"Every one else can't," returned Priscilla, hotly, "for there wouldn't
be any law left in college if they did. I should a good deal rather play
out of doors myself than go to chapel, but I've used up all my cuts and
I can't. You couldn't either if you had a shred of proper feeling left.
The only way you can get out of it is by lying."
"Priscilla dear," Patty murmured, "people in polite society don't put
things quite so baldly. If you would be respected in the best circles,
you must practise the art of equivocation."
Priscilla frowned impatiently. "Are you coming, or are you not?" she
demanded.
"I am not."
Priscilla closed the door--not quite as softly as a door should be
closed--and Patty was left alone. She sat thinking a few minutes with
slightly flushed cheeks, and then as the chapel bell rang she shook
herself and laughed. Even had she wished to go it was too late now, and
all feeling of responsibility vanished. As soon as the decorous swish of
Sunday silks had ceased in the corridor outside, she caught up a book
and a cushion, and, creeping down by the side stairs, set gaily out
across the sunlit lawn, with the deliciously guilty thrill of a truant
little boy who has run away from school.
From the open windows of the chapel she could hear the college
chanting: "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this
law." She laughed happily to herself; she was not keeping laws to-day.
They might stay in there in the gloom, if they wanted to, with their
commandments and their litanies. She was worshiping under the blue sky,
to the jubilant chanting of the birds.
She was the only person alive and out that morning, and the spring was
in her blood, and she felt as though she owned the world. The campus had
never seemed so radiant. She paused on the little rustic bridge to watch
the excited swirling of the brook, and she nearly lost her balance while
trying to launch a tiny boat made of a piece of bark. She dropped
pebbles into the pool in order to watch the startled frogs splash back
into the water, and she threw her cushion at a squirrel, and laughed
aloud at its angry chattering. She raced up the side of Pine Bluff, and
dropped down panting on the fragrant needles in the shadow of a tall
pine.
Below her the ivy-covered buildings of the college lay clustered among
the trees; and in the Sunday quiet, with the sunlight shining on the
towers, it looked like some medieval village sleeping in the valley.
Patty gazed down dreamily with half-shut eyes, and imagined that
presently a band of troubadours and ladies would come riding out on
milk-white mules. But the sight of Peters, strolling to the gateway in
his Sunday clothes, spoiled the illusion, and she turned to her book
with a smile. Presently she closed it, however. This was not the time
for reading. One could read in winter and when it rained, and even in
the college library with every one else turning pages; but out here in
the open, with the real things of life happening all about, it was a
waste of opportunity.
Her eyes wandered back to the campus again, and she suddenly grew sober
as the thought swept over her that in a few weeks more it would be hers
no longer. This happy, irresponsible community life, which had come to
be the only natural way of living, was suddenly at an end. She
remembered the first day of being a freshman, when everything but
herself had looked so big, and she had thought desperately, "Four years
of this!" It had seemed like an eternity; and now that it was over it
seemed like a minute. She wanted to clutch the present and hold it fast.
It was a terrible thing--this growing old.
And there were the girls. She would have to say good-by, with no opening
day in the fall--and Priscilla lived in California and Georgie in South
Dakota and Bonnie in Kentucky and she in New England, and they were the
only people in the world she particularly cared to talk to. She would
have to get acquainted with her mother's friends--with chronically
grown-up people, who talked about husbands and children and servants.
And there would be men. She had never had time to know many men; but
some day she would probably be marrying one of them, and then all
_would_ be over; and before she had time to think, she would be an old
lady, telling her grandchildren stories about when she was a girl.
[Illustration: I have just run away from you, Bishop Copeley]
Patty gazed mournfully down on the campus, almost on the verge of tears
over her lost youth, when a step suddenly sounded on the gravel path,
and she looked up with a startled glance to see a churchly figure
rounding the hill. Involuntarily she prepared for flight; but the bishop
had spied her, together with a little rustic seat under a tree, and he
smiled upon the one and dropped down upon the other with a sigh of
content.
"A beautiful view," he gasped; "but a very steep hill."
"It is steep," Patty agreed politely; and as there seemed to be no
chance of escape, she resumed her seat and added, with a laugh: "I have
just run away from you, Bishop Copeley, and here you come following
along behind like an accusing conscience."
The bishop chuckled. "I've run away myself," he returned; "I knew I
should have to be introduced to a hundred or so of you after service,
so I just slipped out the back way for a quiet stroll."
Patty eyed him appreciatively, with a new sense of fellow-feeling.
"I should like to have run away from church as well," he confessed, with
a twinkle in his eye. "Out of doors is the best church on a day like
this."
"That's what I think," said Patty, cordially; "but I had no idea that
bishops were so sensible."
They chatted along in a friendly manner on various subjects, and
exchanged lay opinions on the college and the clergy.
"It's a funny thing about this place," said Patty, ruminatingly, "that,
though we have a different preacher every Sunday, we always have the
same sermon."
"The same sermon?" inquired the bishop, somewhat aghast.
"Practically the same," said Patty. "I've heard it for four years, and I
think I could almost preach it myself. They all seem to think, you know,
that because we come to college we must be monsters of reason, and they
urge us to remember that reason and science are not the only things that
count in the world--that feeling is, after all, the main factor; and
they quote a little poem about the flower being beautiful, I know not
why. That wasn't what yours was about?" she asked anxiously.
"Not this time," said the bishop; "I preached an old one."
"It's the best way," said Patty. "We're human beings, if we do come to
college. I remember once we had a man from Yale or Harvard or some such
place, and he preached an old sermon: he urged us to become more manly.
It was very refreshing."
The bishop smiled. "Do you run away from church very often?" he inquired
mildly.
"No; I don't have a chance when I room with Priscilla. But obligatory
chapel makes you want to run away," she added. "It's not the chapel I
object to; it's the obligatoriness."
"But you have a system of--er--cuts," he suggested.
"Three a month," said Patty, sadly. "Evening chapel counts as one, but
Sunday morning church as two."
"So you expended two cuts to escape me?" he asked with a smile.
"Oh, it wasn't you," Patty remonstrated hastily. "It was just--the
obligatoriness. And besides," she added frankly, "my legitimate cuts
were used up days ago, and when I once begin over-cutting, I am
reckless."
"And may I ask what happens when you over-cut?" the bishop inquired.
"Well," said Patty, "there are proctors, you know, that mark you when
you are absent; and then, if they find that you've over-cut, the
Self-Government Committee calls you up and asks the reason. If you can't
produce a good excuse you are deprived of your privileges for a month,
and you can't be on committees or in plays or get leave of absence to go
out of town."
"I see," said the bishop; "and will you have to suffer all of those
penalties?"
"Oh, no," said Patty, comfortably; "I shall produce a good excuse."
"What will you say?" he inquired.
"I don't know, exactly; I shall have to depend on the inspiration of the
moment."
The bishop regarded her quizzically. "Do you mean," he asked, "that,
having broken the rule, you intend to evade the penalty by--to put it
flatly--a falsehood?"
"Oh, no, bishop," said Patty, in a shocked tone. "Of course I shall tell
the truth, only"--she looked up in the bishop's face with an
irresistible smile--"the committee probably won't understand it."
For an instant the bishop's face relaxed, and then he grew grave again.
"By a subterfuge?" he asked.
"Y-yes," acknowledged Patty; "I suppose you _might_ call it a
subterfuge. I dare say I am pretty bad," she added, "but you have to
have a reputation for something in a place like this or you get
overlooked. I can't compete in goodness or in athletics or in anything
like that, so there's nothing left for me but to surpass in badness--I
have quite a gift for it."
The corners of the bishop's mouth twitched. "You don't look like one
with a criminal record."
"I'm young yet," said Patty. "It hasn't commenced to show."
"My dear little girl," said the bishop, "I have already preached one
sermon to-day, which you didn't come to hear, and I can't undertake to
preach another for your benefit,"--Patty looked relieved,--"but there is
one question I should like to ask you. In after years, when you are
through college and the question is asked of some of your class-mates,
'Did you know--' You have not told me your name."
"Patty Wyatt."
"'Did you know Patty Wyatt, and what sort of a girl was she?' will the
answer be what you would wish?"