pressing his lips against
hers. ‘My proud little girl.’

‘No,’ she repeated, pulling herself away with a quick wrench, clenching
her lips against the sobs in her throat.

‘You mean you don’t care for me?’

She began to walk rapidly, faster and faster, gathering speed, almost
running over the ground. If she could get back on the crowded pavements,
with people passing and lights, she would be safe.

‘You don’t need to be afraid of me,’ the voice beside her was saying.

They went the rest of the way in silence, she still sweeping over the
terrifying stretch of streets like a home-bound swallow, he stalking
beside her with hard, pounding strides. At the door of the women’s
dormitory, she said a quick good-night.

In her room she was eager to turn out her light, to hide herself away in
the darkness. How dared he? she kept repeating to herself. Lying in bed,
she trembled all over. A chill seized her, coming out in icy drops on
her forehead, making her lips chatter, her fingers stiffen, her feet
dead weights. Then she was burning up with fever. This man had done
something to her—battered down the outer fortifications of her woman’s
world, made her, for the first time, afraid—afraid because she was a
woman.

She knew now why she had run away—locked herself up in this room high
above the city streets. She must save herself. If he had urged her—held
out against her battling opposition—something inside might have
crumpled, and she——That was what it meant to be a woman—weak,
surrendering to brute force.

But she had saved herself. They didn’t match. She knew. They didn’t
belong to each other.

Toward morning, with the dawn making timid grey shadows in her room,
Nora was calm enough to go back over everything. There had been doubts
from the start. He was too well dressed, too sure of himself, too
self-consciously correct. And too—too hard. Almost the first time she
met him he affected her like shiny new furniture in shop windows. She
had tried to remember his finer qualities, his kindness and generosity.
But those things dear to her, which made the delicate flavor to life,
did not exist for him. No—no—they could never belong to each other.

The morning light danced over the white paper on Nora’s study table, the
cover on the bureau, the expanse of mirror, the walls. There were
flickers of dawn, then the sunshine at last in her face. Drawing up the
covers, she hid herself away from the hard brightness of the day, and
wept.


                              CHAPTER III


                                   I

Nora was unpacking her trunk in her old room in Petersfield. Margaret
Abington, looking in at the door, hesitated shyly at the threshold.

‘I kept hoping all the time,’ sighed Margaret, ‘that something
better—something would turn up in New York.’

‘You don’t want me here, then?’ Nora looked up from the depths of her
trunk.

‘I was trying to eliminate my own choice,’ Margaret said solemnly.

Margaret looked very tired, worn, sucked dry. They had come up to
Petersfield on the same train after two busy days in New York spent in
arranging Margaret’s fall exhibition, a ceremony which generally left
her exhausted but radiant. But as Nora had watched her old friend,
silent and gloomy, superintending the hanging of her pictures, she knew
that Margaret wasn’t well. And yet, standing in the little gallery taken
over by the New Society of Women Artists before Margaret’s last
painting—the doorway of a fisherman’s cottage opening out upon a dull
sea, in the foreground the gay, old-fashioned flowers which grow best
with simple care, their bright colors standing out with a kind of
jubilation against the troubled sky and sea—one sensed the joy of
creation. Margaret, so sombre herself—all the energy driven out of her.

‘Those fleeting precious summer weeks,’ she murmured, as if she were
alone. The brilliance in her eyes burned for an instant, then changed to
dull despair. ‘My summer all gone. So little done.’ She crept out of the
room.

In returning to her profession, Nora was trying to convince herself that
she had no illusions about her future. The vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience, without the religious exaltation—these were the rules of
the order to which she was attached. But if a woman threw herself
entirely into her work, she seemed in the end to find something which
fed her spirit.

There was Ruth Ewing. Nora had visited her at her scientific station on
the Massachusetts coast not far from Margaret’s studio. After a
laborious day hunting and studying specimens, Ruth leaped into the sea
and followed the path of the moonlight. In the water, beauty, grace, the
swiftness of a fish or a mermaid came to this plain little spinster. Her
emotions swept over the sky, over birds, butterflies, bugs of the less
ethereal kingdoms, flowers, plants, germs, with the same unspoiled joy.
Men like John Harper would say that science dried up a woman, but
nothing would ever dry up the pools of Ruth Ewing’s fresh spirit. Nora
and Margaret had left her in a New York laboratory working beside a man,
both of them trying to isolate the influenza germ. Neither one thought
of his own glorification. They were the servants of sick humanity. Their
sexless coöperation seemed to Nora very fine. Disembodied mind—that was
the goal of mankind. As she watched their generosity, each placing the
results of his former experiments at the disposal of the other, she felt
something of the heights to which science, once so lowly and despised,
has climbed. Hearing Ruth talk made one realize what an intellectual
outlet meant for women.

But Margaret Abington said Ruth was a pathetic creature. Margaret didn’t
appreciate science. Nor did she appreciate Ruth’s strenuous enjoyment of
the natural world, without contemplation or real æsthetic appreciation,
always darting after something outdoors to name and classify it, to add
it to her store of memory. Margaret’s way was so different. She let
beauty take her unaware. But the result for her as for Ruth was the
same; the same absorption, the same fusion of the individual with his
accomplishment.

The problem of women whose entire sex interest has gone into their work
belongs to the present. The old painters sentimentalized the virgin with
her rapturous gaze upon her young child. But physical creation is the
labor of only one class of women. Miss Steele had the uplifted
expression of a Raphael Madonna when she started a new book and Ruth
Ewing when she was pursuing a new germ. This emotional devotion to some
kind of work—this was what Nora must find if Petersfield was to be
endurable.

Saying good-bye to Michael and Ellen Powys on the pier, Ellen with her
first baby, sure that nothing was important but babies, Nora felt
debased—frustrated—wasted in life. Women with intellectual progeny never
flaunted their self-satisfaction that way. Nora didn’t care if she never
saw Ellen again. Michael’s father had died, leaving a generous fortune
to his son with the stipulation that he never step his foot in the
factory, reserved to the management of Michael’s conservative older
brother. Of course they were disappointed. But with the money they were
embarking to London to start a new liberal weekly. At least Michael was.
Ellen, as a mother, left the reform of the world to others. Nora waved
to her old friend and watched her sail out of her life with no regrets.
The women at Petersfield—they meant her future.

A return to the old life. But during the first days Nora felt like a
stranger. The war had changed Petersfield. During the house shortage,
commuters had discovered the quiet village, had built a row of
attractive suburban dwellings on the street leading to the campus, and
persuaded the railroad to put on express trains between New York and
Petersfield, with excellent service. The journey was now simpler than
the subway stretch between Knickerbocker University and Wall Street. For
a member of the faculty, returning from graduate study with an
indefinite stretch of years divided between teaching and mad plunges
into Knickerbocker lectures and seminars, residence within suburban
limits had special advantages.

But there were other changes. The girls had changed. Most of them had
bobbed hair, wore short skirts, and adopted a costume common over the
entire country, one heard, among college women. There were two
variations: a smart sweater over a ruffled blouse and a pleated skirt,
or the pleated skirt with a blouse in coat effect fastened below the
waist with a leather belt. A plain felt hat completed the desired
effect. Even the woollen stockings now in vogue kept close to one model.
Girls between seventeen and twenty-two all looked alike, and the
delicacy and grace which a democracy in fashion did not entirely conceal
was hidden as if the owner were ashamed of distinction.

Possibly the college world has always appropriated a homogeneous style
to characterize its own order. She may have forgotten. There was the
Peter Thompson sailor-suit just waning in Nora’s freshman year. Yet
surely there was more individuality then.

Walking alone at the end of her first day of lectures, Nora approached
the graveyard where the Suffrage League had kept its night vigils. She
laughed aloud at the memory. She wanted to see how the old place looked.
She heard voices.

Seated on the tombstones was a group of girls all having an afternoon
smoke together. When they saw one of the faculty, they rose, greeted her
cordially, and invited her to join them. No traces of embarrassment,
even though cigarettes were forbidden by college rules. Conservative
mothers from the Middle West still terrorized over the academic
authorities.

Everywhere one heard about the new frankness among girls. Frankness was
their code. They acted as they thought, Nora soon observed. A
distinguished English poet came to lecture, and the girls, expecting to
hear him read his verse, crowded the hall. But he happened to be a
critic as well, and, in a voice so low it reached only the first ten or
twelve rows, read a highly involved study of a Victorian poet. The
students in the back rows slid out. Those in the centre began trickling
away. Bolder spirits marched out of the hall. At last only those near
the platform remained.

Professor Steele was enraged by such rudeness to a guest. But the girls
proclaimed their intention of defending themselves against boredom. No
good came of it. Let lecturers speak out good and loud, and they would
stay to listen.

In the exchange of undergraduate ideas speech was full of psychological
tags. Only a friend like Helen enabled Nora to meet this new college
generation. A freshman was greeted her first day with a charge of the
Œdipus complex, against which she must defend herself. Intimacies
between two girls were watched with keen, distrustful eyes. Among one’s
classmates, one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl
searching for a feminine counterpart, and one ridiculed their devotions.

‘But are they really so sophisticated as they seem?’ Nora appealed to
Margaret Abington as she finished recounting a student’s avowal of
feminine independence, in which adventures of sex loomed dangerously.

‘They’re as innocent as babes,’ Margaret declared. ‘It’s pathetic. All
that talk is a protective armor. Those who don’t talk—the old-fashioned,
languishing ones—look out for them. It was like that in your day. You’ve
forgotten. When you’re young, you like to express yourself.’

A group of girls having dinner with Nora began to argue about the
difference between a flirt and a coquette.

‘A flirt,’ ventured a precocious freshman, whose older brother was of
the opinion that girls ought to learn to think and had accordingly
presented his sister with a set of Shaw, ‘a flirt is a woman who is
willing to rouse a man’s passion without being willing to satisfy it.’

The two older girls blushed beyond their rouge.

In this post-war era men flocked to Petersfield from all the colleges
for week-end visits. A man with a car speeded over the roads from Boston
to Petersfield as a relief from mental fatigue. The campus was like a
country fair. The visitors needed no special entertainment.
Roller-skating had become a fad among the girls. A youth, therefore,
roller-skated, hand in hand with his lady-love, who, if she were a
stalwart maiden, could hold him up while he was learning to balance
himself. There were bicycle races on the college walks, and Miss Steele
was almost run down. Most of the faculty went into retirement during
this frightful week-end period. Even the country roads were no longer
peacefully secluded. Youth was an athletic generation with tireless
legs. The week-enders explored the countryside. A girl, walking with her
visitor’s arm tossed carelessly over her shoulder as they trudged along,
was a frequent faculty vision of horror. There were picnics in one’s
secret haunts—droves of them. Margaret Abington gave up her walks with
Nora. But Nora could only be thankful all this hadn’t come in her day.
Then, men visited Petersfield for proms or to announce their
engagements. Other times one had peace. For the girls without swains to
exhibit, this new order necessitated advertising one’s failure to
attract men. Nora watched the female squads doing everything together,
pretending to be superior to these ruddy boys in knickerbockers, but
looking over their shoulders at them just the same.

Ruth Ewing insisted from the first that the new ways were better. Her
students told her about the violent arguments they had with their
masculine week-enders about the war, which had touched none of them, so
they could talk; about the present Administration and its shameful
attitude toward the League of Nations. World affairs were vital to the
best of these girls. They were arranging debates with the men’s
colleges. The Oxford debaters were coming to Petersfield to cross swords
with them next year. It was wonderful. In November a conference on
social questions was to be held at the college, with delegates from the
men’s colleges as well as the women’s.

Through all this revolution, however, the faculty was unchanged. The
feeble representation of men had not increased. What men there were
seemed more old-maidish than the women, with minds far inferior. Many
were there, Nora suspected, because they couldn’t compete with men in
the men’s colleges. The curriculum, too, was just the same, even though
the President announced that the colleges since the war were attracting
a new type of girl, formerly confined to the finishing schools. But
courses in household arts, by which this society type might be
benefited, had not been provided. When faculty discussions touched upon
the necessity, Miss Steele fought against such innovations. Petersfield
was a college of arts. Let these frivolous creatures who lowered
academic standards go to an institute for domestic science. The number
of girls entering teaching had also declined. But the old training for a
pedagogical career was still the backbone of the college.

Nora going down to New York twice a week, spending Saturday in the
Knickerbocker library, in the moments snatched for contemplation
pondered over what she could do. On the train travelling back and forth
she went over this huge problem. The old traditions and ideals were
gone. What was to take their place?

Her ambition for the students who crowded her courses was to give them
an understanding of the impartial mind, how one got it, what results it
gained. She tried to show them the confused, wasted world into which
their youth had been born; she put before them their special problems
and responsibilities. She talked about the international point of view,
read them the preface to the new Shaw play which had appeared that
summer; ‘The Wicked Half-Century,’ ‘War Delirium,’ ‘The Long Arm of
War,’ ‘The Sufferings of the Sane,’ ‘How the Fools Shouted the Wise Men
Down.’ But while she read, she was conscious of the daily press in the
fall of 1920, with its headlines trumpeting the hunting down of
dangerous ‘aliens and radicals,’ terms largely synonymous, the
deportation of harmless foreigners, and the madness of Americanization
propaganda. What difference did her poor feeble words make?

But she continued to remind the girls that studies in history, unless
one first tried to be impartial, were a pure waste of time. Go into
something else. The classics or a new language. Mathematics.

The descendants of the Socialist League of Nora’s day were now
concentrated upon the Russian Soviets. They looked to the radical
history instructor, Miss Deming, as a patroness for the cause of real
freedom.

‘But are your Bolshevists really giving Russia freedom?’ she demanded
the day she was asked to address a meeting. ‘Isn’t this a new form of
tyranny?’

Her audience looked at her, their courtesy fighting against hostility.
She was evidently like all the rest of the faculty, blind to the beauty
and tragedy of Russia, struggling against her old shackles. She had
deceived them with her animated talk.

Miss Steele told Nora she was becoming an excellent teacher. ‘I don’t
know what you’re doing with them,’ she said. ‘But they’re
interested—stirred up. I hear them talking. You’re waked up yourself,
Nora. Your trips to New York—the University—it won’t let you get stale.’

So the winter passed.


                                   II

One night Margaret Abington knocked at Nora’s door. She came in, and lay
down on her couch, utterly exhausted.

‘It’s the weather,’ Nora said. ‘The first of spring. I feel tired, too,
these days.’

Margaret said nothing.

‘I wonder,’ she murmured half to herself, ‘if it’s worth while going on.
One always feels sure the next thing will be better.’

She rose slowly, paused at Nora’s door, her fingers playing with the
knob. Her face wore its characteristic twisted, tortured smile.

‘You’re so strong, Nora,’ she said. ‘So—so firm and courageous. If I——’
She stopped, looked back at Nora, and was gone.

Late the next afternoon word got around that Miss Abington was missing.
She had not come down to breakfast, but that was not unusual. At
luncheon she was still gone. Nora went up to her room. It was empty. A
search was begun. Nora was questioned.

‘Did she seem pessimistic?’ they asked her.

‘No more than usual.’

‘You noticed nothing? What she said?’

‘She so often says queer things—when she’s tired.’

Not until the next day did they find her. A farmer three miles beyond
the college saw a hat floating down the swollen stream which ran through
his property. She had been dead some time when they took her out of the
water. Not far away was a basket weighted down with stones holding the
bodies of her two cats. She had not been willing to leave them behind
her.

In all the sad arrangements Nora and her friends had to make during the
next days, they found Margaret Abington’s life singularly solitary. She
had provided for no disposal of her possessions, even her paintings.
Some wealthy distant cousins near Boston to whom Nora wrote felt
outraged that the Abington name had been dragged into the newspapers.
They had no suggestions to make about her pictures. They did not care
for the kind of thing she did. They had been collecting Gainsboroughs
for years and were now started on Romneys. It was clear enough from
their letters that they had never given their gifted cousin a penny to
help her along with her work nor the blessed boon of a little leisure.

Miss Abington’s canvases became the possession of the college, all but
the picture of the flowers growing in the fisherman’s doorway, which
went to Nora. And to the fall exhibition, arranged in the art lecture
room, fashionable and artistic New York crowded. Miss Abington had made
Petersfield famous. The President was very much pleased. He immediately
forgot that he had never cared for Miss Abington. He thought of himself
now as the guardian of a sacred shrine. For the pictures, which the
critics tardily praised, he conceived the idea of a beautiful gallery
where the best of contemporary paintings should be gathered. He came out
in the New York papers, called on art patrons, and wrote impressive
letters to wealthy men. In a few months he announced to the college that
the art building was assured.

That the name of one so shrinking and unassuming should be tossed about
by the daily press and the college generally was unendurable to Nora.
Fame for a talent so delicate must be clean and pure. Nora saw it
besmirched by the stupidity of the rabble. In Margaret’s lifetime a
select company had appreciated her. She had had no mercy for fools. Now
she was defenceless against the enthusiasm of the loquacious dilettante.
Nora could not bear it. She kept away from the art lecture room, avoided
the sight of Margaret’s successor, a hard, confident young person who
talked about pictures as if she were trying to sell them.

Margaret—the dear companion, so tortured by her own fastidious nature,
so affectionate with her friends, so fierce against the rest of the
world—Nora would keep for herself. She no longer mentioned Margaret’s
name.

There was plenty to do. As an ambitious historian of nineteenth-century
England, she was now devoting most of her time to the eighteenth
century, and had begun her book, ‘England on the Eve of the Industrial
Revolution.’ The making of a book after long stretches of teaching, with
the frequent trips to New York on stray half-days to use the University
library, the painful adjustments of the mind from the classroom to
writing and back again, was a tortuous undertaking. Nora thought late at
night as she worked of scholars all over the world who have brought
forth their ideas with an even greater fight against unfavorable odds.
The luxuries of ease and an untroubled mind—they were unknown to the
brotherhood of poor scholars. Brotherhood of poor scholars—the phrase
running through her weary head brought cool draughts of refreshment. All
those who had something within them—like poor Margaret—how they suffered
in the pangs of creation! The chips of Nora’s labor she gave to her
students. She also took them into her confidence about her speculations,
her perplexities, tried to have them see how difficult it was to be
honest, intelligent, fair, and at the same time how beautiful were these
virtues of learning. Some of them caught her meaning.


                                  III

Five years of toil. There is nothing to say about it. You read for five
years, think, write, destroy everything you have done the first, perhaps
the second year; and possibly at the end, if you have kept your head and
your health, you have written a book which is worth the reading. Just
that, Nora estimated, was her history between the ages of twenty-five
and thirty.

But the book was done. Nora had spent her thirtieth birthday typing the
last of it. Miss Steele went around with a challenging air pronouncing
it the best piece of scholarship done by an American woman, or a British
woman, she often added. No one dared to contradict her. But Miss Steele
at last was beginning to show signs of age. Nora discerned a tendency in
her to emotionalize those whom she had once regarded with a chill
justice, and the praise of her old teacher had its sting of pain.
Professor Nicholson, who was urging the necessity of sending so
promising a young scholar to England to get a really big piece of work
started, regarded this first book as merely a respectable beginning. It
was all his management, of course, that the fellowship from
Knickerbocker University came to Nora. She was amused that Petersfield
should consider her a remarkable person, and that her students should
offer their congratulations with humble awe.


                                   IV

After a tiresome afternoon spent conferring with her publishers, Nora
went to Helen Spring’s apartment for a quiet week-end. She and Helen
were lounging in front of the fire after dinner, with no other light in
the room. A knock at the door.

‘Bother,’ said Helen.

She opened the door, standing there a minute in silence, staring at her
visitor. ‘Why, it’s Zoe Ryder!’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t recognize you
at first.’

Nora turned on the lights. A pale, very thin woman dropped down,
breathless, on Helen’s couch. ‘It must be five or six years since I’ve
seen you,’ Nora remarked, trying to conceal her shock at the change
which had come over Zoe. A kind of decay had settled over the former
Southern gentility, as if poor Zoe had been dragged through a miry way
in her troubles.

‘You were expecting me?’ Zoe gasped. ‘I followed the marks. I was so
relieved when I saw it was your house, Helen.’

‘The marks?’

Zoe pulled off a little black hat and patted her short brown hair,
heavily streaked with grey. ‘At first I was scared when I saw them on my
doorstep. A big letter _F_ in chalk. It’s that gang following me again,
I thought.’ Zoe’s large blue eyes regarded first Helen seated beside her
on the couch, then Nora before the fire. Nora observed their restless
glitter. ‘Another of their tricks. But something just made me follow
them. You know how it is. Something inside pushing you to do things. The
arrows at the corner—it was easy—and then following the lines—they
brought me right here.’

‘But we don’t know anything about the marks,’ Helen protested.

Zoe paid no attention. She sat, her hands clasping her knees, looking
abstractedly at something in front of her. ‘They’ve done enough. Fed on
me—ruined a good business.’ The gentle voice became shrill, then
subsided, and returned to the old girlish animation Nora remembered.
‘You never came to my tea-room, Helen. It was so cute. Of course I
didn’t have any money. I took down the doors and made them into tables,
stuck candles in the holes where the knobs had been. I called it the
“Devil’s Kitchen”——’

Nora and Helen looked at each other.

‘It was all written up in the newspapers. In two of them. I cooked
everything myself—fried the chicken—made the chocolate cake—the first
night went off wonderfully. I even had drinks—to advertise the tea-room,
you know.’

‘And you’ve made a success of it?’ Helen inquired.

‘The first week I had crowds every night.’ Zoe’s aged face had in
flashes the fire of youth. ‘The real people—writers, the theatre crowd,
artists. And that gang—they all had titles—foreigners. The Baron was
Russian. Pole maybe. I can’t remember. He brought the others. They kept
saying they’d pay and then ate off me every night. Imposing on a woman
that way! And noisy when they were drunk—it scared off the others. I
don’t blame them.’

Zoe’s narrative—broken off with this strange, inconsequential anger
against some one—the gang it was, Nora remembered. It sounded like
madness. And yet Zoe, perched lightly on the edge of Helen’s couch, was
so small and harmless, so much, Nora had always felt, like a fluttering
ground bird, with a silly ambition sometimes for the sky. Helen sat
regarding Zoe with her kind, amused eyes.

‘Why did you feed those men?’ Nora demanded indignantly.

‘They just ordered things. Nobility—all of them. Just helped themselves
to the drinks until they were all gone. And the trouble to get hootch
now——’

Zoe, with her soft voice and helpless air, in league with bootleggers
and a debauched alien crowd—the word ‘hootch’ crashing into her
old-fashioned Virginia speech—was this really Zoe sitting there?

‘My dear,’ drawled Zoe, ‘I never knew there were such people in the
world. After I’d trusted them——’ Her innocent round blue eyes with the
deep circles looked up at Nora. ‘I know now. It was a gang that feeds
off people—off women. They won’t work. Just drinking——’

Zoe wandered in her narrative. But in the end of a long description of
the troubled fortunes of the tea-room, she came at last to its sudden
end, the doors closed, no more possible credit.

‘Even then the Baron came,’ she went on. ‘Walked right in. “I’m hungry,”
he said. “You’ve eaten up all I’ve got,” I told him. “There’s nothing
left.” “I’m going to make myself some tea.” And, my dear, he walked
right out into the kitchen and got tea for himself.’

‘You ought to’ve called the police,’ Helen said.

But Zoe for some reason had no confidence in the protecting arm of the
law. She shrank away from Helen’s suggestion, as if wincing before a
blow. With a few sticks of furniture rescued from the tea-room she had
sought refuge in the attic of a feather factory as a hiding-place from
the gang, of which she lived in daily dread.

‘I didn’t even have a bed,’ Zoe continued plaintively. ‘I told my
friends——’ In all of Zoe’s troubles, when she tried to borrow money, she
spoke largely of those mysterious devoted beings always ready to come to
her aid. ‘They began sending me cots. One after another. I lost count of
them. They were just lined up——’ She laughed as she stretched out her
hands to indicate an infinity of beds. This light, untroubled laughter
as she described that terrible refuge—what—what had come to Zoe to
change her like this? Nora’s imagination leaped to a succession of
vivid, unmentionable horrors.

Zoe went on. Even in this rude shelter above the feather factory,
consisting sometimes of one room, sometimes of four in Zoe’s uncertain
recital, the Baron hunted her down. He declared he would freeze on the
streets if she didn’t take him.

‘I had such a nice fireplace,’ she boasted. ‘And I picked up wood
everywhere. He lay right down on the floor in front of my fire. He had a
terrible cough. Honestly, girls, he was very ill. I couldn’t——’

She had made up a bed for the Baron out of her superfluous store of
cots, covered him with some old clothes, nursed his cold. But as soon as
he was well, he went out and brought back the gang to occupy the rest of
the cots stacked up in the attic.

Helen accepted even this last revelation quietly, with all that one
could imagine from Zoe’s dark hints, the loft of the feather factory
with its disreputable nightly crew presided over by a worn, emaciated
Zoe. Did Zoe know what she was saying? Couldn’t Helen stop this mad
tale? Surely all this flimsy, impossible horror was the work of a sick
mind. But Helen’s calm face seemed to inspire Zoe to go on.

‘Carrying on—stamping up my stairway—there wasn’t even a lock to my
door. I’d lie there scared almost to death——’ Zoe’s skinny little
shoulders shook. ‘It was terrible—just terrible.’ Her voice had the
chirp of an insect trying to announce a tragedy.

Zoe came home one afternoon and found a crowd gathering around the back
door leading to her attic. Two policemen stood over something on the
stairs. Zoe stepped up beside them. She displayed a dainty pride as she
described her important part in the drama.

‘There was the Baron. He’d got some feathers out of one of the factory
bags. He was all rolled up in feathers. Just his head sticking out. Like
an enormous bird.’ Zoe began to laugh at the memory. Helen and Nora, not
knowing what else to do, joined her.

‘Such language. And right before a lady.’ Zoe had a slight lisp in
moments of stress. ‘He was so drunk he—they wanted to carry him off. But
I couldn’t have that. I told them he was a relative. I’d be responsible
for him.’ Again Nora observed Zoe’s unaccountable satisfaction, as if
she had performed some glorious deed.

But after Zoe had got the Baron up to the attic, she had herself taken
flight. Since then she had lived in a room not far from Helen, in daily
dread that the gang would discover her.

‘I’ve found out about them now,’ she said. ‘They collect around the
Square. They pick out their victims and then—I don’t dare go out except
after dark to get something to eat. I never go to the door. My friends
ring three times. Remember, three times. If they found where I was——’

Zoe rambled on a little more, going back over parts of her story,
exclaiming at intervals, ‘My dear, I never knew there were such people
in the world.’

Suddenly she seemed to remember a pressing engagement, jumped up, and
left, saying once more, ‘Ring three times. I’m always home.’

She was gone, and Helen and Nora were looking at each other.

‘It’s all like a hideous nightmare that you can’t shake off,’ Nora said,
her voice husky.

‘Something has happened to her. Drugs maybe,’ Helen speculated. ‘But
that old obsession of hers——’

How much of this tale of terror was true, how much built up with the aid
of Zoe’s sick mind, it was impossible to tell. They compared their
impressions, went over the details once more, but there seemed no
immediate solution.

Finally they went downstairs. Stooping they made out the letter _F_ in
chalk on the outer steps. At the nearest corner, they found a chalk
diagram.

The arrows leading from the letter _F_ pointed toward their house. They
followed the arrows for a few blocks, found them radiating in all
directions, in a perplexing maze.

‘Some new Village game,’ Nora ventured. ‘A party, perhaps—a treasure
hunt. These novelty-seekers would hit on something like this.’

Whatever it was, however, it had brought Zoe to Helen’s.

‘And I didn’t even dare offer to help her,’ Helen remembered, when they
had returned to Helen’s sitting-room. ‘She’s borrowed money from every
one she knew. It’s two years since any one I know has seen her.’

They made inquiries among Zoe’s old circle, but no one had heard of her.
At the address she gave even three rings at the door failed to bring
Zoe.

‘Well,’ Helen remarked, when Nora was starting back to Petersfield
Sunday night, ‘you’ve seen all my menagerie the years you’ve been around
New York. I guess Zoe’s the last of them, Nora. Your work’s about
finished. I’ve done my best for you—Amelia—Vicky—Zoe—I don’t believe I
can give you any more.’

‘You’ve done very well by me, Helen.’

‘Kept you from too dull a diet—the university and the normal academic
mind——Well, you’re the only one of us that’s come to anything. And yet
we’ve sneered at your sanity behind your back, Nora. I can tell you
now.’


                                   V

Nora stood in a long procession of men and women receiving degrees from
Knickerbocker University. She marched up to the high platform, heard a
few words mumbled over her, and was soon back in her seat. The end, so
long delayed by teaching, by her own stumbling in by-paths, by her
intellectual insecurity, was reached at last. In the crowded
amphitheatre, she sensed what a big American university, so formless and
destitute of charm or emotion, had given her. In these striving years,
shut off from much of what men experienced in the rubbing together of
the best minds, she was carrying away intellectual gains which
Petersfield could never have offered her.

After all, it was the universities like Knickerbocker which represented
the best American life could deliver, the safest places to breed the
ideas which would become the popular possession of the next age. The
universities were far from perfect—she was ready to admit, but no
institution of learning can be far above the society which supports it.
Idealists had laid heavy charges against Knickerbocker University: the
creaking machinery, the officers who placed immediate well-being before
the ultimate good, the dull professors, the dead scholarship. Many of
these evils existed in all the universities. But there was the other
side. Where did all the scornful critics who saw no virtue in American
learning get their ideals—their first spark? At a university. Some
professor. Some other student. Perhaps both. Then they grew up, went
away, and belabored the place which prepared them to walk without
leading strings.

Crossing the square in front of the library, escaping from the multitude
of Commencement Day, Nora experienced a prolonging of her elated mood.
She reviewed swiftly the books she knew written by the men of
Knickerbocker. In most of them one found honesty, patient toil, the
absence of charlatanism. And in the best there was brilliance and a safe
start for a new generation of scholars. The great need was more
time—more time to think. ‘Ripeness is all,’ wise Shakespeare had said.
More time, more leisure, peace, no worry about money—but all this is the
heaven of which the tired scholar dreams.

Ruth Ewing was waiting for Nora on the corner. ‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t
get in to see your little show for the crowd.’ She kissed Nora. ‘What
shall we do now?’

‘I’ve meant to do it for months. I’ve never had the time. I’m going to
have my hair cut off,’ Nora said.

‘My dear!’ protested her friend.

‘Come along.’ Nora put a firm hand on Ruth’s arm. ‘My mind’s all made
up.’

‘Miss Steele will be furious,’ Ruth persisted, but Nora only laughed and
dragged her forward.

Nora gazed at a shorn head in the barber’s mirror. ‘Very nice, Miss,’ a
dark little man was saying.

Ruth Ewing was examining her not entirely with disapprobation. ‘I wish
Margaret could see you, Nora.’

Nora continued to study the reflection in the mirror. The line of her
head in back, the sweep of hair over her forehead, broad and
clean-cut—yes, it all went with her slender, boyish figure.

‘They won’t take you seriously at first over there in England,’ laughed
Ruth. ‘How you’ll fool them, my dear.’

Years had dropped from Nora, and most of her dignity. At this climax in
her academic honors, she had never seemed more lightly touched by time.
This was the way to start marching over the stretch between thirty and
forty. Thirty-one years old. A woman ready to face the world for the
first time. The best of life beginning; of that she felt sure.
Intelligence ripens slowly, gives its best only after long and weary
waiting. But she was ready, at last, to see what she could do.

‘Ruth,’ Nora called out, ‘let’s take the first train to Petersfield and
show Miss Steele. Of course she’ll be furious. I want to hear her rage.’
She slid out of the barber’s chair, her eyes seeking once more the trim,
smiling girl in the mirror.




                                PART IV.
                              Mount Latmos


                               CHAPTER I


                                   I

A park, a lake, a red pillar box, a postman on a bicycle wearing a funny
flat helmet, a tall iron fence with an opening through which the taxi
passed. Nora had arrived at Saint Ethelfreda College in London. It was
exactly what an English college should be: red brick covered with ivy, a
stretch of that vivid green grass one always suspected on postcards, and
flowers, actually the snapdragons which since Newman’s ‘Apologia’ one
expected to find in English college gardens. The maid at the door, with
her crisp cap and apron and stiffly starched movements, was a perfect
specimen of the English servant, like those in the novel Nora had read
on the boat coming over.

‘Miss Talbot is expecting you, Miss. Won’t you step this way, Miss?’

Nora was ushered into a large room, very chilly and damp even the first
week of October, with all of the windows opening out into the pleasant
garden. A small, brown-haired woman, the resident tutor, Miss Talbot,
rose to shake hands with Miss Deming, the pupil of that unusual woman,
Professor Steele, who had visited Saint Ethelfreda.

Miss Talbot was all smiles, too many of them. Nora wished that the
resident tutor’s habit of cocking her head on one side like a robin and
opening her blue eyes very wide did not tempt her to laughter. On the
way to her room Nora was introduced to several severe-looking women in
college gowns who must be dons. They didn’t seem to recognize the
American’s donnishness. Evidently short hair didn’t impress the English
as a sign of a highly developed intellect.

The room set aside for the new American student was delightful, with
windows overlooking the garden and the park beyond, where through the
trees Nora could see sheep grazing. A fireplace and a scuttle of coals.
The delights of an open fire would be hers. A desk near the window, a
big armchair, a couch with an India print cover—everything most
comfortable surely. A knock at the door, and the maid she had seen
downstairs entered.

‘I trust everything’s all right, Miss. You want a bit of fire? London is
damp to the Americans, we find. We’ve had American young ladies here
before, Miss. I always take care of them.’

The maid, whose name was Clara, made Nora feel apologetic for her
careless, undistinguished American speech.

‘Now,’ Clara went on, when the coals began to burn, ‘I’m going to bring
up your tea. Miss Talbot said I might. I said you’d be tired after the
weary journey up to London.’

At the sound of the dinner bell the Saint Ethelfreda students gathered
in the chilly common room. Miss Talbot hurriedly introduced Nora to the
gaunt young woman beside her.

‘Miss South from New Zealand. Like two colonials, really.’

Nora looked at Miss South. Then her glance travelled to a girl standing
apart from the others, a girl with heavy black hair held by a large
jewelled pin, and deeply circled eyes, her wrinkled dress in startling
contrast to the English, all correctly attired for a formal eight
o’clock dinner.

‘Mademoiselle Lafleur, your next-door neighbor,’ murmured Miss Talbot.

The French girl’s tragic eyes lighted up for a moment. Miss Talbot put
out a stiff arm through which she slipped her hand, Nora was seized by
the New-Zealander, and a long procession of dons and students, two by
two, marched into the hall.

The dining-hall soared into heights of new oak imitating some
Elizabethan pattern, Nora suspected, and the girls seated at the rows of
tables appeared insignificant in the vastness of space over them.

Nora’s neighbors ate steadily and swiftly, talking very little. All of
them had red cheeks. Like Peggotty’s in ‘David Copperfield,’ as
brilliant as a red velvet pincushion. Nora had heard about English
complexions. It was the dampness, which at the moment hung like a grey
cloud around the chandeliers suspended from the lofty ceiling, now
obscured. These girls were so bony, too. Their arms, their necks, their
cheeks. Not one morsel of superfluous flesh.

From across the table she caught the word hockey—the hockey matches.
Hockey, not yet introduced at Petersfield, had already invaded some of
the American colleges, Nora told them.

‘It’s a topping game,’ ventured a quiet little girl with a shy smile.
‘Topping.’

Miss Talbot rose, Mademoiselle Lafleur took her arm, and the procession
marched back to the common room. The solemnity of the ceremony was
really delicious. The English girls began passing coffee. It was vile.
One sip almost choked Nora. She saw the French girl slide her cup under
the sofa. The dons, raw-boned and talking hockey, took two cups.

Nora, back in her room, closed the windows to shut out the clammy chill
of English air, and shook some coal over the fire. The common room had
kept the shivers chasing up and down her backbone.

A knock on her door. A girl who looked like Fuzzy Leland at Petersfield,
but much taller and thinner, entered.

‘Won’t you come to cocoa at ten o’clock?’ she said. ‘In my room at the
end of the corridor.’

Petersfield all over again. Even to night feeds. But something hot to
drink would be grateful before getting into bed. The sheets were always
damp. Some one on the boat had warned her never to sleep in an English
bed without slipping a watch between the sheets to see if the glass got
damp. But if it did, what next? Nora decided it was more comfortable not
to know too much about the sheets.

In the tall girl’s room—Sheldon her name was, and English girls called
one another by last names just like boys—five girls sat on the floor in
front of a bright fire. They were very friendly to the strange American,
but they didn’t talk much. Long—long pauses. The cocoa made a comforting
warm trickle down Nora’s clammy interior.

In bed that night Nora prayed that she wouldn’t have to live her
freshman year over again at thirty-one. It would be worse than
reincarnation. Those cocoa parties! Professor Steele was responsible for
her coming to Saint Ethelfreda. She had selected Miss Talbot as a
reliable caretaker for her dear pupil. Nora had counted on cheap
lodgings near the British Museum and the School of Economics before Miss
Steele got started on the lurid horrors of an unheated room, or at best
one with a reeking gas-fire, presided over by a slatternly landlady. She
also preached to Nora the duty of studying English university women at
first hand. Her pupil, with her deceptive youth, would be accepted as
one of the girls and could find out if they, in spite of their
seriousness, were any cleverer than the frivolous American girl who had
brains, even while she concealed them.

So here Nora was. Her room was very still. She could hear the ducks on
the lake and the striking of a church bell. Saint Ethelfreda College,
after a cocoa party, had betaken itself to slumber or to study, instead
of conversing loudly in the corridors, romping and squealing in the
Petersfield fashion. An American had to admit that the English respected
quiet.

At breakfast Annette Lafleur slipped into the vacant chair beside Nora.
All around her sat the English girls fresh from a morning tub, their
hair brushed back into a tight bun in a straight line with their shiny
noses. The French girl wore the tumbled dress of the night before. The
jewelled pin, which still upheld her sable coils, had an uncertain,
trembling tilt. Beside the snappy alertness of her neighbors, she looked
as if she had passed a troubled, sleepless night. She stirred a cup of
tea languidly, and looked around her. The English were quietly consuming
frightful quantities of porridge.

Opposite Nora sat the same quiet little hockey enthusiast to whom Nora
had spoken at dinner. She came from Dorsetshire, and her name by some
strange twist was Dorset, Lucy Dorset.

‘Going to play in the match Saturday, Dorset?’ called out the
cocoa-party hostess of the night before.

‘Hockey—always that hockey,’ muttered the French girl. She turned to
Nora. ‘I want to talk to you about America. Some day soon? This
afternoon maybe? I know many Americans.’

Nora and the New-Zealander walked through the park after breakfast, the
feeble sun lighting up the brown of the London trees and the red buses
lumbering past them. Miss South leaped on to the proper bus, Nora
clumsily catching on behind her.

At the British Museum they passed the guardian policemen at the outer
gate, the sight-seers already assembling, and the guards within. The
signatures of the Saint Ethelfreda officers gave Nora immediate access
to the reading-room sanctities.

‘That much done,’ sighed Miss South, leading the way to University
College and then to the School of Economics to arrange about lectures.

On her return, Nora knocked on the door next to hers. Mademoiselle
Lafleur, wrapped in a big white shawl, was leaning over a cold grate
rubbing her hands together.

‘Haven’t you lit your fire yet?’ Nora asked.

The French girl shook her head. In the centre of the mantel shelf above
her was a little shrine covered with gaily colored silk for a picture of
Napoleon as a young man, draped with the tricolor. Beside him nodded two
white carnations in a tipsy little vase. Mademoiselle Lafleur observed
the direction of Nora’s gaze.

‘The Savior of France,’ she said. ‘I pray for the coming of his
successor to save my poor country. A strong man——’

‘I think a descendant of the Napoleon family lives in America.’ Nora was
conscious of the inappropriateness of her matter-of-fact tone. ‘At least
I have a vague memory——’

‘If it could be a ruler with Napoleon’s blood,’ sighed Annette Lafleur.

When Nora suggested tea in her room in front of a blazing fire, the
great melancholy eyes lit up with a faint ray of response. The sight of
Clara bringing in a tray with an abundance of bread and butter, damson
preserves, plum cake, and tea for two hungry people, changed her into an
eager and normal girl.

‘Beautiful—beautiful.’

‘I’m going to start calling you Annette immediately,’ announced Nora,
pouring out fragrant hot tea from a squatty brown earthenware teapot.
‘And please call me Nora.’

‘With pleasure—Nora.’ Annette laughed over her clumsy fumbling with the
name. ‘To escape “Mademoiselle.” Mademoiselle—Mademoiselle with these
English from morning until night. Like a servant. It is horrible.
Miss—Miss—how would they suffer it?’ Annette began to drink her tea, her
chair up close to the comforting flames.

Annette began to question her new friend eagerly about the United
States. She had met American boys during the war. When the big trucks
stopped in front of her country home and the soldiers tried to buy
gasoline, she, the only member of her family speaking English, had to
talk to them. She had begun filling a note-book with her observations of
American men. To draw them out, she made a list of questions.

‘“Do you believe in Platonic love?” That was one of my questions,’
Annette said, looking at Nora with a triumphant and superior air. ‘And
always the young American man said yes, he believed in Platonic love.’

‘Of course,’ Nora agreed.

‘Then I decided the American young man is remarkable. Now the
Frenchman—of course I love my countrymen best—but no Frenchman believes
in Platonic love. And the Englishman—but they are too cold—too frozen to
believe in anything about love. The Englishman—I hate that kind of man.’

Nora had hoped there wouldn’t be another cocoa party that night. But
there was. This time Annette was invited. Cocoa parties were absolutely
new in her experience. She sat perched on a stool before her hostess’s
fire staring around her, a quizzical wonder in her eloquent eyes.

In Nora’s room afterward she went off into spasms of amusement. ‘I shall
write home,’ she snorted. ‘Cocoa—cocoa party.’ In her mocking tones the
words sounded very ridiculous. ‘Oh, my God!’ Annette threw herself face
downward on Nora’s couch.

The French girl interspersed all her remarks with free translations of
her _mon Dieu_. They flavored her speech like red pepper. Of course the
English girls were shocked by her ‘My God,’ which snapped out like a
firecracker.

But even more startling was the American student’s announcement that she
was taking lectures at the School of Economics. None of them went down
there. Somehow it seemed outside the pale of respectability, an
un-English place, they had been told. It also brought back too vivid
memories of that recent shameful but mercifully brief period when a
Labor Government had ruled England, and a coal-miner had donned satin
breeches to bow before the King. There seemed to be no radicals at Saint
Ethelfreda.


                                   II

Down in the visitors’ room, located with the assistance of Clara, Nora
found Ellen Powys. Ellen, very fresh and lovely, with the pink bloom of
her new home, looked very English in her broad-brimmed hat, tweed
costume, homespun scarf, and chamois gloves.

‘I’ve come to carry you home with me for tea,’ she said, enfolding Nora
in a warm embrace. She looked around the bare little room with its
hissing gas-fire. ‘Isn’t this the quaintest place? Like an inquisitorial
chamber. And I walked through miles and miles of halls to find it.’

Ellen was the mother of four substantial British subjects, waiting to be
displayed to Mummy’s American friend in a big cheerful nursery, presided
over by a Scotch nurse; two boys and two girls, the youngest a babe of
three months. They were beautiful and blond like their parents, with
firm hard legs like pillars. Even the small baby promised a stalwart
robustness.

‘You see,’ explained Ellen, as they drove away in her two-seater, ‘I’m
not clever like Michael. So I took to the baby business. All we can hope
is that the children will inherit their father’s brains.’

On Sunday Nora went a second time to the Powys’s Kensington flat, where
Michael’s friends working with him on the paper and a pleasant mixture
of other people dropped in for supper.

Michael had the same beautiful radiance, but he looked more substantial,
and his enthusiasms were tempered by a sobriety and humor which he had
not yet developed in his Petersfield days.

‘I expected you’d get over,’ Michael said to Nora. ‘I hope we can be
some help to you, Ellen and I. We’ll do what we can.’

The guests began to arrive rapidly. They were gayer than Nora had
anticipated, with a careless and informal kindness to the American
stranger unlike the studied benevolence of Saint Ethelfreda. In their
talk, glancing over various employments and avocations, there was none
of that veneration for the arts which characterizes the outsider. Most
of them, it appeared, had a recognized place in a chosen craft.

‘Jolly piece of acting you put on last week, Jerry.’ A stout man
expanding beyond the confines of his dinner jacket nodded toward an
Irish boy stretched out on the floor before the fire.

‘And a jolly bit of writing you spun out for me in “The Londoner,”’ the
actor rejoined. ‘It was kind of you, Norris.’

‘The honest overflow of a disciplined heart,’ laughed the other.

Supper was handed out informally to the guests, who stood around in
groups balancing plates or sought quiet corners. Nora found herself in a
window-seat between an elderly woman whose studio overlooked Hammersmith
Bridge and a young journalist who was trying between assignments to
write a great novel on the war. Others joined them, talked to Nora,
drifted away. Ellen brought up a few people to be introduced to Nora,
but she left her guests largely to themselves.

It was the most delightful evening Nora had yet spent in England. She
leaped on a bus at a near-by corner, with a new affection for London and
for old friends. At the edge of the park near the college gates, she
passed two policemen.

‘Good evening, Miss,’ they said with a warming politeness.

Yes, London was a charming place. She sped along, the church bell
striking, striking. It must be midnight. She reached the college gates.
They were closed. She tried to pull them open. She strained against
them. No response. They were locked. The porter’s lodge on the other
side was in darkness. She looked around. No one was in sight. She
examined the gate. Yes, she could climb over it. She lifted her skirt,
placed one foot on the first cross-piece, up and up, now over, and
quickly climbed down the other side. Walking up the avenue of beech
trees, casting long shadows over the driveway, she remembered that this
was Sunday night, Sunday in England, church-going, propriety, a quiet
evening at home. The college entrance was locked. Of course it would be.
But a light in one of the first-floor windows saved her. She crept over
to it, called softly, and Willis, a very serious second-year girl,
appeared at the window.

‘I’m locked out,’ Nora said.

‘Of course. It’s past midnight,’ announced Willis.

‘May I climb into your window?’ The window-sill was close to the ground.
The only difficulty was in leaping over the flower borders which
stretched between.

‘I oughtn’t to let you,’ scolded Willis. ‘If you trample the flowers——’

But Willis was so absorbed in higher mathematics that she had no desire
to inquire into the American girl’s irregularity. She said good-night
chillily and went on with her work.

The next morning a note in Nora’s post-office box summoned her to Miss
Talbot’s room. She knocked on what she thought was the proper door.

‘Come in,’ called a faint voice.

Miss Talbot was seated at the opposite end of her very long room in
front of an official table.

‘Will you please go around to the other door,’ suggested Miss Talbot,
‘and not tramp through my sitting-room?’ Nora looked around her, backed
out of the room, and found a door marked ‘Office.’ Evidently, Miss
Talbot’s room possessed a public and a private entrance.

Nora stood in front of the official table, Miss Talbot not asking her to
be seated.

‘I am informed that you were not in the college at closing time last
night, Miss Deming. Your entrance later needs some explanation.’

‘I—I didn’t know—that the gates were locked. When I returned——’ Nora
felt the black guilt of a small child unable to make the proper
explanation to his elders.

‘You did not consult me about any evening engagement, Miss Deming.’

‘You mean that I—if I go out evenings——’

‘Every resident in this college makes no engagement without consulting
me,’ Miss Talbot declared.

‘I—I didn’t know,’ Nora faltered.

‘Oh.’ Into Miss Talbot’s exclamation one could read almost anything.

Outside the inquisitorial chamber, Nora realized that Miss Talbot was
ignorant of her academic standing in her own country, her age, her years
of independence. She must go back and explain. But something held her
outside Miss Talbot’s door. Why should she live in this English college
without the restrictions of the other students, free of the shackles
which held them? The girls had accepted her as one of them. She would
not spoil the naturalness of her position.

Her heart still beat with enraged thumps. Her cheeks burned. She
remembered now the rancor the young suffer against restraint. So this
was what the English girls had to endure.

Annette was delighted at Nora’s experience in bumping her head against
the unyielding stone wall of a British Sabbath. She, too, had suffered.
But she had her peculiar kind of revenge. Whenever Miss Talbot appeared
within her orbit, she muttered under her breath two phrases which she
had found in Gaston Leroux: ‘Smirking with the careful charm of a woman
a little along in years who relies still on infantine graces,’ and ‘fat
smile of importance,’ which was even better.

The English girls called Miss Talbot ‘Tabby,’ and they resented her
tyranny as much as did the two foreigners. None of them, however, dared
to rebel. Poor Jonesie, an honors student in chemistry, always studying
long after midnight, had asked for permission to go to a Bach concert.

‘You will never distinguish yourself by running out at night like a
servant girl,’ pronounced Tabby icily.

Jones, on a scholarship and not far enough removed from the servant
class to escape the sting in Tabby’s words, had submitted to the
decision.

‘She’s a tyrant,’ one of Jonesie’s champions said. ‘It’s power she
loves. Poor Jonesie who gets dull working so hard——’

‘If one felt Tabby did it for our good. The way she grins when she says
something nasty——’

But Fairfield, a stubby girl from Cheshire, always defended Tabby.
‘She’s clever—awfully clever. You all know that.’ No one disputed
Fairfield. All of them had too many sore memories of Tabby’s
relentlessly powerful tongue. ‘You’ve got to let Tabby have a little
temperament,’ she concluded.

Nora soon discovered that Fairfield was right. Tabby was so much more
than a tyrant. At the International Dinner given at the Trafalgar Club,
she overheard Miss Talbot talking to a distinguished Frenchman partly in
French and partly in English in a brilliant fashion which she realized
she at Tabby’s age could never equal. In the candlelight, Tabby, with
her firm white neck and shoulders, the brilliant green of her eyes, the
delicately shifting color of her face intensified by the rose of her
gown, was very handsome, one of the most notable women there. Only as
the shades of Saint Ethelfreda drew around her did she become sharp and
hard, ruling with a force which none dared question. She had two lives
which never crossed each other.


                                  III

Lucy wanted to be Nora’s friend. She gave a light little knock on Nora’s
door, lingered over her fire, talked to her about Hardy, the Dorsetshire
poet, whose verse stirred her, another Dorsetshire person, as nothing
else had. Gradually she told more about herself. She came from a family
whose ambition for her was success at the county balls. But she wasn’t a
success. She couldn’t be. At dances her hair got wet and stringy. She
knew she was awkward. And dancing made her tired—so very tired. She came
to college to escape the county balls. Her father had been angry, her
mother sad, at their daughter’s failure. But she loved Saint Ethelfreda.
And she loved hockey. Hardy and hockey—strange little Lucy.

One night she looked up at Nora with a bird-like glance from her
footstool in front of the fire. ‘Do you like Mademoiselle?’ she asked.
‘I’ve seen you talking to her.’

‘I find her very interesting—very different,’ Nora told her.

‘I’m afraid I don’t care for the French. We always have a French girl
here at college. They seem very strange. Not like the English. I don’t
like people who are different. That’s English, I suppose. We’re narrow,
you think?’

‘But I’m different.’

‘In such a nice way,’ interrupted Lucy. ‘You seem so friendly—easy to
talk to. Really,’ she added, the courage rising in the depths of scared,
blue-green eyes.

There seemed no poetry in the English girls—except Lucy—no imagination.
When Annette insisted upon reading aloud her latest discovery in English
verse at the cocoa parties, reading it as it should be read—tenderly,
with moments of fire, of passion, their red cheeks flushed carmine and
they looked down toward their boots. They appeared proud of their lack
of emotion, at least their concealment of it, of their regular and
studious life at college. They expected to secure posts in a school,
good ones if they got ‘firsts’ in the examinations, those eventful
examinations, which, at the end of three years, decided their
professional standing in life. To be successful students, they
eliminated all vanity. Neatness, an almost oppressive soapy cleanliness,
they insisted upon, but scraped-back hair and dull woollen dresses under
academic gowns were the marks of the serious university woman. They, the
daughters of doctors, barristers, schoolmasters, and clergymen in
provincial towns, had no curiosity about London. They laughed at the
time Nora wasted with sight-seeing. They had been to the Tower and the
Zoo. A few of the more spirited had visited Madame Tussaud’s. When
necessity took them to East London, they avoided buses which carried one
relentlessly through miserable thoroughfares. They used the Underground,
bolted out as quickly as they could, and didn’t look around them. They
felt a sense of good form in not staring at the misery of others. Out of
kindness several of the older girls went with Nora to the City churches
like Saint Bartholomew’s, but they disapproved of her choosing a
different one each Sunday. They hinted that it seemed too much like
church sight-seeing. But Nora told them with a laugh that she was not
above such ecclesiastical junketings.

All the political sense the female novelists gave to Englishwomen Nora
never discovered at Saint Ethelfreda. Not one of them had attended a
session of Parliament. There wasn’t time. They couldn’t understand
politics. Conservative, Liberal—they left all that to their fathers. A
government election the year before had started the college, so Maggs
said, into staging a mock election, in which, even in play, most of
Saint Ethelfreda had kept away from Labor. The few votes given all came
from day students, London girls, who sported with a mild radicalism. But
never the residents from the provinces.

‘Too stodgy and respectable,’ declared Maggs, a new acquaintance of
Nora’s, who was Cockney to the marrow.

There were no Socialist Leagues, no arguments about the duty of bearing
fatherless children, or of becoming sisters to the unwashed Bolshevists.

When Nora dropped in to visit the history seminars, she kept comparing
the English and the American way. Petersfield played more lightly with
the mind. It wasted time with college activities, but there was an
intensity, an enlivening force in its best moments which she felt Saint
Ethelfreda lacked. Here was the daily faithful application, the mature
self-direction which flitting American girls seldom arrived at, the
solid, honest accomplishment. Balance, restraint—these were the
intellectual virtues of Saint Ethelfreda. But the ignorance of
contemporary events, the indifference held the students in a sluggish
theoretical backwater. They could not translate what they read into
terms of the present. Yet was Petersfield any better? She was probably
nursing romantic memories of her own college. All college women,
possibly, were equally out of the world.

The brilliant students at University College and the School of Economics
were generally men. Not all. The short-haired women with masculine dress
and the prim Quaker ladies with strong opinions she had met at Professor
MacPherson’s Sunday afternoon teas argued boldly about political
philosophy with the Hindoos, the eager Jews, the Boer, the Canadians, a
Siamese, the New-Zealanders, the Egyptian, the shabby Irish and English.
Although they were solidly Labor, they represented delicate shades of
distinction hard for an outsider like Nora to catch. Some of them were
Fabians, much interested in the Fabian Kindergarten, instituted for the
young and faltering in radical thought. Others were Guild Socialists
ready to watch the spectacular downfall of the present capitalistic
society almost any moment. When Nora carried back these prophecies to
her own college, the chemistry don had laughed like a horse, throwing
back her head, and screaming, ‘What nonsense!’ Others among Professor
MacPherson’s guests, merging Fabianism and Guild Socialism, represented
the most subtle and tantalizing of thinkers. But none of them had the
middle-class taboos of Saint Ethelfreda, with the belief in the
necessity of respectability. How they despised Saint Ethelfreda! Those
women!

Michael Powys’s crowd, which Nora met almost every Sunday, were less
statistical, less grubby. What brought all of them to Ellen’s little
drawing-room was their common belief that a man could be a painter or a
journalist and at the same time hope that England could be made a less
hopeless hole to live in. They wanted to reconstruct a society shattered
by war and still, after eight years, sadly in pieces, so that one could
be spiritually comfortable while one fiddled in Queen’s Hall or hurried
off the last pages of proof. But all of this seriousness they concealed.
To Nora the well-set-up and carefully finished young men were the most
graceful product of British civilization. Their perfection of ease, the
best American men never succeeded in giving the effect of such
undesigned art. The women, young matrons like Ellen, with serene eyes
and delicate flower-like bloom, lacked the nervous intensity which wore
one out with American women.

But at ten o’clock the porter was beginning to lock the college gates,
and Nora had to leave these delightful people warming up to their best
conversation to return to another week of porridge, Tabby, and the dons,
and table talk of hockey.


                                   IV

London was now held fast in the grip of November fogs. The light October
mists were only happy memories. Day after day, when Nora looked out of
her window, even the nearest trees were hidden by greyish vapor, and the
thick air made her eyes burn and her throat dry. Going to the Museum,
she felt as if she were walking in her sleep as she passed from one
choking area to another. The water on the pavements, the slimy streets,
the sooty air made her spirits sink. She felt as if something were
pushing her down to the pavement, and she would never be able to get up
again.

In the reading-room the grey clouds floated up to the lofty dome,
dropping down upon the men and women huddled in their stalls, and giving
to the benevolent attendants in skull caps imprisoned in a sacred inner
circle the dark, forbidding obscurity of mischief-loving genii.

When she and Annette went to the theatre in Hammersmith, the fog, like
pea-soup the British described it, was so dense that the policemen after
the play escorted parties to the Underground. Along the edge of the park
they felt their way, touching the iron palings of the fence for
guidance. They heard voices near by, but could see no one.

When the fog lifted after five days and a convalescent sun glimmered
weakly over the streets, Nora went to the Wallace gallery to see ‘The
Laughing Cavalier.’ She found it an amusing pastime to move slowly away
from the compelling smile of the merry gentleman in the painting to see
how far it could follow her. Farther and farther away she went, the eyes
pursuing her with their tantalizing gaiety. Suddenly the laughter was
gone. She looked around her. The same pall had fallen over all the
neighboring canvases—Reynolds, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Titian, and the
rest. The fog had returned and was rapidly filling the gallery. As she
passed through the room full of old French clocks, all ticking away with
different voices and rhythms in the dimness, they seemed to be closing
in upon her, ticking, ticking, in her ears, all around her head, at her
back, over her feet. She ran down the staircase to get away, and out
into the black chasms of Marylebone High Street.

The next day she was back in the B.M. She had been reading aimlessly for
almost two months and had got nowhere. Nineteenth-century England
stretched out greater and greater, vast unexplored spaces. One plunge
seemed as sensible as another. It really made no difference. Sometimes
she stayed away from the reading-room and from her lectures, but the
weeks were slipping by, and she had done nothing. If she sat in that
grey, airless tomb, an inspiration might suddenly come to her. She had a
cold, and her hacking cough made the dried-up old woman in the chair
next look up sharply from her copying. She reached in her bag, and
brought out a box of lozenges.

‘Here, take this,’ she said crossly. Nora obediently swallowed one, and
thanked her.

Another day Nora, writing hard on a new project for a book, toiled with
a scratching pen. Screech—screech—it was annoying. Once more her
neighbor regarded her with hostility. She handed Nora a thick blotter.

‘I can’t stand that pen of yours,’ she scolded. ‘You write on this.’

Four o’clock. Nora was accomplishing nothing. She would go back to
college. She reached her room exhausted, her head aching, her neck
stiff. As she sipped her tea in front of the fire, the pounding of heels
in the hallway making throbs of pain shoot through her head, she knew
that she hated everything at Saint Ethelfreda, everything except Annette
and Lucy and Maggs—and dear old Clara who made her fire and brought her
beautiful tea every day. Tabby and the other dons—yes, she hated them.
They had no feeling. They were so hard—hard. Was it being shut up in a
college nunnery which made them like this? Would she—yes, she was afraid
that some day she, too——‘Consign me to the watery depths if I get that
way,’ she confided to her diary. ‘Make me love the human race, O ye
great powers of the universe.’

‘I don’t see how you can live this way,’ protested Annette as she
watched her friend start off after breakfast every morning. ‘A system so
unbending—I should die, Nora.’

She clapped her hands together for joy when Nora, after dinner,
stretched out on her couch, with Annette and Lucy for an audience,
before the fire, cursed the B.M. and all the diabolical realms of
scholarship.

‘You Americans are delightful!’ cried Annette. ‘So—so complicated. Going
off to the B.M. with that bag after breakfast. That Nora, I
say—she cares only for books and for working. But now you are
delightful—delightful, Nora.’ She rushed over and kissed her friend on
both cheeks.

But Lucy was shaking her head. Lucy’s main regret was that she had
wasted most of her youth with the county balls. ‘You don’t know, Nora.
You’ve done so much. And I—I must work every minute now to make up for
all the time I lost. Books—books. I can never get enough. There’s
nothing in life equal to good books. They are everything.’

Annette snorted. ‘It is the soul—the heart. An empty heart——’ Annette’s
great eyes were lifted toward the ceiling. ‘A heart not loving——In this
college there is nothing for the heart—nothing.’

Lucy looked arch. ‘Is it the young men you miss, Annette?’

‘English young men? I do not care for English young men.’ Annette
marched out of the room.

‘You know the French,’ hinted Lucy when Annette had closed the door
majestically behind her. Lucy had read Balzac the preceding summer and
had even peeped into Maupassant’s ‘Une Vie.’ ‘They’re always thinking
about young men.’

Poor Lucy! Did she never have shy memories of the young men in Dorset
with whom she had danced year after year?

When Nora emerged from the reading-room at noon and found the sun
shining, a low pale sun scarcely rising above the grey Georgian houses
with yellow blinds in Bedford Square, she often decided not to go back
to her work, but to spend the afternoon walking the streets. She was
almost happy then. She loved the winding lanes of the City, the mazes of
Southwark, the forest of church spires she saw from London Bridge.

But too often at the end of these footsore adventures, there was the old
pressure of pain at her neck, the tight ache in her throat. She must be
homesick. It was being out of her own country. She wanted Petersfield,
Miss Steele, Ruth and Helen, dear Cordelia and the quiet Maronac house
near the lake. With her international conception, she had once scoffed
at an irrational love of one’s own country. But there was something—you
just couldn’t explain it away. She felt it even in the friendliness of
Michael’s and Ellen’s drawing-room. The most charming, appealing people,
and yet between them and her such fearful gulfs yawned. From the women
she felt less separated, but it was the men she wanted to know. The
Irish actor—there were several actors; the violinist who played for his
friends as he never played in Queen’s Hall; the painter in the Royal
College of Art hating his classes the way Margaret Abington had
hated hers; the intense man with the streaks of grey in his
chrysanthemum-yellow hair, who was on Michael’s paper—it was they who
followed her as she ran toward the college gates. But perhaps even more
she thought of the men who were nothing. What they did wasn’t what
mattered. It was their grace, their careless talk with her, their mere
existence she wanted for herself. But they were all English, and removed
from her by this silly and accidental fact. She always the stranger. She
vowed she would keep away from the supper parties, but the next week she
suffered all over again the blend of pleasure and pain.

No one—nothing was to blame. She was tired. She worked too steadily in
the B.M. The bad air, and then getting nowhere with her work. She must
stay away for a few days and rest. But in the morning she started
reading a new book. She was afraid of the silence of her room, broken
only by the hard heels of the English girls marching back and forth to
and from lectures. She admitted to herself sitting late at night over
her dying fire that when she had come to England she had counted on
life’s being different for her. New scenes. A fresh existence.
Something—changing all the past. The men at Ellen’s—each week the
feeling that she would meet some one who——But always the same thing. The
Englishmen standing in groups against the wall. ‘Clever American woman,’
they might say. ‘Attractive in an odd way. Almost beautiful, you know.’
These composed Britishers whom Annette hated and Nora found mysteriously
different. But never did they and she quite meet on a common
understanding. Perhaps if she had not been forced to hurry away so soon
after supper——

‘It’s ridiculous—you running back to that old college like a
schoolgirl,’ scolded Ellen. ‘Michael could write a letter to that
woman—his connection with the paper would impress her. That kind always
are impressed that way.’

‘If you like,’ Michael added, smiling at Nora.

But Nora remained firm in asking for no concessions, and each week she
had the same sensation of just missing what she most wanted.

Work—doing something. She must keep very busy.


                                   V

On the last Saturday before the Christmas vacation, Maggs, Nora,
Annette, and Lucy went to visit the Docks. From the Underground they
walked through Shadwell, the district where Michael Powys, as a
Cambridge undergraduate, had lived in his vacations. When they started,
the sun had shone upon their undertaking, but now the gloom of winter
intensified the dreariness of the rows and rows of wretched houses and
the dirt of the children playing in the narrow streets.

A guide at the entrance to the Docks conferred with Maggs. He handed
over the young women to the foreman of the ivory warehouse. Thousands of
elephants’ tusks from East and West Africa, from Asia, from South
Africa, lay piled upon the floor. The foreman pointed to one beautiful
polished tusk, a creamy, shiny white.

‘Worth two hundred and fifty pounds, that one,’ he informed them.

There were walrus and rhinoceros tusks in the great warehouse, and
twisted tusks, at least five feet long, from an Arctic fish, out of
which ivory beads were made.

The spice warehouse had the delicious odor which Nora associated with
Eastern tales. Nutmegs, cloves, cinnamon, all sent up great columns of
pungent sweetness. Wool—rubber—in all stages. Australia, South Africa,
Siam, New Zealand, South America. The tropics—frozen seas. These far-off
treasures nursed the imagination, freed one from the confining walls of
Saint Ethelfreda. Oceans—typhoons—sailors—deserts—caravans—the whole
world.

The wine cellars the guide saved for the end, dim, cavernous spaces, the
roofs white with the fungus growth from evaporating wine, through which
both the guide and his party carried torches which lighted up the rows
of fat casks.

But the heavy fog had shut off the river from the Docks, and no boats
could land, so the wharves stretched out into nothing.

On the way back to the Underground station, they passed the Shadwell
Market. Nora thought herself hardened to misery after almost three
months of London. She had learned to hurry past the men without legs
sprawled on the pavement who drew pictures with colored chalk and held
out ragged caps for pennies. She had seen a wild-eyed man feeding out of
a garbage can in Tottenham Court Road. From the steps of the National
Gallery she had watched the army of unemployed mass themselves at
Trafalgar Square, distribute their handbills, with unutterable woes upon
them, and make their terrible speeches. She knew that if she stood in a
theatre queue to get a cheap seat in the pit, she must endure the lively
business contrived by those who gathered in a few pennies where they
could. There were the three blind men led past the queue by a fat boy.
They seemed to follow her everywhere. And the organ wheeled up by the
red-faced man, who played and sang, while his friend, with iron plates
on his heels, did a clog dance. There were whole families trooping past,
avoiding the penalties of begging by some pathetic display of feeble
wits. Card tricksters, melodramatic monologuists with appeals to heaven,
fiddlers, pipers—all of them concluding with the same speech before they
passed the hat. They were the London unemployed. The world owed them a
living. ‘Only a penny or two, Miss.’

But Nora was not prepared for Shadwell Market filled with Christmas
toys. Dolls hung suspended over the crowd of children, beautiful smiling
dolls with pink and blue dresses, perambulators for dolls, beds,
bureaus, little stoves, boxes of dishes with tiny teapots, Noah’s arks,
games, drums, pistols, trumpets, a toy telephone, pails of candy,
barrels of nuts, apples, oranges. Around them crowded dirty ragged
little girls of eight or ten, carrying pale babies under their shawls.
Even little boys carried babies. Women, tugging small children by the
hand, showed that there would soon be new babies. Babies—more babies. So
the world goes on.

Nora had never seen so many children before. And children in a great
flock often bring tears to the eyes, even if they are happy children.

The others stopped to buy some toys for the college Christmas tea. Nora
bought dolls, and, when she came to the dirtiest little girls carrying
the dirtiest babies, she slipped a doll into their hands.

The next morning in the British Museum, Nora picked up a book Annette
had wanted her to read. It was about the emotion of beauty. She read a
few pages. Then the book dropped from her hand. She had decided that
instant to write a history of women in the textile industries.


                                   VI

Nora was sitting in the drawing-room of Michael Powys’s brother Tom in
Felton, two hours out of Manchester. Mrs. Powys, in a setting of heavily
stuffed furniture and large oil paintings, was pouring tea. Her fat
blonde face had an amusing lack of harmony with her elaborate Paris
clothes.

‘I can’t understand why you want to see our mills, Miss Deming. You
won’t understand anything about it. I never can. Just fearful noise and
queer hot smells. I insisted that we live as far away as possible. All
that dirt, you know. Even here the atmosphere is always smoky. Please
don’t talk about the mill to Tom when he comes in. He’s so bored by any
reference to it. Of course, it’s profitable. But if he hadn’t inherited
the business, we could live in London or near by like Michael and
Ellen.’

As a preparation for her visit the next morning, Mrs.
Powys felt impelled to contribute a few facts. ‘They’re so
ungrateful—working-people. The more you do for them, the worse they
are. In bad times, my husband has kept his factory going at a loss to
himself just to help out his hands. But they never appreciate such
things.’

‘Isn’t it also an advantage to an employer to keep his industry from
getting disorganized?’ Nora inquired.

‘Not at all. And you’ll be shocked at the way those mill women neglect
their children. Off to the mills before their babies are two weeks old.
The children grow up wild—hardly know their mothers. If they’d stay
home, take care of their houses, and cook proper meals——’

It was useless to bring a ray of light into Mrs. Powys’s dark views of
the human beings upon whom her husband’s industry rested.

In the morning Nora motored through hilly country dark with smoke to Mr.
Powys’s mill, where the manager conducted her over the various
departments, shouting out explanations of the mysteries of cotton
manufacture above the din of machinery. He had worked for the Powys
family, father and son, for forty years. Splendid men both of them. If
their workers did the right thing, they couldn’t have better employers.
But with these trade-unions putting wrong ideas in people’s heads and
the Labor Party in Parliament shouting nonsense, there was no telling
what England was coming to.

On the second day Nora was conducted through another mill by Miss
Chapin, a slow-moving, spiritless woman in the Welfare Department, and a
friend of Maggs and the girls at the Working-Women’s College near
London. They went from one hot, noisy department to another. In the
spinning-room Nora found women employed, ring-spinning it was instead of
the mules, which required men. Many of the workers were far advanced in
pregnancy. And the little ‘doffers’ who took off the full bobbins and
put on empty ones appeared very small for the legal fourteen years.
Neglect and undernourishment had not made giants of North England
people.

Miss Chapin was discouraged about her mill. It belonged to an extensive
limited company, with no concern in the industry except its profits. She
disapproved of the policy carried out of taking back the mothers of
illegitimate children, a bad example for the rest of the girls.

‘The only difference they make is that the unmarried girls have to stop
work a month sooner than the others. But they can come back as quick.
They bring their babies in here for me to see. It’s seldom they try to
get rid of them. I can’t understand it.’

There was much Miss Chapin would never understand. But she did the best
she could.

Nora mingled in the noon crowd of mill people hurrying home to their
dinner. The women, with their shawls thrown over their heads shuffling
along in clogs, were a picturesque novelty to a stranger. Small brothers
and sisters came bringing lunches wrapped up in red bandanna
handkerchiefs for members of the family who lived too far away from the
mills to go home. The babies in the perambulators, potential spinners
and weavers, in a community where few children dreamed of a future
outside the mills, looked sad to Nora. The rows of stone houses buzzed
with the excitement of home-coming workers. A little doffer whom Nora
had noticed in the spinning-room smiled at her from a group of children.

‘I seen you in our place,’ she said shyly.

Nora ate a cheerless bun and a hard banana on a chilly bench near the
trolley line. The spring sun had been obscured by the dense clouds of
smoke which gave the manufacturing community a uniformly drab
countenance. Raw winds blew from the sea.

The trolley entered a beautiful valley, with tall chimneys rising above
the pale green foliage of early spring. The next mill, unlike the
efficiently constructed new building Nora had seen in the morning, was a
rambling structure close to a stream, which had evidently in an early
day furnished water-power. Miss Gretton, the Welfare Worker, in a light
but littered office, was a brown-eyed, enthusiastic woman close to
forty. She was attached to her employer, John Alexander, by a lifetime
of the finest kind of association. He was a grand old man with four sons
just like him. All of them lived within sight of the factory. Four
generations of workers had toiled in the mills established by the
grandfather of the present owner. His employees were recognized in all
the mill towns clustered around Manchester as steady, honest men and
women. Old John Alexander got the best of them. He tolerated no
looseness. No children born out of wedlock in his mills. One case in
fifty years, Miss Gretton said.

The workers stopped to show Nora what they were doing. At piece-rates,
this meant the gift of valuable time. But a pleasant spirit of
friendliness was evident everywhere. One woman explained her warping;
another, handsome and pink-cheeked, her weaving. In a corner a very old
man, following an obsolete method of warping, worked alone.

‘He was too old to learn the new ways,’ Miss Gretton explained. ‘He
never looks up from his work. I don’t believe he’s seen me all the years
I’ve been here.’

In the Welfare Room a young girl brought tea for the visitor. All the
mill was taking a few minutes off for afternoon ‘drinking.’ Over their
tea Miss Gretton admitted that family mills like hers were rapidly being
replaced by the limited companies operating scores of mills, with
impersonal, disinterested stockholders. The paternalistic system must
give way to some organization where the workers looked out for their own
well-being. But the old way, at least their mill, had been so pleasant.
Like Miss Chapin she had her discouragements. The evening clubs designed
for the improvement of the work-people were not well attended.

‘The cinema and boxing matches—it’s all some of them want. And now the
radio. We’ve tried reviving some of the old village customs—the games,
the May pole and the May dances. There’s one old man who’s tried to keep
them up. But they don’t care. And the reading-clubs and the
lectures—what was my father’s life and mine—only a few want them.’

When they parted at the trolley station, Nora, waving from the car until
she could see Miss Gretton’s sturdy figure no longer, knew that her book
was already begun.


                                  VII

In the British Museum reading-room Nora began over again. All her life
she had been preparing herself for the new book. Women—women—their
lives—their frustrations—their work. What she had done before was like
the background of a tapestry—sky, earth, trees. She was now to weave in
the main figures. These she had already started in the dark winter weeks
when she thought she was accomplishing nothing.

She wanted to be fair, to observe all sides, to keep her historic
perspective. She was pleading no cause, making no case. Perhaps when the
facts were gathered, her readers could go farther. But that was not for
her. She no longer felt fatigue. Every day showed some trifle finished.
More and more hours—stretching out the labor of the day.

At night the immensity of her task lay before her when she tried to
sleep, like the vast spaces of the heavens which she had observed with
Ruth Ewing back in Petersfield. All those whirling worlds and millions
of suns. Numbers, space, time, they went beyond all human comprehension.
Hardy’s ‘Two in a Tower,’ which Ruth had sent her at Christmas time. The
poetry of the sky. Immeasurable infinity. A big undertaking. It was what
one tried to do. All those women—all countries—all ages. The little she
could do for England was less than the smallest star. Generations of
women spinning—spinning—spinning. In Greece, in Palestine, all over
Europe. China, India, Japan—perhaps she would never know much about
them. Even in England the Wyf of Bath, the ladies Piers Plowman had
chided, Margaret of Shrewsbury—but so many more. Then women the
weavers—carders—winders. In her dreams one pale figure after
another—stretching on and on—an endless procession—the same unending
toil. Spiders—they had become spiders. Long silken threads everywhere.
Had she read of a woman changed into a spider? A Greek tale. She was
awake.

                   *       *       *       *       *

‘Are you made so, Nora, that in the spring you can shut yourself up in
that miserable B.M.?’ inquired Annette sarcastically. ‘Live on books in
the spring? The sun so beautiful. The sunshine on my face, my hands—it
is as if I, too, were growing like the flowers. The daffodils springing
up in the grass. By moonlight I wander down to the lake. Like
butterflies fluttering—the daffodils on the edge of the water. Another
week, and they will be gone. My poor little Nora. Is it the little old
men in the skull caps in that B.M. reading-room she dreams about at
night?’ Annette, laughing, bobbed forward and kissed Nora with her
double-cheeked French kiss.

‘You don’t think you are working too hard?’ inquired Lucy gently.

At first Nora fought against the pain in her neck which climbed to the
top of her head and lay there like a heavy pressing stone and then went
down, down her back, until each aching nerve cried out, and she could
not sleep. Through a course of spring lectures at the School of
Economics given by the most famous historian of industrial England, a
man who emerged seldom from his country library, Nora hung on. Each day
a little harder than the one before. One morning in May she had to stay
in bed.

Matron, the college nurse, said all she needed was rest. She shut
Annette and Lucy out of the room. She pushed back the curtains so that
the sunshine streamed through wide-open windows, and one could hear the
birds singing in the garden, and smell the tang of the earth and the
sweetness of the flowers. Nothing but rest. Sleep—sleep once more. One
hour after another. The church bells—the clicking heels in the hallway
between lectures, and the voices and the strike of balls in the near-by
tennis courts.

At last Nora got restless. She wanted to see Annette and Lucy. She must
thank Miss Talbot for the irises she had sent. Matron gave her a
reluctant smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps you may have a visitor now
and then.’

From Clara, Nora first learned that London was not so peaceful as usual.
Clara had come in from her walk through her favorite streets, and was
making a little fire, now that the chill of evening was coming on.

When she faced around, Nora detected an unnatural excitement in her
usually calm eyes. ‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ she began. ‘Not
even the paper this morning to tell us the news.’ Clara reached for the
scuttle and shook it violently over the blazing kindlings. ‘They’ve gone
mad—don’t know what they’re doing. Everything’s stopped—the trains they
say. And all those dock-men down where you young ladies was——’

‘You mean the miners—that it’s a sympathetic strike——’ Nora in her sick
retreat had not seen a paper for days. She sat up in bed and stared at
Clara.

‘There’s none o’ my sympathy in it.’ Clara turned with a snap toward
Nora. ‘What do they think they’re doin’—London with no milk, butter,
nothing. It’s starvation. Like the war. I know how it’ll go.’

Tabby during her frequent short visits had never mentioned the strike.
To one suffering from nervous fatigue she was a delightful visitor. She
had been ill during the war—a breakdown it was—and she had a skill in
darting lightly over inconsequential topics which was both restful and
entertaining.

What had prostrated Tabby? Had the war stricken her? One would never
know.

To-night, having heard Clara’s excited tones she divined at once what
they had been discussing.

‘I hoped you wouldn’t know,’ she said, when she and Nora were alone.
‘But of course that would be impossible.’ Tabby stretched out in the big
chair near the fire. She looked very weary, her color gone, her eyes
protruding and heavily circled. ‘Things will be patched up,’ she
continued. ‘They always are in England, you know. We make no desperate
experiments—tearing down the old and beginning all over again. The Labor
leaders are already scared. The strike has been too successful—the
suddenness and completeness. They could do almost anything if they
dared. But they only talk. Every one talks. In a few days we’ll go on
the same old way.’

Nora began to tell Tabby about her interrupted book, her visits to
industrial England, her months of reading.

‘You are older than most of the students here, Miss Deming?’

‘Yes,’ Nora answered.

‘I thought so.’ Tabby was gazing into the fire. ‘I wonder if our
universities will ever be anything but the playing-fields of infants.’

‘I’d forgotten—that we, too, are like that—until I came here. I thought
at first we were better—less intellectually provincial—more interested
in the broader aspects of learning. But lying here—so many things——’

Tabby had no illusions, then. But why couldn’t she do something—treat
the girls like equals—show them her own mind brilliant, clear,
relentlessly logical?

Even Annette had caught glimpses of the real Tabby. ‘She talks French
like an angel,’ Annette often said. ‘I love her for that. For making my
language beautiful—not like the rest of the English.’

Annette was beginning to droop. She longed for Paris. May in Paris. In
London, the daffodils had become shrivelled husks on green stems. Before
Nora was well enough to go back to the B.M., the general strike was
over. The suddenness of the end no one could understand. The strikers
assumed an apologetic attitude toward their recent insurrection. Only
the miners held out, deserted by the rest, they thought, with no relief
in sight. The vague promises of gentlemen—not for them.


                                  VIII

Nora, seated in the taxi beside Annette, was seeing her off to Paris.
That morning she had said good-bye to Lucy, fighting back her tears. The
year was over. Annette, waving toward the red-brick buildings visible
through the trees until they were hidden from her sight, threw herself
against Nora and sobbed.

‘Dear Saint Ethelfreda, dear Saint Ethelfreda. Will I ever see the
beloved college again?’

‘But Annette,’ Nora reminded her, ‘you know you really didn’t like it
here.’

‘A whole year of my life—a whole year. Part of myself I leave behind me.
Never again will those happy days return to me.’

At the station she wept afresh. ‘We are sisters,’ she sobbed against
Nora’s shoulder. ‘Sisters forever. Although the great ocean is between
us, never will I forget my dear Nora. Never until I die.’ The train
sighed and began to move, Annette mopped her eyes, waved her
handkerchief, and threw kisses to her dear friend. At last Nora was
alone on the platform, friendless in London.

In the deserted college, she began to pack her trunk hurriedly. She was
leaving London in the morning to go down to Cornwall for a few weeks.
After that, she planned to take lodgings near the B.M. and read through
the summer.

Late that night, she stood looking out of the window. There was a
shimmer of moonlight over the garden, and she could smell the roses in
the border. Like Annette, she felt a stirring of the heart at leaving
Saint Ethelfreda. When she had said good-bye to the girls, she had got a
glimpse into their locked lives. She pitied them as she pitied herself.

England, bowed down by taxes, by debt, by its huge pauper population,
fed just enough by the dole to save it from utter starvation, held out
no rosy promises to girls of the impoverished middle class. They would
never marry the young men who in normal times would have become their
husbands. Young men were too poor. If they married, they must seek
brides with a dowry.

Consciously or unconsciously, after observing the spinsterhood of their
native villages which went for a walk in the afternoon, poured out tea
in a fussy, chilly drawing-room, or looked over the ‘Times’ before
dinner, these girls had worked out escape from such a life by going to
the universities. The hope of a profession—teaching or medicine—that was
life for them. And in fighting for this kind of existence, they crushed
out weakness, softness. They seemed hard. Struggling for scholarships,
for ‘firsts,’ for posts with a living stipend—one had to be hard. And
Miss Talbot, who knew so much better than the girls what was ahead of
them, held them to their work. She had appeared tyrannical, cruel, but——

Nora, so much older, with so much more of the struggle behind her, fewer
years of helpless longing for the overpowering emotion that clutched at
the throat, stung the eyes, made stabs of pain at the breast—for her now
there was the salty flavor of work. But for them——

A tap on the door. Clara held something in her hand. ‘A letter, Miss, by
the late post.’

The letter was from Judge Andrews. Cordelia was dead. She had been dead
almost three weeks. The end had come quickly. Two weeks before her death
she had been living alone, no one but her family doctor suspecting there
was little of life left to her. The malady had been of long standing,
ever since the year Nora went away to college, Judge Andrews believed.
During the last two years, when Nora had not been back to Maronac,
Cordelia had been much worse. The previous summer Doctor Elliot had
wanted to send for Nora before she started abroad, but Cordelia had
refused. She had been a resolute, valiant sufferer.

Cordelia’s last letter was in Nora’s bag to be answered in the quiet of
Cornwall. She brought it out now. The date over a month back. Close to
the end. The crabbed, almost undecipherable writing was unchanged, the
news the usual parish happenings. Della had a baby of her own now. She
and Nora would go together to see it next summer. Cordelia wrote, made
plans for the future when she knew she was dying.

A resolute woman. Resolute and self-denying always. That terrible
abnegation of Cordelia’s. Regret was useless. It was too late. Cordelia
with gnawing pain for two years, and no one near her. That lonely
house—the succession of empty rooms—Cordelia waiting to die.

The rest of Judge Andrews’s letter was business. Cordelia left
everything to Nora, more than most people thought she had, the house
with all of its furnishings, and property and investments which brought
a comfortable income.

Nora’s eyes were dry as she stared at the facts of Judge Andrews’s
letter. If she had loved Cordelia more—been kinder—remembered her
oftener.

Nora realized for the first time what it meant to be entirely alone. She
had no one. The tears came. She sobbed in the stillness of her
dismantled room in Saint Ethelfreda College.


                               CHAPTER II


                                   I

All the afternoon the scene from the train window had been the dreary
wastes of Cornwall moors, trees tortured and dwarfed by twisting sea
gales, stretches of furze, gorse, and rock, occasionally enlivened by
sprightly clusters of purple flowers which tossed in the summer wind.
Perhaps Nora had made a mistake to come. The Cornwall of which she had
dreamed in London had been that of rocky coasts, with brilliant
contrasts of sea, cliffs, and sky, and a midsummer sun which shone
daily. Such beauty, she remembered now, had its foundation only in
Margaret Abington’s raptures over the summer she had spent at the
farmhouse near Trebavas, where Nora was going; a memory to which
Margaret returned again and again. Usually her friend had been right
about places.

Nora’s travelling companions had done nothing to relieve the monotony of
the journey. Opposite her sat a pale, dark man whose spiritless
expression and well-kept, bloodless hands suggested illness. For some
time he had looked as if he wanted to talk to some one, but she had
gazed steadily out of the window. She was afraid he would begin to tell
her about his ruined health. Beside him was a young mother with a very
active child, a smeary-faced little girl with thin, molasses-tinted hair
which her mother had tried to curl. A querulous voice followed her
succession of bobbings up and down, ‘Now, Annie, be good; sit still,
Annie. No, you can’t have more sweeties, dearie.’

The child was now plunging toward the fourth traveller in the carriage,
whose face, hidden behind his London paper, Nora had not seen since he
entered. When the porter had arranged his luggage in the rack, very
good, but long used, the dull sheen of it, its substantial quality, had
made her curious about its owner, a tall man in shaggy tweeds and golf
stockings who had slipped quietly into the seat beside her a moment
before the train moved. He had the careless, travelled ease of the bags
over his head, an aloofness to his companions in the carriage.

Annie’s waving, sticky hands now clutched at the defences of newspaper.

‘Annie,’ shouted her mother, ‘don’t trouble the gentleman. I’m sorry,
sir,’ she apologized, giving the child’s hands a quick smack.

‘Not at all. No trouble,’ he murmured, once more resuming his reading.

Nora, roused from the dreariness of the landscape, had looked quickly
toward the disturbed traveller. He was, as she had suspected, like those
young men she had met at Ellen’s, who were nothing in particular, with
the baffling charm of nonchalant, cheerful acceptance of that importance
which is superior to any mere profession or slavery to the arts. They
had achieved significance at birth, with no trouble to themselves. If it
had been trouble——But this stranger, at second glance, was not entirely
of their brotherhood. He was lean like them, but with more iron about
him. His face was bronzed, his very dark hair burned by the sun. His
prominent cheek-bones and his nose and jaw had the angularity which
might be Scotch. Pictures of Highland chieftains showed the same hawk
profile. His general bearing, his erectness as he sat in the swaying
carriage, suggested military discipline—the army—a man who gave orders.

The pale man, encouraged by the confusion, looked up once more at Nora.
He pointed to the purple flowers clustered against the rocks.

‘Foxgloves. That’s Cornwall. They’re everywhere.’

‘But it’s desolate country,’ she said.

‘You wait.’ A bland smile lighted up the drooping features. ‘Wait till
you get near the sea.’ His gaze wandered to the man next to her, but the
newspaper was too much of a barrier. He went on talking to Nora. ‘You’ve
never been in these parts before?’

‘No.’

‘You’re travelling toward the coast?’

‘Yes.’ Then, not wishing to seem rude to a person so obviously ill, she
added, ‘I’m going to Trebavas. You know it? I get off at Pelreath.’

There was a rustle of newspaper beside her. Her neighbor’s eyes were
turned in her direction. They were deep blue, with a direct glance that
did not avoid hers, as he slowly measured her with a detached, swift
interest before he returned to his paper.

‘Very fine coast,’ the pale man said. ‘I know the south coast better.
Around Penzance. I go there for the climate.’

‘Oh, yes.’ He was ill, then. She was conscious of the difference between
the two men in the carriage, the tanned vigor of one, the anæmic
transparency of the other. He wouldn’t live long. Perhaps he knew.

A deep voice interrupted Nora’s speculations. ‘Would you care to look at
this?’ The man in tweeds was holding out his newspaper.

Although she didn’t care to read, she thanked him, and made a pretence
of examining the headings on the first page.

‘The cricket matches at Lord’s—they’re on page 12,’ he suggested.

She smiled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t care much about cricket.’

‘Oh.’ The rising and falling of his interjection was like Tabby’s.

‘I don’t understand cricket.’

‘It’s very simple, really.’ He was now smiling too, his smile making him
unexpectedly boyish and a little less assured. His blue eyes had a gleam
which attracted the smeary little girl a second time. She turned from
the pictures in her mother’s gaudy magazine and looked at him. Then,
dropping down from her seat, she planted a sticky fist upon his knee.

‘Annie, don’t you bother the gentleman.’

‘Please don’t be troubled on my account.’ Again that aloof expression
which covered his face like a mask. ‘I, too, am going to Trebavas,’ he
said, turning once more toward Nora to escape the mother’s embarrassed
apologies. ‘It’s an unusual place to go. Very isolated and dull,
really.’

‘I had a friend who spent a summer there and loved it. It’s because of
her I’m going.’

He crossed one leg over the other, and shifted his position in his
corner seat so that they faced each other. ‘Yes—the quiet. I understand.
And very fine cliffs.’

‘She has told me about them. The colors—the blackness of them and then
the deep green sea.’

‘My old school friend is rector there. I’ve been coming to him for short
visits a long time now. Rather a nice old Norman church. He’s very keen
about it. He’ll be glad to show it to you. It’s away from the village,
close to the cliffs. One hears the sea all through the prayers.’

‘How lovely!’

‘Yes, but——’ He looked smilingly toward Nora’s childlike face under her
severe blue travelling hat. ‘It may be too unexciting for a young
person.’

He evidently took her for an eccentric American schoolgirl, wandering
about in queer places. She smiled to herself, and to hide the quiver of
her lips looked out of the window again.

With late afternoon, the sun, falling lower, made long shadows on the
moor and deepened the mauve of the massed foxgloves to purple. One would
not care to walk alone in this threatening, waste country. The sick man
and the troublesome child first went to sleep, then the tired mother.
Nora and her neighbor were left to themselves. They conversed from time
to time in low tones. A shyness swept over her. She took up the paper
lying between them.

‘I wonder if they’ll take Germany into the League this summer.’

‘You believe in the League? I thought Americans didn’t, you know.’

‘Yes—many of us. We place our hopes in anything that——’

‘You have no interest in the glories of our late disturbance, then?’ he
inquired.

He was clearly enough a military man. No need to be silly or get
excited. One’s real opinions—they are saved for the rare moments—not for
a railway carriage.

‘No,’ she answered, ‘not very much.’

There was something queer about his eyes, behind the deep blue of them
and the directness of their glance, which she could not understand. He
was hiding something—not from her only, a stranger, but from every one.
Some hurt—some painful secret.

Looking out, Nora saw Pelreath painted on the station benches. Some
ponies with two-wheeled carts were waiting near the platform. As she
began to bestir herself, the sleepers awoke. The tall stranger was
lifting her bags from the rack and carrying them out to the platform. He
raised his hat, and turned to get his own luggage. The pale man smiled
at her, the mother and child waved. In front of her a slight Englishman
in clerical dress was examining the passengers. He looked a little like
Father Stokesbury—the same brilliant smile.

‘Neville, old boy! I couldn’t see you at first.’

The wind-swept wastes, the rocks, the furze and gorse. A pang of
desolation swept Nora. She had come all this distance to throw herself
among strangers.

‘Miss Deming? The American lady? I got the pony an’ jingle over this
way, Miss.’ A mild little man had approached her, his stiff hat held
like a salver in front of him.

As Nora climbed into the cart, she saw her travelling companion driving
off in a grey two-seater with his old friend. He lifted his hat and
smiled before they disappeared behind the tall hedges of the road toward
Trebavas.

‘The rector’s got his friend down again,’ observed Nora’s driver. ‘Army
man. Major West.’ As they passed between the hedges which shut out the
landscape, he introduced himself as Thomas Pentillie, Mrs. Bodmin’s new
husband. She was Bodmin now only for business. They had been married two
weeks. ‘In time for the summer visitors,’ he explained. ‘I’m a big help
to her that way.’

The road turned suddenly and ascended above the valley. There was a rush
of air, and then Nora saw the sea. It was booming against a deep purple
cliff lost in green water and pale green spray.

‘Oh,’ she breathed.

Mrs. Pentillie, who as Mrs. Bodmin had known Miss Abington, a very
pleasant American lady always out on the rocks painting, ushered Nora up
to a little room on the third floor with a view of the sea.

‘It was hers—your friend’s. I remember her wantin’ the top o’ the
house,’ Mrs. Pentillie said.

Nora stood looking out of the open window. A chill filled the room now
that the sun lay low over the water. It was almost time for supper, Mrs.
Pentillie had announced. Only a moment or two before she had to join the
strange Britishers below, sit down at a table crowded with holiday
visitors. She could hear their voices. Somehow she had not thought of
them before—only seacoast and great spaces. She was afraid. She wasn’t
very hungry. If she could walk out toward the sea first—not have any
supper. Walk toward the church—a bell tinkled, tinkled. Doors slammed.
Some one laughed. Again the bell. Nora washed hastily, brushed back her
hair, and went downstairs.

The other boarders—paying guests they said in England, even at Mrs.
Pentillie’s possibly—were already seated. Nora slipped into a vacant
chair. A strange man, not Mr. Pentillie, was at the head of the table,
carving a guinea fowl. Nora sniffed at it hungrily. An angular woman
next to her smiled.

‘Miss Deming, let me make you acquainted with every one.’ She began to
call out the names of the people gathered around the table.

‘Oh, the American lady,’ commented a stout woman down near the guinea
fowls. She paused in a monologue she had begun upon the Second Coming.
‘We been hearing about you. Travelling all alone, too. You Americans are
so adventurous.’

Opposite Nora sat a husband and wife talking together. There was
something so united, so indivisible about them, that Nora sensed their
relationship at once. Next to Miss Wallis, who had conducted the
introductions, were two women who looked exactly like her, the same dun
coloring which was neither brunette nor blonde, the same bloodless faces
and bony figures. They were sisters, Miss Wallis told her, all taking
the holiday they looked forward to the whole year.

‘After a winter in London,’ she concluded.

The other two bobbed behind or in front of their obstructing relative,
and said a word or two to Nora. This was a beautiful place. She would
love it. Miss Wallis explained about the others in a low tone during the
passing of plates. The man serving, Mr. Downey, was on furlough from
Central Africa. Some Government job. His wife hadn’t seen him in three
years. She couldn’t stand the climate. The child between them, a bright
little thing, was almost four years old. Sad—living that way. And the
two on the other side, aunt and niece, both post-office clerks in
London. Nora looked in the direction of a stout black-haired woman with
a face like a tomato and a girl much like her, slightly less red, with a
shaggy mane of coarse, dark bobbed hair.

‘They can’t talk without swearing,’ Miss Wallis said sadly.

On Nora’s end of the table were two middle-aged women dressed in heavy
black. They were discussing the church services of the preceding Sunday.
The church was, then, not very far away.

After supper, when the rest of the procession trooped into the
drawing-room, the Wallis sisters offered to show Nora the path to the
cliffs. In a week they had learned all the pleasant walks in the
vicinity. As the four passed back of the house, two of Mrs. Pentillie’s
Leghorn hens trailed after them. Cows in a near-by farmyard looked up,
and then came slowly toward the fence. As they walked along the narrow
hedge-bordered path, the youngest of the three sisters joined Nora. She
was probably not much over thirty, less neutral than the other two, with
a sturdy spring to her step unlike the drag of theirs.

‘Two men among us,’ she began. ‘One a Quaker—the other from Africa. And
both married. Rare, isn’t it? Is this what I’ve come down from London
for?’

Her sisters behind laughed heartily. They regarded Dora as a terrible
wag, Nora guessed almost immediately.

‘And the Quaker lady hangs on to her husband as faithfully as to her
pocket-book,’ Dora went on.

All three regarded the middle-aged femininity of their fellow guests as
a tremendous joke on Adeline Pinks, the post-office niece, probably as
much on her aunt, one of those maiden ladies who never knows that her
day is over.

‘They keep an eye out for what Pentillie will bring from the station.
“Another woman,” they said, when you drove up before supper.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nora said, laughing.

They climbed over one slate hedge. A light mist lay over the cliffs
above the sea, which resounded from below. The high grass between the
hedge-rows was very wet, the foxgloves against the stone walls drooping
with their load of dew. As she was mounting the stairway made of flat
stones over the second hedge, she heard her first lark. The bird had
swooped up, and was singing, singing as he climbed higher and higher.
She sat on the flat top of the stile, looking up toward the sky and
listening to the warblings, fainter and fainter. Just as the poets had
told her, singing as all of her life she had dreamed they would sing.
The three sisters stood waiting for her to climb over the hedge. While
she had been sitting on the stile, the larks had slowly gathered in the
sky, one after another, hundreds of them, it seemed, singing together,
close to the last yellow light.

They went on toward the cliffs. Far below sounded the sea, covered with
a lacy haze, like thick cobwebs. They stood, looking down, not speaking
a word.

They followed the path close to the edge of the cliffs, as it twisted in
and out. Another hedge. Standing on the last tone, Nora saw a square
tower rising above a dip in the flat stretches of green. The church. A
queer feeling, like pain, made her turn.

‘Shouldn’t we be going back? It’s getting dark.’

Between the last hedge-rows, in sight of Mrs. Pentillie’s lights, night
had already fallen. They crept cautiously forward. In the drawing-room
the household was gathered around the Government official from Africa
telling tales. Nora paused at the doorway, listened a moment, and then
went upstairs.


                                   II

In the morning she hurried through breakfast and took the path which led
to the sea. The sky above her was deep sapphire, the sun strong and
clear. She could hear the lambs bleating from the other side of the
hedges, the tinkle of bells, the ecstasy of the morning sea. She
followed the general direction of the preceding night, and sat close to
the edge of the cliff, looking down. Some sheep were grazing in the
grassy crevices between the black rocks. The gulls swept close over her
head, and dipped down to the water, with hoarse shrieks. A sweetness—a
familiar sweetness was all around her. Wee purple flowers close to the
ground everywhere. Thyme—wild thyme. She knew from the smell. She
pressed a purple cluster between her fingers.

A crunching of rocks, and footsteps approaching. Possibly some one from
Mrs. Pentillie’s house. Nora gazed steadily out upon the sea.

‘Good-morning.’ The tweeds—the familiar voice. ‘I felt sure I should see
you again.’

Major West seated himself on the rock beside her. ‘Jolly day, isn’t it?
So you’re a near neighbor of Reggie’s? Over there? How very good! And do
you think you’ll like this place?’

She assured him that she liked it, that already she loved it. Trebavas
was what she had wanted. She went on to describe the Pentillie
gathering, its middle-aged quality. They would not bother her. She liked
them that way best, she had decided. They wouldn’t wander far away from
Mrs. Pentillie’s summer-house, with the British flag floating over it, a
border of geraniums, and a comfortable view of the sea.

They sat looking over the shining blue water. He brought out a pipe,
knocked it against the rock. The sheep bounded up the trail and tinkled
past them. Once more the larks were beginning to sing, a faint, cheerful
squeak only, high in the sky.

‘Reggie’s in the church. Should you care to see it? Oh—I forgot to
introduce myself yesterday. Neville West——’

She murmured her name in return, and he helped her up from the rock.
They climbed over the stiles, passed rude heaps of stone, like the ruins
of a castle wall, and entered the churchyard. Reginald Enderby stood in
the doorway. As she saw him in the sunshine, holding a funny
broad-brimmed hat like Father Stokesbury’s, he looked enough like him to
be an older brother—older than Father Stokesbury, so long ago. When he
smiled, he was like an old friend.

‘Miss Deming would like to see the church, Reggie.’

‘Delighted, dear boy. It’s really a snug little place, Miss Deming.’

The church was like a twilight chamber. Its thick walls were cut by
Norman windows with dim glass; there was a Norman font near the door,
with four fat legs and a funny face cut into the stone.

‘Major West says this old chap looks like me.’ The rector twinkled.

It was a beautiful little church in its dusky way, with its timbered
roof, its black-oak rood screen, its dull seats, and grey stone walls.
Looking out through the open doorway, one felt the peace of its shade, a
retreat from the burning brightness of the sky and sea. The rector
pointed out the tombstones in the churchyard propped up with buttresses.

‘To keep the winter winds from blowing them away,’ he explained. ‘We
have some jolly blows here then.’

She glanced back for another look at the interior. ‘You like our old
places?’ he asked her.

‘Very much.’

‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to have tea with us in the garden this
afternoon. The widow of the former rector is coming. It would be a
pleasure to her, I know. There are some ruins of the thirteenth-century
monastery there I’d like to show you.’

Major West walked back toward Mrs. Pentillie’s with Nora. She was late
for dinner. Mr. Downey had finished serving.

‘Well, where you been?’ inquired the large woman, who was still arguing
the tenets of Seventh Day Adventism. ‘I thought you’d jumped over the
cliff.’

                   *       *       *       *       *

In the rectory garden Nora was seated beside Mrs. Cecil, the widow of
Father Enderby’s predecessor, white-haired, her large hands covered with
diamonds. As Mrs. Cecil talked, a cigarette dangled from her mouth. When
the others took the burden of the conversation, she smoked with quick
puffs one cigarette after another. She was like a chimney, with good
drawing powers.

Major West talked very little. He sat holding his pipe, looking across
first at one and then the other of Reggie’s guests. When they were
exploring the monastery after tea, Father Enderby took possession of
Nora, Major West coming up slowly behind with Mrs. Cecil, who had little
interest in ecclesiastical remains, she said.

‘I’m one myself,’ she informed Nora. ‘Not in very good condition. Can’t
you restore me—like the church—Reggie?’

The monastery ruins were a hoary background for the garden. Foxgloves
grew close to the lichen-covered walls, and there were clematis vines
over one sunny end.

‘Charming—charming,’ Mrs. Cecil murmured at appropriate intervals, in
spite of the fact that her best days had been spent here. Reggie really
had improved the garden. Then she confided to Nora: ‘These men know
nothing about my poor legs. Handsome man—Major West. Reggie’s always
talking about him. How violent he looks sometimes! Don’t fall in love
with him, my dear. Young girls always do with that kind of menacing
desperation when it smiles at them.’ Mrs. Cecil laughed at her blush.
‘Take Reggie instead. He’s one of the sweetest creatures. A saint with a
sense of humor.’


                                  III

Nora had been in Trebavas a week. Since the day of the rectory tea,
Reggie—she thought of him as Reggie always—had assumed the rôle of guide
to the young American who had strayed into his quiet settlement. He
offered himself and his two-seater in her service, Major West with
comical dignity perched behind in the dicky, for a pilgrimage in search
of such neighborhood antiquities as Cornish crosses and churches with
Saxon walls, for a visit to the slate quarry, and a sight of the spot
where Reggie had seen the very rare Cornish chough. Major West laughed
at these excursions, but he did not refuse to join them.

In the primitive Cornwall scene of tumbling sea and rock, Major West,
even in his rough country clothes, remained the sophisticate for whom a
London club window in Saint James’s Street seemed the appropriate
setting. The face, with the arrogant curve of nose and the jaw held with
unconscious pride, was a powerful contrast to Reggie’s mild rusticity.
But between the two men existed an understanding which Nora, as an
outsider, envied. They shared innumerable ancient jokes, had been raw
schoolboys together, made frequent references to the war when they, no
matter how separated, had depended on each other. ‘Good old Reggie,’
Major West said of his friend. ‘Poor sinner,’ Reggie called the Major.

When they stretched out on the grassy heights of the cliffs in the
golden hour before dinner, Reggie, as an amateur botanist, explained the
native flowers blossoming luxuriously all around them. To an American
they would be entirely strange—the gay, yellow Tom Thumb; the sea pinks
which they called thrift, almost like American red clover in color, Nora
told Reggie; the snowy bell-shaped campion, and the pink stone-crop
covering the rocks.

In the midst of Reggie’s talk, Major West walked over to the edge of the
cliff, and stood there tossing slate chips over the steep side. Nora
joined him. Down—down—the stones rattled, until they could no longer be
heard. The rocky walls, unrelieved by lichens, were blue-black
zigzagging ravines against which the waves beat with a muttering,
menacing thunder.

‘And to think that all these flowers grow close up to the edge of such
horror,’ Nora whispered, as the spray struck the slate columns far
below.

Major West nodded, turning his blue eyes, half-closed in a smile, toward
her. ‘Jolly old show—the sea with the tide rushing in,’ he said, as they
confronted the limitless expanse of convulsive green waste, upon which
not even a sail was visible.

Above Doscastle Strand early in the afternoon when the tide was low, the
three of them looked down upon the groups of men, women, and children
seated on the rocks, lying out on the smooth white sand, or plunging
into the sea. The children, as they threw themselves with shouts against
the crests of waves, were like sporting elves, mere midgets of humanity.
Even the men and women had a comically insignificant aspect, funny
little wiggles of arms and legs, puny struts of importance up and down.
Upon the height one felt Olympic grandeur and serenity, detachment from
the pigmy concerns of earth.

‘Don’t you ever go down to swim?’ Nora asked Major West one day.

‘Not of late. I haven’t been swimming this summer.’

The day Reggie had church duties which carried him off to Exeter, Major
West and Nora visited the caves, reached by a steep trail cut into the
cliff. They entered the murky chamber and looked out upon the tossing,
watery plain which could not reach them. But as the tide rose higher,
the waves sent laps of water into the cave. One drew farther back. The
water next time came closer. Soon the cave was filled with a great
clamor. The sea shouted, boomed like a cannon. Nora scrambled hastily up
the steep path to escape the crashing terror of the ocean-filled caves.

‘You make me think of a Himalaya goat,’ he said, coming on more slowly
behind her.

While they rested on the grassy slopes at the top, he talked carelessly
about India, his expeditions in the hills, the sunsets over the
Mediterranean when he was going to Egypt. One gathered that he had been
everywhere.

She, in turn, launched out on her favorite political topics.

‘I didn’t believe women really cared about that sort of thing,’ he
commented. ‘But you Americans are different, I see.’

‘No, I don’t think we are.’

‘Then you’ve been with men more—talked with them—got their point of
view.’

‘Oh!’ Nora gasped, looking at him with wide-open eyes. Then she laughed.
As she reflected on his magnificent conclusion, she laughed harder and
harder. The delight—the wonder—the ridiculousness of fooling people that
way. That she—from men—she could not stop laughing.

‘Do—do help me,’ she begged. ‘I——’ Again ripples of helpless mirth swept
over her, waves, torrents. She could never stop.

‘I know what will make you stop laughing,’ Major West said, looking down
at her with uplifted brows.

‘Tell me,’ she entreated between her seizures. ‘Anything.’

‘You wouldn’t like it.’

‘Yes—yes.’

‘You are very lovely when you laugh that way.’ He pronounced the words
with triumphant calm.

She looked solemn in an instant.

‘See—I knew I could make you stop.’

‘But I—I must tell you why—why I laughed.’ She hesitated. ‘Some other
time.’

The next morning she found him pacing back and forth at the end of Mrs.
Pentillie’s lane.

‘I thought I’d catch you here,’ he began carelessly. ‘Shall we walk
toward Doscastle Strand?’

He sprawled lazily upon a mound of thyme, sniffing at it, then with his
head raised against his clenched hands, regarded Nora seated near him
with his disturbing, direct gaze. His eyes were like bottomless
wells—depths she could not measure—his face a handsome, unintelligible
defence. He had none of Reggie’s comforting simplicity. She felt as if
he were highly amused at her American gawkishness.

‘Do you know, I do like you, Miss Deming,’ he said. ‘Really.’ He gave a
short laugh when he saw a flush spreading to her hair, flaming in the
sunshine. ‘Usually I detest young girls. Their chatter bores me—their
chatter about themselves. But you—you converse so wisely, you know.’

‘I—I’m not so young,’ she protested.

‘Oh, come.’

‘I’m—I’m thirty-two,’ she confessed.

‘Magnificent. Now I understand why we get on so well together. Poor
Reggie! He’s shocked at the way American parents let their young charge
about unguarded. He’s been trying to take care of you during your
Cornwall sojourn. And you—why you’re almost my generation. I’m close to
forty.’

She noticed for the first time the threads of grey in his hair, the deep
lines around his eyes and mouth. ‘I’m going to tell you why I laughed so
hard yesterday, when you——’

‘I haven’t an idea what I said or did.’

‘You said I’d talked to men a lot—had their point of view.’

‘Well, you have, you know.’

‘But not from talking to men. Only to women.’

‘Come, now. That’s a bit thick. Even American women——’

‘Yes, I’m serious. I’ve lived all my life in hives of women.’

‘Good God! Not really?’

‘It’s true. I have. It’s a man’s world I’ve wanted to know—tried to
know. What ought to be everybody’s world. But women all the time—caught
in petty squabbles and backstair talk. Nothing big—nothing——’

‘But isn’t that what the dear creatures want?’

‘No,’ Nora contradicted, beating her fist against a rock. ‘No—no. So
many of us—what we want—I can’t explain. It’s endless. I can’t make you
see. What we have, it’s pitiful—stifling. I can’t stand it any more!’
She burst into unexpected tears, and threw herself face downward on the
ground.

She was so ashamed—women and their tears—how she hated them! And she had
degraded herself even more by pretending it was intellectual
participation in the lives of men she wanted. He would know. He couldn’t
help guessing. How he would despise her—weak, ridiculous creature. But
she was helpless—no control before this man. No one before—this
way——What—what had changed her?

She rose quickly, tried to plan escape. If she could run away, not see
the kindness—the pity in his eyes.

‘I’m—ashamed—ashamed,’ she murmured, her eyes still brimming over with
tears.

He seized her hand so that she could not escape. ‘No—no,’ he protested.
‘I understand. But a man’s world isn’t what you think. It’s a rotten
bore—most of it.’

He was like her. He had missed something. The more she saw of this dark,
grim friend of Reggie’s, the surer she felt that some reason lay behind
his reticence, his consistent distaste for talking about the adventurous
life she envied. She had thought first that he was a cynic, a man of the
world who tossed everything serious away from him. But when he told her
of his childhood, especially of his mother who died when he was nine, a
wistful boyishness replaced his usual mocking tone.

‘I come of an army family,’ he confided one day when the two of them
were searching out new cliff heights, new views far away from the
rectory. ‘Sandhurst was as inevitable for me as Oxford for Reggie. When
I was a youngster, my mother used to talk about Parliament. She was keen
about one’s social responsibilities. Perhaps if she had lived——But
Parliament’s an awful bore, they tell me. All talk and muddling along.
The army didn’t give me time to get bored—constant excitement—first one
part of the world and then another. But after a time——’ He broke off
suddenly and began to talk of other things.

His references to the army were always that way, apologetic,
unenthusiastic. He hated the army. She was sure of it. The conviction
gave her an unaccountable upliftment.

After dinner one night Major West came upon Nora perched on the top of
the stile listening to the skylarks.

‘Reggie’s driven me off. He’s in solemn session with the vestry.’ He sat
down beside her.

The sun was glorious fire close to the sea, which turned pink, lavender,
grey-green as the sun dipped lower and lower. Above them larks, faint
specks in the darkening sky, continued to sing.

‘Let’s walk,’ Nora suggested, drawing her coat around her. ‘It’s cold
the moment the sun is gone.’

As they skirted the edge of the cliff, the shadows imperceptibly crept
toward them, but they walked on. The stunted trees, the hedges, the
hollows were changed into black shapes which rose up suddenly all
around. Nora stumbled in a tangle of gorse.

‘We’ve lost it,’ she said, as Major West took her arm and tried to guide
her back to the path.

Below them the sea moaned, the circling gulls cried. Another step, and
the sea made a nearer clamor. The edge of the cliff, they now realized
for the first time, was lost in darkness. Major West struck a match. The
feeble little circle of light intensified the thick night surrounding
them.

‘Don’t move,’ he said, exploring the ground around them with his cane.
‘We may be close to the edge.’

The undulating folds of grey, dark blue, black, shut out the trees, the
hedges. The tinkle of a sheep bell, the twitter of a sleepy bird broke
the silence between the regular beat of the waves far below.

He took a cautious step backward, drawing her by the hand after him.
Another step backward. He lit a second match.

‘This seems to be a path.’

Slowly they made their way, stumbling over rocks, over roots, over deep,
moist furze, the ground rising up against their feet unexpectedly.

Major West bent over Nora. ‘You’re all right?’ he asked. ‘You aren’t
afraid?’ He laughed at his question.

‘No, no, not afraid,’ she insisted in an unnatural, weak voice. The
nearness of his face to hers, brushing it almost, his shoulder against
hers, the pressure of his arm overpowered her with the sense of their
intimacy, the night bringing them together, enclosing them in a small,
dark room. No, she wasn’t afraid, hovering, maybe, on the edge of the
precipice. They stood motionless, then once more advanced one step at a
time.

At last Mrs. Pentillie’s lights winked in the distance.

‘We were close to the edge,’ Nora said.

‘Yes, I didn’t tell you. Back there, when I reached out with my stick,
there was nothing.’

‘Oh,’ she shuddered.

Then they plunged through the caverns of the hedge toward the lighted
windows and the sound of voices in the drawing-room. They crossed the
lawn unobserved, and Nora guided him to the main road on the other side.

‘Good-night,’ she said hastily, drawing her hand away from his and
hurrying back to the house.

In her room she sank down on the floor in front of the low window. She
was trembling all over. She clutched the sill, and leaned her head over
her tightly clasped hands. No, she hadn’t been afraid out there lost in
the night. But now——In the darkness beyond, the waves crashed toward her
nearer and nearer. Like the rattle of the sea in the caves. Something
swept over her, chilled her, burned her, leaped over her head, and
engulfed her. When she emerged, she was breathless, gasping, as if she
had been fighting against the waves.


                                   IV

Major West was waiting for Nora outside the rectory gate.

‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, as she came up to him in her moss-green hat and
dress, ‘you’re the color of the sea this morning.’ Then with a sigh, he
added, ‘Poor old Reggie—old Reggie in Exeter,’ and both of them laughed
together.

The larks were swooping up from the ground with flashes of song and
soaring toward the clouds. Timid lambs peered out from behind the
shelter of their mothers at the intruders in their pleasant green
pasture. There were foot-bridges to cross over little streams, with
forget-me-nots clustering around them, their tender, unforgettable blue
eyes blinking up toward the sun. Around interrupting cliffs, following
steep trails up and down, sometimes leaving the sea and coming back to
it gladly again, Nora and Major West tramped toward Roswithiel. From
time to time they flopped down upon a soft bank of flowers to rest.
Flowers were everywhere. One stepped upon them, lay upon them in this
profuse summer season. They lost the trail, floundered in streams and
swampy ground, leaped over pools, found the trail again. The whole
expedition was a gigantic game of hide-and-seek against a prankish
Nature with her tests of endurance.

On a hillside high above the sea, they sat down to eat their luncheon.
Sticking up over the trees behind them was the steeple of Roswithiel
church.

‘It’s a silent little church. There aren’t any bells,’ Major West
explained. ‘They were bringing them by ship from Plymouth, so the story
goes, and there was a wreck in sight of the town. The natives say that
on calm nights they can hear the bells ringing from the depths of the
sea. Reggie can tell you all about it.’

‘It’s a pretty story,’ Nora commented, looking across the meadow where
men were haying. From the fragrance of the new-mown hay and the peace of
the church tower, one turned back to the sea. She peered down—down the
scarred black cliffs—at the sea, rising and falling, high ridges, low
ridges, then a great mountain of heaving, destructive ocean.

A middle-aged woman panted up toward their hilltop. She was staying in
Roswithiel, she said, a very pretty place, but lonely.

‘I heard you laughing together,’ she added, apologizing for her
intrusion, ‘and I felt I must come up. Just the sound of voices
sometimes——My husband and I, when we were young like you, came to
Cornwall for our holidays. But it was a mistake for me to come back
here.’

They begged her to share their luncheon, but she refused. If they didn’t
mind, she’d like to chat with them a bit before she went back to her
lodgings. They had looked so happy sitting there together on the
hillside that she had envied them. Every one ought to be happy. That was
what life was for.

Beyond a twist in the trail, they dropped down into Roswithiel, with its
whitewashed cottages lined up along the narrow stream trickling in from
the sea, where the ducks paddled up and down, the granite quay and
lighthouse mere toys beside the solid wall of rock behind the village.
Hedges of valerian bent their fragrant rosy blossoms over the water.
Children waded in the shallow pools. Old men sat idle in the sunshine.
Scarcely a human sound. Nora and Major West, perched on a hillock
commanding the diminutive settlement, looked down upon the quiet scene.

‘How sweet—how very sweet it all is,’ breathed Nora.

Neville West sat holding one knee between his hands, his eyes blinking
in the brilliant sunshine.

At tea-time they found a retreat from the sun, which had grown steadily
hotter, a cool, dim room, with walls tinted yellow, and yellow curtains
and yellow poppies on the tables painted a cool green.

‘All your color scheme,’ laughed Major West, as they entered.

‘Tea—tea—oceans of tea,’ begged Nora, pouring a cup of tea for him out
of a green-and-yellow teapot.

Beyond the window where they sat, an old mill-wheel turned and splashed
up cool columns of water. Drip—drip. There was green moss on the
silver-grey wood of the wheel, mossy depths in the water. As it turned,
Nora felt the streams flowing gently over her, refreshing her, making
her over. Perhaps she had been happy before. But never like this—knowing
she was happy—sure that this exquisite, beautiful moment was all for
her.

They finished their lettuce sandwiches, and began on scones, with honey
and Cornish cream, and cup after cup of tea, steaming hot, smelling like
pressed rose leaves.

A deep sigh from her companion. She looked up. There was a queer twist
to his face, as if he were in pain.

‘What is it?’

‘I want to stay here forever,’ he said. ‘Here—just like this.’

‘And I—I too,’ she added.

The waitress had left them. They sat regarding each other, neither one
remembering to look away. He was pulling at the petals of the yellow
poppies between them. Those long brown fingers——She dropped her eyes.

‘Sitting here—you and I—I suddenly remembered—never before—the quiet.
After so many years. In the army they were always packing me off
somewhere. After Sandhurst it was China. Next Egypt.’ He held a poppy
petal between his fingers, crushing it, letting it fall. ‘I was married
the night before we started for Cairo. Three years of it. My children
were born there. I remember the trials of getting milk for them. Goat’s
milk it was. And they are great girls now. With their mother in
Brighton. Molly, the oldest, going to dancing parties.’ He rubbed his
hand over his eyes. ‘I’m glad they’re girls—she can manage them—see
that——’

Nora poured out a cup of cold tea and drank it in great gulps, the
sickening stuff nearly choking her. Of course, she ought to have known
that he was married. A man with his charm, his handsome face. As the
clergyman’s widow had said, all women——

‘Until the war I was a soldier who had never seen a battle. Just dress
parade. Always in some show or other. My wife liked the excitement—the
social responsibilities. She managed it all superbly. And then the war.
I was twenty-eight, a spoiled boy who had danced at Embassy balls, army
balls. At first I couldn’t take it all in. I went around in a funk, a
daze. I—a professional soldier. I was no good. And then—we all got
spinning around. Orders from on top. At last the front lines. A sporting
chance—facing danger every moment—your men such sporting chaps. Every
day we thought they’d get us. We didn’t care. Soon we wanted them to end
it for us. It’s like a nightmare. You keep thinking you’ll wake up. The
blood—quivering bodies—reeking—reeking—the shrieks—squeals. I never wake
up in the morning without seeing and hearing it all over
again—smelling—the horror of it.’

Nora swallowed a second nauseous gulp of tea. A few moments before, she
had been happy.

‘Nothing touched me. Not a scratch. On leave, constant excitement. It’s
the way of our family. They fancied it was what I needed. My wife and
I—those few days—she with colonels, generals—I carrying on with young
girls—bold, pretty things. I hated them back at the front.’

Nora’s tea-cup rattled against the saucer. She sat bent over the table,
her face shaded by her hands.

‘Men beside me—dying like pigs in a slaughtering pen. But I—up to the
end—I thought if I lived to see it over—I’d kill myself. Never another
war then. But they sent me to Mesopotamia afterward. We were quartered
in an old Turkish fort. Nothing to do. Just thinking. The men spent
their time with field glasses ready for a glimpse at a Turkish woman.
Any woman—when they saw her, they called to the others. All
that—thinking—it came to me—I knew I hated the army—hated it. And when I
remembered that young boys like me—brought up on family traditions
of the obligation to serve one’s country, to preserve the
Empire—killing—killing other men, I wanted to save them. All those days
with nothing to do—the idea tortured me that there was no one—no one but
me to tell them. Your serene years with time to give to books—I’ve
envied you that. I read when I could. Adventure tales—then history.
Thucydides over and over. But a soldier trying to write a book——’ He
shook his head. ‘He’s like a plough boy with a pen. But I began to write
for the cadets at Sandhurst. Four, six, eight hours a day. Sometimes
nothing would come. The men lolling around me—their interminable
stories—of women mostly. To escape I began writing again. Maybe I stuck
at it too close. At last they sent me home—home for a rest. I wanted to
finish my book. Only rest—complete rest they said. But how does one
rest?’

Nora lifted herself out of her chair. They must go back. They had a long
way to go. How could she drag herself over all those weary miles—up and
down—hour after hour? She was so tired. Every bone cried out against the
pull of that endless journey before they saw the tower of Reggie’s
church. But now that they knew the trail, they plodded along more
quickly than they had in the morning, though with all the elasticity,
the keen sense of discovery gone.

In the meadows, which a few hours before had been so cool and moist, the
hot sun beat down upon the little streams, which sent up steaming fumes.
In the shadow of the rocks the ewes lay, indifferent to the poor lambs
bleating and crying for the mothers they had lost. This way and that
they scampered, seeking here, there, behind a bush, a rock, stupidly
missing the place where their hot, bad-tempered mothers lay concealed.

Nora tried to help them. ‘Here, poor thing, here is your mother.’ But
they plunged away from her in fear. Like people—so stupid—just missing
what they most wanted. ‘They will never find their mothers,’ Nora cried
out to the silent man beside her. But he didn’t seem to hear her, as he
stamped along over the spongy earth. A deep flush had spread over his
face. Then he was very pale.

He fell on the ground close to the scanty shade of some stunted
evergreen trees.

‘Let’s rest a moment,’ he said in a queer, gasping voice.

She had a vivid memory of her mother during her last sickness. ‘You are
ill!’ she exclaimed in terror. She got a cup out of the picnic bag and
ran for some water from the stream they had passed. She spilled it over
his face, his hands. Small beads of perspiration stood out on his
forehead. Bending down over him, she rubbed his hands. A faint color
came back to his face, the sickly pallor retreated.

‘I—I’m sorry,’ he breathed, turning toward her. ‘I haven’t been well.
I——’

‘We walked too far.’

‘No—I’m all right now. Quite all right, I assure you.’

Her tears splashed down upon his hands, which she was rubbing between
hers.

‘I’m sorry—I—I couldn’t spare you—seeing—me. It’s my heart. I—I want to
tell you. I can’t last long, they say. I came down to Reggie. He knows.
A month—six months——’

She covered her face with her hands.

‘Oh, please,’ he begged. ‘It doesn’t matter, really. It’s been so
delightful to-day. If—a minute ago——’

‘I—I care,’ she wept, shaken with sobs.

‘Until a few days ago—living or dying—it didn’t matter,’ he confessed.
‘But now I—I want to live. Now when it’s too late. Living—it can be
sweet, enduring. I’ve found out. I want it——Darling, I——’

From his broken words she pieced together what he meant, what both of
them meant, as they clung to each other in the shade of the scrubby
pines around which the lost lambs still straggled with their
heart-breaking cries.

But it was no use. They must go back, he to Reggie, she to Adeline Pinks
and the rest of Mrs. Pentillie’s guests waiting in their best clothes in
the summer-house for the tinkle of the dinner bell. The tide was coming
up, the sun dipping lower and lower. They rose, and, after one last
embrace, went on slowly, heavily down the trail.


                                   V

Nora had one day more in Cornwall. A lady from Manchester was coming to
take her room as soon as she was gone. Nora and Neville met after dinner
on the black cliff glowering down upon Doscastle Strand.

‘Nora, can’t we, your last day, go back to Roswithiel?’

‘If you wish,’ she agreed feebly. In the depths of her present misery
what they did no longer mattered.

On the second expedition, the sun shone with the same beautiful yellow
gleam as the first time, but sun, blue sea, floating gulls, the flowers
under their feet—none of it existed for them. Nothing was real but their
wretchedness, their parting in the morning. As they ate their luncheon
in the cool tea-room, the water dripped off the mossy mill-wheel, the
little waitress hovered over them with the same flattering attentions as
before, but the food they tried to eat was tasteless.

As they followed the single street of the village joining a highway
farther on, Neville said, ‘I meant to spare you, Nora. Never to let you
know. That night on the cliff—when we might——’

‘Didn’t you know that day on the train——’

‘Of course. I forgot. When I entered the carriage and saw you sitting
there——’

‘You were hidden behind your newspaper. You couldn’t see me. You didn’t
even look at me then.’

‘I was hiding a blushing, schoolboy face, my darling.’

They had moments like this, when they were almost gay with each other,
like happy lovers, alternating tenderness and playful scorn.

‘What’s this?’ Nora pointed to a break in the rows of evergreen, a path
sun-flaked and fragrant. ‘Shall we see where it goes?’

At the end of the road, they discovered what appeared to be a
gentleman’s estate, surrounded by a wall of the tumbling slate of
Cornwall hedges, covered with stone-crop, with foxgloves growing in the
crevices. A little farther they got a glimpse of a grey stone house,
yellow with lichen, its sharply pointed gables giving it a venerable
aspect, as it stood on a hill overlooking the sea. The gate stood open.
On it was a sign: ‘Gentleman’s Residence To Let. Caretaker Within.’

‘Could we go in, Neville? At home I love to prowl around empty houses.’

They walked boldly up the driveway, with its little green islands of
weeds, its straggling edges. To the south of the house was an unkempt,
luxurious garden, giant geraniums, fuchsias in festoons tumbling over
the garden wall, great heights of myrtle. Snapdragons and white pinks
had sprung up, seeding themselves, in the neglected borders.

A woman in a brown dress appeared from around the corner of the house.
She had a pale face spotted with brown, the color of her dress, large,
hollow brown eyes, a nervous twitch to her lips.

‘Would you care to see the house?’ she asked them in a bleak,
disheartened voice. ‘I’ll be glad to show it to you.’

Nora turned to her companion. ‘Could we, Neville? I’d like to see it.’

‘If you wish.’

The caretaker tried to smile encouragingly. ‘It’s a pleasant old place.
We thought it was let for the season. They paid money down. And then the
last moment the lady decided not to come.’ She ushered them into the
house. ‘My husband an’ me—we do all the work here. You see how dry an’
sunny it is inside, madam. Not like some o’ these old stone houses.’

In the drawing-room, through the windows opening out upon the wall of
fuchsias and myrtle, the sunshine poured in, and lay in golden squares
upon the dark floors and brown walls, flickered upon the chairs and
sofas in their crash covers.

‘I could take ’em off in a minute, madam, if you’d care to see. The
cretonne’s all been washed for the summer. See—just this one. My
lady—she planned the pink in ’em to match the fuchsias outside. Kind of
a rose really—the color. She loved this room. But one lone lady in this
house—an’ since the war you know how it’s gone with those that’s had
plenty before. An’ her in cheap lodgings in Westgate—it’s sad to think
about.’

They followed her upstairs, where she displayed one room after the
other. She did her job thoroughly, as well as she could.

‘Folks hasn’t the money,’ she concluded when they had seen the last
room. ‘That’s why a house like this stands vacant. Last year we had an
American family. Money was nothin’ to ’em. But I didn’t care much for
’em. My lady kept one room for herself. No place is home to her like
this. An’ they—they treated her like a servant. I couldn’t stand it. She
didn’t seem to notice—just worked with the flowers an’ sat there in the
sun near the garden wall.’

They went downstairs, stood in the hall a moment, the caretaker talking
on and on, so they couldn’t go.

‘If I could rent it—even a month—a week or two—now it’s so late in the
season,’ she urged, following them out of the front door.

Neville bowed. ‘Could we have a little time to consider—talk it over
together?’

She smiled, retreated, as they stood out near the fuchsias in the
sunshine.

‘Nora, could you—you and I for a few days together? Coming this way—the
old place—it’s like a kind of childhood dream. As if we’d been here
before. Darling—if you could——’

She swayed toward him. To make a decision such as this, in a chance
moment, standing there, the eye of the worried caretaker upon her——

‘I’d arrange everything, dearest, everything. You know what we’ve
said—that if we could have only a short space of time together—not
cheated out of everything——You, dearest, that night in the churchyard
waiting for Reggie——’

‘Yes, I—I know,’ she gasped, clutching his hand.

‘I mustn’t—I ought not—appeal to you that way. My being—not well. But if
it ended to-morrow—and you and I—even a few hours——’

‘I—I’m afraid,’ she shuddered.

‘If I felt that I’d lived—ever——You told me that you—nothing you really
wanted—until you and I——’

‘Yes,’ she agreed sadly.

‘I must—I must snatch at it before it’s too late. Happiness for us
both.’

She locked her hands tightly together.

‘A real home with you—how I’ve longed for it, my darling.’

Of course she would do anything to make him happy. He knew she would.

Hand in hand, they went back to the caretaker. Yes, they would take the
house for two weeks. It fitted in well with their plans. They could come
in the morning.


                                   VI

Mrs. Pentillie’s dinner was over when Nora returned, but they sent a
tray upstairs to her room. She was very tired, she explained, and had
some packing to finish. In the morning they crowded around the jingle
when Mr. Pentillie was ready to take her to the station. Adeline Pinks
and her aunt both kissed Nora, Mrs. Pentillie hoped she would come
again. The Quaker husband and wife invited her to visit them in
Sheffield before she went back to America. She took the London train,
got off at the next station, and there Neville waited for her according
to their plan.

‘No, no, I’m not sorry,’ she assured him when he took her in his arms.

‘My darling,’ he whispered over and over again, ‘my generous darling
girl.’

Mrs. Tamar, who regarded all residents in her mistress’s house as
interlopers to be endured only for the sake of profit, took good care of
them. It was her duty. But she had no interest in these strangers, or
any others. Nice enough people. No trouble. Tearing around the cliffs on
bright days and not in the house much. This, Neville declared, was Mrs.
Tamar’s estimate of Nora and him. She served them at meals in her brown
dresses, which were always of the same cut and color, a part of her,
like an outer skin, hide, or plumage, over which she wore white aprons
several sizes too large. Neville carved the joints, Nora poured the
coffee in the oak-panelled dining-room with the rough stone floor, the
candles on the table making long shadows over the two of them and Mrs.
Tamar, as she came in and out. A bent little man, Mr. Tamar, with whom
they seldom spoke, worked, when his wife’s eye was upon him, in the
vegetable garden back of the house.

Every morning, when they went through the garden and over the stile in
the stone hedge toward the sea, the only person they ever met was a lame
old man, Mr. Bunny, from the farmhouse he pointed at between them and
Roswithiel. With his dog, he was going after his sheep, which fed in the
grassy crevices of the rocks close to the sea.

‘You want to watch him bring up the sheep?’ he asked Nora one morning as
he limped past her. He always addressed her instead of Neville. ‘They’re
a stubborn flock, them sheep, but he gets ’em.’

The dog was barking and circling round his master. ‘Go for ’em, Roy,’ he
commanded at last.

He hobbled down the steep trail, Nora after him. Neville would wait at
the top. It was, Nora agreed, a splendid sight to see the dog assemble
the sheep and bring them in a sober procession away from their favorite
feeding-grounds.

‘I told you he’d do it,’ chuckled Mr. Bunny. Then he examined Nora with
his funny little eyes. ‘American lady, be ye? We have ’em hereabouts. I
read an American book once, when I was a lad. About a fugitive slave.
Ran away from his master. Through swamps and rivers. I knowed that book
most by heart. Every winter—sittin’ tight up t’ the fire, I’d read it
over ag’in.’

In Nora he saw reflected the glory of this remarkable volume of his
youth. He repeated over and over again, as they climbed the cliff, the
one story he had read.

Neville sat in the bright morning sunshine waiting for Nora. He turned
his eyes, with their indolent, half-cynical tilt upon her, and responded
to her smile with the expression, at once bantering and tender, which so
instantly transformed him.

‘I missed you so—my darling.’ She sat down close to him, pressing his
hand. ‘Those few minutes. I was like a forlorn little boy—like one of
those lambs you felt so sorry for that day—lost from its mother.’

A week passed. Sun, rain, it made no difference to them. Sometimes Mrs.
Tamar’s eyes upon them had a less bleak look. They were happy people.
Even Mrs. Tamar must know that.

The larks had never sung with more emancipated delight in their song
than during those flying, flying days. Nora and Neville were like larks.
Swooping up and up—never out of breath, those marvellous birds, always
singing, always seeking the sun.

The two of them sitting quietly on a rock high above the sea told each
other that their bodies had dropped away, that everything had dropped
away, the past, the future. Memory was gone. But for the present they
had a kind of transfigured experience, sharpened senses, a keenness of
sight, hearing, smell, which had never been theirs before. And never
were they tired—in the morning, or at night. This was living what only a
few knew—the marks of it on their faces. People passing them on the
street saw that here were human beings who were different. Not poor
creatures breathing, filling their lungs with air, letting it out again,
respiration, heartbeats, food, digestion, pains. Not that alone. But
full crowded vital existence for them. Making beauty of it, reality.
Mrs. Tamar—surely even Mrs. Tamar could see that they were happy.

In the night Nora sometimes awoke from troubled dreams with a muffled
cry of fear. Or at dawn when the first light stole into the room, she
had a moment of terror when she looked at the motionless figure lying
beside her so still. But he was sleeping peacefully, and she, too, slept
again. If he had any such moments, she never knew. Their two weeks were
almost over. They might stay three, four, on and on through the summer.
One day and then another—that was all.

One blustering morning they had climbed down to a shelter in the rocks,
where they could look out for miles over the sea and at the same time be
protected from the wind. They could see Mr. Bunny hobbling down after
his sheep, leaping with the help of his stick from one rock to another
like a goat.

‘Wonderful old chap—that Bunny of yours, Nora,’ said Neville lazily as
he puffed at his pipe.

The peace of their snug little chamber was so perfect that they were
reluctant to leave it at lunch-time.

‘But we’ll come back and spend the afternoon,’ Nora said, looking down
at Mr. Bunny not far below them.

At the top Neville paused. The same deep flush and then the pallor.

‘Just a minute—if I lie here——’

Mr. Bunny was not far away. She called to him, her voice carried forward
by the wind. He saw her, waved, began to turn his direction toward her.

‘Nora—I—my dearest.’ His eyes closed. ‘Reggie—to him——My dear—dear——’
She clung to his chilly hand, held his head against her breast.

A voice behind her. Mr. Bunny was saying something. ‘He’s gone—gone,’ he
whispered close to her ear.

They were a long way beyond the house, close to the Roswithiel Road,
which went on to Trebavas. She remembered Mr. Bunny’s horse and wagon
making journeys between the two villages.

‘Take him to—to his friend—the rector in Trebavas,’ she gasped out.
‘Quick! Quick!’

Mr. Bunny placed a horny finger on Neville’s white cheek, felt at his
heart. He shook his head. ‘He’s dead. While I was standin’ here behind
ye.’

But Mr. Bunny understood that he was to go after his horse and wagon,
fortunately all ready to start to Trebavas after dinner. In his stupid,
bewildered way he followed her directions as best he could.

All the way to Trebavas she sat on the floor of the jolting wagon
holding Neville in her arms. But she knew as well as Mr. Bunny that
nothing could be done. They halted outside the rectory gate. The lazy
horse waited with drooping head until his master came back with the
clergyman.

Reggie looked at Nora, then at the burden in her arms. He and Mr. Bunny
carried the limp figure into the house, climbed the stairs, and laid him
on the bed, Nora following them. Then the old man, muttering to himself,
clumped awkwardly down the stairs.

Reggie knelt beside his friend. Then he rose and held out his hand to
Nora. They had not spoken a word.

‘Let me—let me get you some tea,’ he said. ‘You must be very tired.’

He led her out of the room. In a few confused words she tried to tell
him what had happened. While she talked, his tortured eyes never left
her face.

‘I—I must get away before you send—for—for his wife. She mustn’t know.
He was with you—with you all the time. When he—you found him——’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I understand.’

‘Help me—help me to get away.’

She must allow him to drive her to the station as soon as the doctor
went away. Then he could send a wire to Neville’s wife from Pelreath. He
waited below while she went upstairs. When she returned, he was standing
in the centre of the room where she had left him.

At the station, they had a few minutes to wait. He took her hand,
holding it as if he had forgotten to release it.

‘You will—you will write me when you are safe in London. I shall not
rest until I hear.’ There was something in his eyes which made her heart
beat with fresh pain. ‘You will. Promise me. And afterward—in
America——If I could know you were all right—quite all right.’

She nodded her head, unable to speak. The train was coming. Reggie still
clung to her hand. ‘If ever—anything—anything I can do. For Neville and
me both—a kindness.’

The evening glow swept Reggie’s face as she, from the train, watched him
standing on the wind-swept platform, surrounded by the desolate Cornish
moors. She closed her eyes and locked her lips tight together.


                                  VII

In the American Express Office in London Nora found a long-delayed cable
and a letter from the President of Petersfield. She stood in the room
crowded with her countrymen and read the cable. It meant nothing. They
wanted her—for what? She read the letter. They had created a new office
at Petersfield, that of dean, an academic as well as a social dean, the
President was careful to explain, whose function it would be to assist
him in building up a new kind of Petersfield. She was the unanimous
choice of the faculty, the alumnæ, the trustees. The new Petersfield,
she, Nora Deming, could help to make a force in American education.

Nora tottered toward a divan against the wall. She read the letter once
more. Then she began to laugh. She laughed until the tears ran down her
cheeks. She mopped them away, but again they splashed upon her face, her
hands, the letter which she held in her trembling fingers. The Americans
all around her paid no attention to the small red-haired woman laughing
there on the sofa. They were busy reading their letters. So she went on
and on, all by herself, with shaking, hysterical laughter.


                              CHAPTER III


                                   I

Nora was on the train taking her from Maronac to Petersfield. During the
week she had spent in Maronac, Mrs. Pancratz, the Bohemian woman who had
been Cordelia’s helper in periods of stress, serving her at the end, had
protected Nora from every one: from Lizzie Guildford arriving the first
day, insisting that Nora would want to see her, even from Della coming
to show her little boy. From the front window one morning she had caught
a glimpse of Amy Henderson hurrying to Weyhausen’s store, still looking
like a girl of twenty, as elaborately fashionable as she had been then.
But she could not bring herself to see any of them. She must have a
sanctuary, a hiding-place for her bruised body. Every day, as the
echoing house became more and more dismantled, she had the desperate
sense that it was being torn away from her, one wall after another, one
board, another, until there would be no place, nothing behind which she
could stifle her mad, quivering passion, her helpless cries. It was over
at last. The house, on the edge of the new industrial district which had
sprung up since the war, was sold to the Aluminum Company, and the heavy
mahogany and walnut furniture made by the old English cabinet worker,
the friend of Cordelia’s father, was on its way to Petersfield.

Nora would never see Maronac again. On the last night, before she went
to her room in the German hotel across the river, where she and Cordelia
had often eaten their Sunday dinners, she had walked down to the beach,
and in the beating wind which made her cling to the railing walked out
on the pier toward the lighthouse, winking over the lake. She had looked
down at the churning water, had hesitated, loosened her hand clutching
the iron support, and then turned and gone slowly back toward the town.

In an hour, she would be back in Petersfield, back to the old life. In
the night, when she had lain in her berth hour after hour listening to
the clicking rails, she had marvelled at the meek obedience of the human
spirit. Why was she going back to Petersfield? What could she do there
or anywhere?

From the first, that night in the Exeter hotel, the cathedral chimes
jangling mad tunes through her head, those other terrible nights in the
Bedford Place lodging-house in London, on the boat coming home, she had
never had any illusions. What sentimentalists had written, babbled among
themselves about living in the spirit, not allowing the dead to depart
from one’s life, holding them close to the heart, keeping them, she had
never, even in her quieter, exhausted moments, heeded. All of life
crowded into a few feverishly happy days, and then wrenched from her.
She was only an automaton now, jerked about with no will of her own. She
had clutched at Petersfield as the first support which had offered
itself, and now she clung to it with feeble desperation.

With only a few minutes left before she must get off the train, see the
mob of students gathered at the station, direct her hazy, jaded powers
sufficiently to descend and be conveyed to the college, she shut her
eyes before the prospect of what she had driven herself to do.

The porter was beside her. ‘Brush ye off, madam?’

The familiar Petersfield hills spun past her. Some strange girls were
chattering the familiar college jargon at the opposite end of the car.
She put on her hat, stood motionless while the porter worked with his
brush, and then fell against the seat, the car whirling round and round
in nauseous circles.

The train was slowing up. She looked out. There stood the girls, in
their brilliant sport clothes and graceful shorn heads, talking and
laughing together, waving toward the train. Youth was beautiful—so full
of hope. She, once, like them——The same old station, the steps, the lame
porter who always remembered her. She felt something crashing within
her, the blood coursing swiftly through her veins. The old life
unchanged. Tears dropped unnoticed from her eyes.

This was her life, here in Petersfield. The lame man took her bag,
touched his cap. With downcast eyes she passed through the animated,
darting crowd on the platform, and her taxi carried her quickly to the
college and through its gates. The buildings draped in ivy, the advanced
guard of students in white, yellow, lavender, rose, fluttering over the
green of the lawns like butterflies, the grey towers rising above old
trees—never since she came there as a freshman for the first time had
the beauty of Petersfield so touched her, encompassed her. Here, after
all, was the place where she must find peace.

Ruth Ewing in Faculty Hall held Nora in her arms and kissed her. ‘I’ve
missed you so, my dear. No one else here like you. Why didn’t you tell
us when you were coming? We wanted to be down at the station to welcome
you, our distinguished member from foreign parts. Miss Steele trotted
over twice this morning to see if you had arrived.’

‘I’m glad to be back,’ Nora said quickly, conscious that Ruth’s
scientific eye was upon her.

‘You look tired, my dear. You mustn’t be too ambitious right away.’

‘How is Miss Steele?’

‘I must warn you. She’s very changed. It’s high blood pressure and a
kind of nervous exhaustion. Of course, she ought to rest.’

‘It would kill her,’ Nora reminded her.

‘Yes, I know. But she’s killing herself this way. She’s so rebellious
against her infirmity. A kind of mad rage. She has falling spells. Last
year she was brought home twice in a very bad condition. But she won’t
stop. We’re hoping you can do something with her.’

‘Never. I’ll never interfere with her.’

Ruth Ewing shook her head.

While Nora was unpacking, one visitor after another came into her room,
all of them with hearty congratulations for themselves and for
Petersfield that she was to be their Dean. Nora listened to them
quietly, trying to respond to what their conception of a dean must be.
Judicial and enigmatic, possibly. But how did one look that? On the
campus the students she had known, stopped her, told her how glad they
were she was back, how much they had missed her.

Before dinner that night Miss Steele plunged into her room.

‘Well,’ she began with a vigorous handshake. ‘I told them to get you
here, Nora. I refused to listen, to consider any one else. If we’re to
be reformed, I told them, let one of our own who knows us cast the first
stone.’

‘I don’t know about stones,’ Nora laughed.

Miss Steele sat down. She now wore two sets of spectacles, one on top of
the other, but in spite of them she betrayed the indecisive movements of
a person whose sight is fast going. When she was in repose, her face
dropped into strange, bewildered lines. Her hands twitched as she tried
to hold them tightly together. She scraped back and forth on the bare
floor one foot encased in the Congress boot which had inspired campus
humor for twenty years.

‘Have they told you?’ she burst out finally. ‘The President will talk to
you when you see him in the morning. They tell me I ought to resign—hint
at it. Advise me to rest—to give myself a little leisure to write my
books. Leisure after all these years! What would I do with it? Without
my students, why should I write books? I write to help them. If I—if I
resign——’

‘How ridiculous! You to give up. I shan’t listen to such nonsense.’

‘You mean it, Nora? You don’t think for the good of the college——’

‘I’m depending on you to get me started here.’

‘That’s what I hoped. But I—I’m an old woman.’

‘You’re a wise woman also,’ Nora added. ‘I shall tell the President that
without you to run the department——’

Miss Steele took out her handkerchief—she always bought the large
squares devoted usually to masculine necessity—and blew her nose like a
trumpet. According to her old-fashioned ladylike code nothing could have
been more degrading than such a public exhibition. But a show of emotion
belonged to even lower depths. At times one must choose the lesser of
two evils.

‘Well, then,’ she said in her characteristic hurried fashion, ‘I must be
off.’ She wrung Nora’s hand. ‘Don’t try to do everything at once, young
woman. Our ancient evils will keep a year or two while you’re getting
started.’

‘I want to talk over a few of my ideas with you. Some of them you won’t
like, Miss Steele.’

‘Of course, I won’t. But are you running this college to please me? Some
of them won’t please the President. I know you well enough for that,
Nora Deming.’ The door banged behind her retreating figure.

That night, when the footsteps in Faculty Hall and the high, eager
voices of the girls outside had ceased, Nora, before she went to bed,
looked at herself in her mirror. Ruth Ewing had immediately seen the
change in her face with those searching, kind eyes. A few weeks ago the
daily reflection which met her was that of an ignorant, careless girl.
But already it was beginning to show faint traceries of lines. Not
caverns, trenches, only delicate pencillings around the nose and mouth,
a kind of veil over the eyes, as if their owner no longer dared to look
straight out at the world. This was age, so long delayed, but coming
quickly now at thirty-two. Age—she welcomed age. It meant the inevitable
end.

Nora took out a photograph in an old-fashioned mahogany frame and looked
at the happy-faced young woman wearing puffed sleeves and a festoon of
lace around her throat, and a little boy standing beside her, a serious,
handsome child of five or six, with a plump hand clutching the silken
folds of his mother’s dress. She regarded it steadily for several
moments, and then hid it away in the drawer of the table beside her bed.

Work—only work to drive away that cutting, scalding memory. She would
work. Never stop. Philosophers down through the ages have praised work.
One can work when everything else is torn away. One takes it up first
for relief, escape. Then in the end it is life—all of life.

But until then—until one forgets—when what she and Neville in a few
summer weeks had known was everything—even in those breathless moments
there had been time to measure it. For her, love had been immediate,
irretrievable mating, the complete kind which comes only once. She
remembered her stumbling experiments in chemistry, those mysterious
combinations, reactions which she had watched over in the laboratory,
foreign elements bearing no outward resemblance to each other, but
coming together with such instantaneous, inevitable force. Love for her
and Neville had been like that. Dwellers in far-removed parts of an
indifferent planet, living many aimless, weary years before they came
together, and then close—close.

But there was no escape from the spinning of her mind. Restless, active,
it went on and on. Reaching out into the future—carrying her tired body
along with it. It had dragged her back to this old life. Now it stood
over her, beating her into plans for action. To-morrow when she saw the
President—what was she going to tell him? What she herself had
discovered, freedom, escape from fear—that she would try to give to the
Petersfield girls.

Even on the boat bringing her home, she already understood herself. She
understood Cordelia—all women. She was sure that she saw clearly how she
could protect them from some of the taboos, the restrictions, the
detachments which had held her down. They must cease being afraid—afraid
of themselves, of sex, of truth, of life and death. She no longer feared
any of these things. Once more, as on the train, the blood leaped within
her, brought fire to her brain, warmth through her whole body. Life—one
couldn’t escape it. Even joy.


                                   II

When Nora saw the President in the morning, he began the conversation by
lamenting the fact that Professor Steele was no longer what she once
was.

Nora drew up her small figure to the most impressively expanded deanly
proportions. ‘But even now, there is no one at Petersfield to equal
her,’ she said firmly.

‘Perhaps not—perhaps not,’ he admitted, tapping his eyeglasses nervously
against the arm of his chair. Professor Steele was a strong-minded,
exasperating woman, as Miss Deming well knew. Perhaps all strong-minded
women were exasperating. The President had his playful glances at humor.
Petersfield had been founded to produce such a race, and it had nobly
fulfilled its destiny.

Nora could follow the thoughts of the President as he sat solemnly
measuring her capacity for her new job. By the time the Dean was
forty-five, she might succeed him. Alumnæ were always clamoring to honor
their own sex. But Miss Deming looked so small and innocent sitting
there, not easily distinguishable from the undergraduates, whose
destinies she held in her thin, nervous fingers.

He repeated the future policy of Petersfield, which he had already
outlined in the letter he had sent Nora in London. Hereafter, the
college was to be restricted to the best applicants, not to the
daughters of alumnæ, those with the most flawless genealogies, or the
most eulogistic recommendations from school heads respecting charm,
school spirit, and attractive appearance. Mental tests, records of
preparatory schools, were to be the decisive factors. With hundreds
battering at its doors for admission, Petersfield could, at last, afford
to be exclusive. And for the final choice of this superior student body,
the young women who respected intelligence and learning and were willing
for four years to devote themselves to the exercise of the mind, and for
their general guidance, the new office of dean had been created. The
President’s voice took on a warm tone as he expanded his theme.

‘I’ve been thinking over many plans,’ Nora told him.

‘Oh, yes,’ agreed the President, determined that Petersfield should
march in the vanguard of the college processional.

‘Some of them may be a mistake. But this first year I’d like to make a
few experiments.’

‘We must proceed with caution,’ warned the President.

In her opening address in chapel, the new Dean announced to the students
of Petersfield that their college was in the future to be a place for
responsible women, for women who were capable of deciding their own
course of action, not for children in leading strings. But they had for
so many years been addressed in public as women and treated afterward as
wayward children that they only smiled politely at the eager, red-haired
woman, who stood, a small figure in the folds of her academic gown, on
the edge of the chapel rostrum.

By degrees Nora explained to the President what she wanted to do.

‘I want women to go to college as men do—completely free. If they make
mistakes——’

‘But I can’t see that freedom in men’s colleges has brought about
praiseworthy results. Quite the contrary.’

‘Because at the same time with freedom high standards of scholarship
have never been insisted upon. If a girl devotes herself to dancing,
musical comedies, and a tour of the men’s colleges at Prom time, and her
work suffers, she goes home. She can be social there. We criticize women
for lack of independent thinking, for shifting around instead of coming
directly to the point, for cringing before authority, for lying, for
using the feminine weapons of flattery, tears, hysteria. And these are
the great sins.’ Nora’s large reddish-brown eyes held the President in
their spell. ‘I’d rather see the girls of Petersfield drunk——’

At the Dean’s words the President fell back as if, Nora surmised sitting
quietly opposite, she had taken the paper-knife lying on the desk beside
him and stabbed him to the heart.

‘Than full of deceit,’ Nora concluded, with the suspicion of a smile
flitting over her lips.

‘Drink for women——’ the President said in an awed voice.

‘They won’t drink. They never have in my experience. We generally leave
that kind of adventurous escape from reality to men. Of course college
girls have experimented. The last class day I was here two delightful
graduates of the class of 1872 told me about three girls of their year
sitting down after dinner to see how much they could take before they
lost consciousness. They were sent home the next morning. They seem to
have got rather maudlin and wandered about. And the old ladies
themselves used to smoke pipes—corncob pipes I think they said—in their
rooms late at night with towels fastened over the keyholes. They were
very proud telling it. And girls in those days were watched over
faithfully enough, weren’t they?’

The President permitted himself to smile. But he confided to the Dean
the difficulties of his position. She was new to administrative
responsibilities. If she understood—the worst thing was the
newspapers—if reporters got hold of the slightest indiscretion——

‘But we can’t run a college with one eye on the newspapers,’ Nora
insisted.

‘That is exactly what we have to do,’ he informed her.

‘I’ll take the responsibility. If we are disgraced before the world,
I’ll resign at once. Resign any time you think I have failed to make my
policies work out for the good of the college.’

When Nora repeated to Miss Steele what she had outlined for the
President, the head of the history department suppressed something close
to a groan which rose instinctively from her throat.

‘Well,’ she admitted, ‘we’ve made mistakes enough the old way. I’m
willing to try something new. But I warn you, Nora Deming, you’re
embarking upon a stony, uphill road.’

‘I know it,’ Nora answered her.

The matrons of the residence halls, in too many cases substitutes for
the parental tyranny which some girls came to college to escape, were
ready for open rebellion when they were informed that hereafter
Petersfield girls should go and come, even to New York, as they pleased,
without questionings from them. One after another sat in the Dean’s
office, concluding lengthy objections to this dangerous policy with the
words, ‘They’re children—mere children.’

‘Of course they’re too young. But while educators are getting the junior
colleges established, we must use forcing processes to make these girls
grow up.’

Robbing college girls of their infantile charm—their dependence—women
grown grey in nursery service at Petersfield often burst into angry
tears when they left the Dean’s office.

None of the older professors had suspected the iron will of the quiet
young woman they remembered in the history department, with great
scholarly promise, Professor Steele and others had said. That she had
already converted to her sudden revolutions the President, Professor
Steele, Professor Ewing, and others old and responsible enough to know
better, seemed incredible. They could only wait for disaster to tumble
down upon her, to tumble down upon them all.

There were days when the Dean no longer looked young. One could almost
imagine her as an old woman. Those who watched her with hostility were
conscious of the grim, settled lines of her mouth, the fixed light in
her eyes. Even Professor Steele admitted that her favorite pupil was a
changed person. So emotionless, they said among themselves, almost like
a man. She seemed indifferent to their concerted attacks, their united
antagonism. She showed no resentment, treated them with an unchanged
courtesy, deference almost, which was more maddening than blows. At
times she smiled at them with the sweetness of a pitying angel.

For her teaching her critics gave her generous praise. They approved of
her honesty, her unwillingness to use cheap tricks to win the guileless
undergraduate heart, so defenceless against high-sounding words. If
students crowded Miss Deming’s brilliant lectures, it was because she
had a vivid creative power, a concentration of thought, which Miss
Steele admitted she had never equalled even in her best days. The
professors who attended her public lectures on contemporary Europe told
her that she knew so much more than history. If Miss Deming had had less
energy to spread over all of Petersfield, she might have had only
friends there.

Two months later, the college had still escaped the newspapers. But
daily the President foresaw disaster ahead. To all outward appearance,
however, the undergraduates seemed to go on the same way. They may not
have had time to measure the extent of new privileges. Already a small
weeping procession of the unfit had been reunited to their parents, but
not many. The surprisingly meagre number encouraged the promoters of the
new entrance requirements. The right kind of students didn’t seem to
need police regulation.

At the meetings of the committee on instruction the Dean proposed for
the next year a larger faculty. For years it had been inadequate to
handle students effectively. New buildings went up, but the teaching
staff had had almost no increase in numbers. Miss Deming also wanted
more men to teach at Petersfield—not mere men, but the best men. They
needn’t live in Petersfield. It would be better for them if they didn’t.
Men who had made distinguished contributions to history, science,
literature, the arts could be induced to spend part of their time at a
college so easily available from New York. Of course such a policy was
expensive. But it was time Petersfield spent money on brains as well as
on bricks.

‘What about introducing good women into men’s colleges?’ interrupted
Professor Steele.

‘I admit they need good women as much as we need good men. But it’s not
within our power to reform men’s colleges,’ Nora told her.

‘You have moments of illumination, young woman,’ snorted Miss Steele
amidst general laughter.

The introduction of good men was accepted calmly enough by the faculty.
Perhaps they were too feminine at Petersfield. But when the Dean one
night at dinner in Faculty House expanded another of her theories, that
of introducing married women, mothers with children, into their teaching
ranks, even Professor Steele, who was a guest that night, thought she
also must interfere.

‘Married women getting everything—even the jobs away from us, who depend
on them,’ she shouted at Nora.

‘Well,’ Nora smiled, ‘I might compromise on widows.’

‘Widows!’ they chorused.

‘Mothers who have children to support—if they have academic equipment
equal to ours—are surely not objectionable. The very best widows,’ she
added, looking around the table.

In Ruth Ewing’s room after dinner, Nora was examined further by her old
friend. ‘Why are you so keen about widows? Really, my dear, you put on
all the airs of a successfully married woman.’

Ruth’s scientific detachment encouraged frankness. ‘Because they
wouldn’t idealize the facts of life, sentimentalize them, be timid about
what we stigmatize too often as nastiness, the low side of life, what
only men can talk about now without blushing.’ In her haste Nora’s words
tumbled over one another.

‘Where did you get so much wisdom? In England, my dear?’

Nora blushed. ‘I know I’m right,’ she answered.

One afternoon, following an unusually exhausting session with the old
régime, Nora walked rapidly out of town along the Eastchester Pike, with
the snowless fields of late November stretching out on all sides a
dreary brown. Turning away from the main thoroughfare and going up a
little hill, she discovered a road nearly hidden by a clump of cedar
trees, which she had never seen before. It appeared so quiet and
untravelled, with an atmosphere of such peace and seclusion, that she
felt as if she had opened a secret door leading quite out of the world.
Perched on a hillock at a twist in the road was a small pumpkin-colored
house with green blinds, with the hills sweeping around it. When she
approached, she found it untenanted, the front door blowing back and
forth on its hinges. It was of the usual Dutch cottage style, consisting
of a large room with a fireplace opening off from the narrow hall which
divided the house, two rooms on the other side for a dining-room and
kitchen, and three low bedrooms upstairs. The plaster had long since
dropped from the walls, a few panes of glass were broken, but the floors
were solid, the foundations strong.

The poor little place—Nora loved it. She wanted it. If she had a home,
it might be safe to drive herself less relentlessly. Already she was
tired—very tired, and this quiet, lonely house——

A week later Nora had bought the pumpkin-colored cottage, and an
architect was contriving the smallest possible number of renovations.
The stream at the foot of the hill, the closeness to Eastchester Pike,
made his plans so simple that the contractor prophesied Miss Deming
would eat her Christmas dinner in her own home. But Nora, understanding
the characteristic optimism of his business, estimated that the joys of
her own fireside would be delayed until February or early March.


                                  III

A few days before Christmas, Margaret Campbell entered the Dean’s
office. She had been a student of Nora’s two years before, an eccentric
but able girl, kept in college by scholarships. Nora, with her memory
for detail, remembered that her father was a farmer in Iowa.

The girl took the seat Nora offered her, but stared in front of her
without speaking.

‘You wanted to consult me about something?’ Nora began to encourage her.

She gulped, worked her hands nervously together, and then the words shot
out after a painful effort. ‘I—I can’t come back to college after
Christmas.’

‘The scholarship isn’t enough? I’m sure we can help you a little. You’re
a senior, with a good record. I’m sure a loan to tide you over this last
year can easily be managed.’

‘It isn’t money. I know how to get along without money.’

‘Tell me, please.’

‘It’s—I—I’m going to have a child. I’ve got to go home, I suppose.’

Margaret Campbell, not pretty or frivolous, with a kind of rigid Scotch
Calvinism about her, was the last student who would seem likely to bring
such a problem to the Dean’s office.

She looked at Nora with a defiant and tearless despair, adding, ‘An Iowa
farm is not the place I want to go to now.’

At first she refused to make any explanations. Finally she began to cry.
No one would understand, Dean Deming least of all. She had a job in New
York the preceding summer and shared an apartment with a Petersfield
girl who had graduated the year before. On the street one day she met
the boy she had invited to her Prom. Just a boy. A stranger to her. One
of her friends had arranged about his coming. Junior Prom was the first
college party she had ever attended. The girls said she must go. One of
them lent her a dress, another a light evening wrap. She bought nothing
but slippers, not stockings even. She hadn’t seen the boy since. But he
was working in New York, too, last summer, knew almost no one. She asked
him to the apartment. They went out together a little. Then her
friend—the other girl—had her summer vacation. She was gone two weeks.
And then——

He was still in college. A junior. Younger than she. And with no money.
She hadn’t told him. He wasn’t even in love with her, wrote to her only
seldom, was planning to study medicine if he could manage it. And she—if
it hadn’t been for this——No, she didn’t love him. He wasn’t the kind
she’d want to marry. If all this trouble——She hated him. He ought to
have known better. He was so sure that he——Only in the end did she admit
that the blame was equally hers.

At first she had desperate thoughts. Now she didn’t care. But she didn’t
want to go home. If there were some kind of institution—she would
work—do anything—if she could hide what had happened from her parents.

‘It was never having any fun,’ she wept, hiding her face on Nora’s desk.
‘Working every summer—working at anything I could get here at college.
Finally hating everything——And I knew I was the kind that wouldn’t get
married. When I saw the other girls——’

‘Yes,’ Nora agreed, ‘I can understand that.’

Nora’s interview with the President was long and painful. Even though
Margaret Campbell’s disgrace had no connection with the Dean’s reforms,
it roused all his fears. Nora saw all that she had worked for threatened
with immediate destruction. But she reminded him of similar tragedies in
Petersfield history. She assumed the burden of all the arrangements: the
place in the country, no other than Amelia’s colony, where Margaret
could support herself for three or four months working for the
emancipated; she sent the announcement to the college paper that
Margaret Campbell because of illness would be unable to return to
college until the next fall; and the day before Christmas she settled
Margaret under Amelia’s care.

Nora tried to temper Amelia’s enthusiastic championship of this brave
girl’s motherhood by reminding her that Margaret didn’t want to be a
mother, was sure she disliked children, and that Margaret’s child,
conceived so carelessly, had not the most secure future.

‘Of course she’ll want him,’ declared Amelia, who like many feminists
thought only in terms of boy babies, ‘when she sees him. It will be
delightful to have a baby here at the colony. We’ve never had one
before.’

All that Margaret thought of was some escape from her maternal
responsibilities.

‘If I never had to see it—if you’d take it away,’ she wept when Nora
kissed her good-bye.

‘You don’t need to keep your child,’ Nora promised her, as she had
countless times before. ‘We’ll find some way.’

In January the pumpkin-colored cottage was ready for Nora. Her only
neighbor was a wealthy landowner, who had a colony of Russian tenant
farmers distributed over his expansive acres. Amelia, with her interest
in the Russian soul, had discovered them on one of Helen’s and her
week-end visits. A young husband and wife occupied the cottage only a
few steps from Nora’s front door. The woman, only a girl, always smiling
to cover her inability to speak English, was eager to work for Nora. She
was preparing for her first baby, and she needed money.

With Mitya’s help Nora placed Cordelia’s furniture in the bright fresh
rooms, the walnut bookcases going up to the ceiling, the walnut
secretary and high-backed chair, the solid table, the picture of Queen
Victoria and her grandchildren, and that of Warwick Castle. Margaret
Abington’s painting was between the two south windows. The old mirror
hung in the hall. The mahogany card-table and corner cupboard with the
Lowestoft china were placed in the dining-room.

‘Be-utiful,’ said Mitya, who was already in these first days beginning
to speak English.

But the house, after Mitya had gone home to get Peter’s supper—Peter the
Great Nora called the tall blond husband—was, in spite of its venerable,
solid beauty and its bright cretonnes, very lonely and quiet. Peter
thought Nora ought to have a dog. Mitya inclined toward a kitten.

In the clock-ticking stillness of the living-room one blustering January
night, Nora stood in the window watching the snow rise like spray—like
the sea—above the fields as the wind swept over them. Reggie had written
that people couldn’t live on memory—even perfect memory. He had written
her this when he sent Neville’s picture, the only one he had, of a
little boy and his mother. She must have something else. He was right.
Her duties at the college crowded her time, but she was so lonely, so
unutterably lonely. There was a chance that this—this fugitive thought
which visited her day and night—was after all what she needed. She would
settle it now.

She sat down at the walnut secretary and wrote to Margaret that she
would take the baby. If Margaret wanted her own child when he came, she
would waive all claim, but otherwise she wanted the baby.


                                   IV

One morning in May Professor Deming did not meet any of her classes. She
had been called away, the announcement on the bulletin board read. She
was gone three days. In the midst of final examinations the story got
around that the Dean had adopted a baby, a very young baby already
established in her house off the Eastchester Pike. The girls thought it
was a tremendous joke. Dean Deming of all people!

Professor Steele collided with Ruth Ewing a few moments after the
astonishing report had reached her. ‘She would never take such a step
without consulting me,’ Professor Steele pronounced majestically.

Miss Ewing had to admit that she had seen the baby, a boy, a splendid,
healthy child.

‘Ridiculous. A male child at that!’ stormed Miss Steele.

‘But it turned out to be a boy,’ Ruth let out inadvertently.

‘What’s that?’ shouted Miss Steele, who, although she insisted that she
was getting deaf, had her periods of amazing audition.

‘She’ll tell you all about it.’

Miss Steele could not find Nora in the Dean’s office. Determined not to
be baffled, she started out on the country road. Nora came to the door
in answer to the violent clump of the brass knocker.

‘What’s this I hear about you, Nora?’ she demanded from the doorstep.

Nora led her into the house, guided her over the strange rugs, and
settled her in the chair near the window.

‘You shouldn’t have walked out here in the heat,’ she protested.

‘You telling me nothing,’ the older woman thundered. ‘It’s
madness—madness.’

‘I wanted to tell you. But I know how easily I’m influenced by your
opinion, Miss Steele. If you had disapproved——’

‘Of course I’d have disapproved. Old maids adopting babies. They’re all
doing it. Couldn’t you think of anything more original?’

‘You see his mother—she was a student once at Petersfield.’

‘So were you. It isn’t your child, Nora?’ Miss Steele’s eyes glittered
ironically behind her spectacles.

‘I wish he were. But I had to have him. I was sure of that. I want you
to see my baby.’

From the foot of the stairs she called to Mitya, who had just finished
giving the baby his bottle. Mitya entered the room carrying him on one
arm, and smiling at the erect, severe woman in her stiff dress.

‘Here he is,’ Nora said, taking him from Mitya. ‘Richard Tait—after my
father and the guardian who left me the money to bring him up.’ She
dangled him before Miss Steele’s disapproving eyes.

Miss Steele’s gaze wandered from the curious pink creature Nora held
before her to Mitya with her clumsy, comic figure. Mitya continued to
smile and twitter an unintelligible jargon to the baby.

‘Sit down, please. Do see how soft and warm he feels.’

Miss Steele dropped into a low chair and draped her unyielding arms
around the baby. Her hold upon him was uncertain, virginal. Nora seated
herself on a stool in front of them.

‘Every one says he’s a remarkable infant,’ Nora confided. ‘See how
strong his neck is. He’s beautifully made. Just look at his legs.’

A deep flush crept into Miss Steele’s grey cheeks. She looked
embarrassed.

‘What’s that woman doing here?’ she demanded, frowning at Mitya’s
retreating form.

‘She’s Dicky’s nurse. Mitya. I’m certainly fortunate to have her.’

‘You’ll have another young one on your hands any day, it looks to me,’
prophesied Miss Steele.

‘Yes, Mitya’s baby comes next month. She might just as well have two
babies to look after as one.’

‘A pretty mess you’ll have here. You’ll never finish your book, now.’

‘When I’m busy, Mitya will keep the children in her cottage—there at the
foot of the hill.’ Nora looked over at Dicky. He was very sleepy. He
gave a great yawn and stretched out his arms. She must call Mitya to
carry him off to bed. ‘I’ve sent for Clara, the maid I was so fond of at
Saint Ethelfreda. She’s promised to stay the rest of her life.’

Miss Steele shifted the baby in her arms and sighed. ‘Why couldn’t you
have waited, Nora, to have one of your own? I thought—perhaps at
Knickerbocker or in England.’

Cordelia’s words—the same hope.

Nora shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no—never.’ She hid her face
against the arm of Miss Steele’s chair. If she could tell her—tell her
now. There was no one else she wanted to have know. After the first
shock she would understand. But Miss Steele couldn’t be given shocks any
more. She had to be spared. Nora must make her lie down, and then have a
cup of tea before she drove her back to the college.

‘Why,’ insisted Miss Steele to her dearest pupil, ‘why did you do it,
Nora?’

Nora lifted her head and smiled. ‘Why? To counteract the feminine
influence at Petersfield, dear Miss Steele.’ Then she reached over and
kissed her old teacher on the cheek before she carried the baby to
Mitya.


                                THE END




                         NOVELS OF DISTINCTION


   A MIRROR FOR WITCHES By ESTHER FORBES

   A story of Salem in the days of witches and of a mortal girl who
   took, as she believed, a fiend to love, daring the wrath of God
   and the vengeance of man for her infernal paramour. By the author
   of ‘O Genteel Lady!’


   THIS WAY OUT By PHILIP LITTELL

   A lively, humorous, and brilliantly ironic story of the
   adventures of our first parents in the Garden of Eden.


   WE SING DIANA By WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF

   This story of a woman’s revolt against a woman’s world is a frank
   and absorbing study of a modern woman’s inner life.


   TALES FROM GREENERY STREET By DENIS MACKAIL

   Enchanting stories of London newly-weds that will make new
   friends for the author of ‘The Flower Show.’


   CHILDREN OF THE WIND By DORIS PEEL

   ‘It is that rare and humorous thing, the exquisite comedy of
   manners.’—Philadelphia Ledger.

                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY




                          Transcriber’s Notes


Duplicate headings have been removed.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were
silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

   [p. 116]:
   ... she knew no the slippery surface of the freshman mind. ...
   ... she knew on the slippery surface of the freshman mind. ...

   [p. 117]:
   ... them, Nora knew, lay the peaks of the Renascence and ...
   ... them, Nora knew, lay the peaks of the Renaissance and ...


*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79465 ***