Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 54033-h.htm or 54033-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/54033/pg54033-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54033/54033-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/whenshecamehome00presgoog
WHEN SHE CAME HOME FROM COLLEGE
[Illustration: (page 16)
HEL-LO, LITTLE GIRL]
WHEN SHE CAME HOME FROM COLLEGE
by
MARIAN KENT HURD
and
JEAN BINGHAM WILSON
With Illustrations by George Gibbs
[Illustration: TOVT
RIEN OV
RIEN]
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1909
Copyright, 1909, by Marian Kent Hurd and Jean Bingham Wilson
All Rights Reserved
Published October, 1909
Contents
I. Alma Mater 1
II. Home 15
III. The Theory of Philosophy 40
IV. The Practice 56
V. The “Idgit” 81
VI. The Duchess 106
VII. “The Falling out of Faithful Friends” 128
VIII. Applied Philanthropy 142
IX. “Without” 170
X. The Vegetable Man’s Daughter 193
XI. Real Trouble 222
XII. The End of the Interregnum 249
Illustrations
_Hel-lo, little girl_ (page 16) _Frontispiece_
_Cantyloops! What’s them?_ 68
_Why are you eating in here?_ 72
_In the middle of the floor sat the Idgit_ 104
_I’m Mrs. ’Arris, an’ I’ve come to ’elp you hout_ 108
_Such a sadly changed Gassy_ 182
_Barbara sank down wearily_ 190
When She Came Home From College
CHAPTER I
ALMA MATER
“WELL, this is cheerful!” cried the Infant, as she stepped briskly into
the room where the rest of the “Set” were dejectedly assembled. “What
if this _is_ the last night of college! What if our diplomas _are_ all
concealed in the tops of our top trays! Can’t this crowd be original
enough to smile a little on our last evening, instead of looking like a
country prayer-meeting?”
The Infant cast herself upon the cushionless frame of a Morris
armchair, and grinned at the forms on the packing-boxes around her. Her
eyes roved round the disorderly room, stripped of the pretty portières,
cushions, mandolins, and posters, which are as inevitably a part of a
college suite as the curriculum is a part of the college itself. Even
the Infant suppressed a sigh as she caught sight of the trunks outside
in the corridor.
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean;
Tears from the depths of some divine despair,
Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes,
On looking at the—excelsior—on the floor,
And thinking of the days that are no more,”
she chanted.
“It’s all very well to talk in that unfeeling way, Infant,” said
Knowledge, separating herself with difficulty from the embrace of the
Sphinx and sitting up on the packing-box to address her chums to better
advantage. “It’s very well to talk, but the fact remains that to-morrow
we are all to be scattered to the four corners of the United States.
And who knows whether we shall ever all be together again in our whole
lives?” Knowledge forgot the dignity of her new A. B. and gulped
audibly; while the Sphinx patted her on the back, and said nothing, as
usual.
“Well!” retorted the Infant, rising, “if I _am_ the youngest, I have
more sense than the rest of you. I’ve kept my chafing-dish out of
my trunk, and I’ve saved some sugar and alcohol and chocolate, and
‘borrowed’ some milk and butter from the table downstairs; because I
knew something would be needed to revive this set, and I hadn’t the
money to buy enough smelling-salts.”
The Infant ran down the corridor, and came back with her battered dish;
and the girls gathered together on the dusty floor around the box,
which now served as a table. Their faces, worn from the strain of the
week of graduation, relaxed noticeably as the familiar odor began to
float upon the air.
“This _is_ comfortable,” sighed Barbara, gratefully. “Let me take the
spoon, Infant. Your four years of college life have not yet A. B.’d you
in fudge.”
“Oh, you are not quite crushed by the pangs of the coming separation,
after all, then,” grinned the youngest member. “Girls, did you hear
an awful chuckle when our Barbara finished her Commencement speech
yesterday? It was I, and I was dreadfully ashamed.”
“Mercy, no!” cried Atalanta, turning shocked eyes at the offender.
“What on earth did you chuckle for, when it was so sad?”
“That’s just it!” said the Irreverent Infant. “When Babbie began
to talk of Life and Love and the Discipline of Experience and the
Opportunities for Uplifting One’s Environment,—wasn’t that it,
Babbie?—I began to wonder how she knew it all. Babbie has never loved
a man in her life” (the Infant glanced sharply at Barbara’s clear
profile); “Babbie has never had any experiences to be disciplined
about; Babbie’s environment, which is _we_, girls, hasn’t been
especially uplifted by any titanic efforts on her part; and as for
Life, why, Babbie’s had only twenty-one years of it, and some of them
were unconscious. So when her oration ended with that grand triumphant
climax, and every one was holding her breath and looking awed and
tearful, I was chuckling to think how beautifully Barbara was selling
all those people.”
A horrified clamor arose from the girls.
“Why, Evelyn Clinton! It was lovely!”
“Infant, you shameless creature!”
With a whirl of her white skirts, amid the confusion that followed, the
House Plant rose to her feet and the rescue of her chum. “Just because
you can’t appreciate what a splendid mind Babbie has, Evelyn Clinton,
and how much the English professors think of her, and what a prodigy
she is, anyway—”
“Hear, hear!” cried Barbara, laughing.
“—And how proud we are of her,” went on the impetuous House Plant
“Just because you have no soul is no reason why you should deny its
possession by others!”
“Well, I’ve stirred you all up, anyway,” said the Infant, comfortably.
“And that is all I wanted.”
Barbara took the spoon out of the fudge dreamily. “You may be right,”
she said to the Infant. “You know I didn’t get the Eastman Scholarship.”
“Don’t you ever mention that odious thing again!” cried Atalanta. “You
know that the whole class thinks you should have had it.”
Barbara turned her face aside to hide a momentary shadow.
“Well, in any case,” she said, “there is work ahead for me. Every one
who anticipates a literary career must work hard for recognition.”
“You won’t have to,” declared the House Plant, hugging her chum, and
followed by a murmur of assent from the floor. “Why, Babbie, didn’t you
get five dollars from that Sunday-School Journal, and don’t they want
more stories at the same rate? I think that is splendid!”
“I shall not write insipid little stories when I go home,” Barbara
answered, smiling kindly down at the enthusiastic little devotee
who had subsided at her feet “I shall write something really worth
while,—perhaps a story which will unveil characters in all their
complexity and show how they are swayed by all the different elements
which enter into environment—”
“Ouch!” exclaimed the Infant “You are letting the fudge burn, and
unveiling your characteristic of absent-mindedness to the set, who
know it already. This stuff is done, anyway, and I’ll pour it out Or,
no,—let’s eat it hot with these spoons.”
The Infant dealt out spoons with the rapidity of a dexterous
bridge-player, and the girls burned their tongues in one second, and
blamed their youngest in the next.
“By the way, Babbie,” suggested the Infant with a view to hiding
speedily her second enormity, “you never told us the advice that New
York editor gave you last week.”
Barbara’s scorn rose. “He was horrid,” she said. “He told me that an
entering wedge into literary life was _stenography_ in a magazine
office. Imagine! He said that sometimes stenographers earned as much as
twenty dollars a week. I told him that perhaps he had not realized that
I was of New England ancestry and Vassar College, and that I was not
wearing my hair in a huge pompadour, nor was I chewing gum.”
The others looked impressed.
“What did he reply?” asked the Infant.
“He said, ‘Dear me, I had forgotten the need of a rarefied atmosphere
for the college graduate. I am sorry that I am no longer at leisure.’
And I walked out.”
“You did just right,” declared the House Plant, warmly, confirmed in
her opinion by a murmur of assent from the girls.
“Right!” echoed the Infant. “Babbie, you are the dearest old goose in
the world. You will never succeed nor make any money if you take an
attitude like that.”
“I shall not write for money,” declared Barbara, beginning to pace the
floor. “What is money, compared to accomplishment? I shall go home,
shut myself up, and write, write, write—until recognition comes to me.
I am sure it will come if I work and wait!”
She flung her head back with her usual independent gesture, and
the crimson color rose in her cheeks. And the girls eyed, a little
awesomely, this splendid prodigy, in whose powers they believed with
that absolute, unquestioning faith which is found only in youth and
college. The short silence was broken almost immediately by the Infant.
“Are you going to have a chance to write at home, undisturbed?” she
asked. “Our house is a perfect Bedlam all the time. Two young sisters
and a raft of brothers keep me occupied every minute.”
“There are four children younger than I, too,” answered Barbara. “But
do you suppose that I am going to allow them to come between me and my
life-work? It would not be right; and my mother would never permit it.”
“Mine would,” said the Infant, gloomily. “She thinks it is the mission
of an elder sister to help manage those who have the luck to be younger
and less responsible. I wish your mother could have come to graduation,
Babbie. She might have converted my mother to her standpoint.”
“I wish she had come,” said Barbara, wistfully. “It seems as if she
might have managed some way.”
Her mind flew back to the quiet little Western town,—a thousand miles
away; to the household full of children, presided over by that serene,
sweet-faced mother. Why could not that mother have left the children
with some one, and have come to see her eldest daughter graduate “with
honor”?
“What a splendid thing it is to have a real gift to develop, like
Babbie’s,” sighed the House Plant.
Barbara looked uncomfortable. “You all have them,” she said. “I think I
talk about mine more than the rest of you.”
“You may give us all presentation copies of your magnum opus,”
announced the Infant, mercenarily. “You will come forth from your
lair—I mean workroom—a dozen years hence, and find us all living happy,
commonplace lives. The House Plant here will be fulfilling her name by
raising six Peter Thompson children and embroidering lingerie waists.
Atalanta,—by the way, girls, mother asked me why we called that very
slow-moving girl Atalanta, and I told her I was ashamed to think that
she should ask such a question,—well, Atalanta will marry that Yale
individual who never took his eyes off her at Class-Day march. And
I think you are mean not to tell us, Atalanta, when we know you’re
engaged.”
The Infant threw a spoon at her blushing friend, who unexpectedly
justified her nickname by dodging it.
“As for the Sphinx,” went on the Infant, happy in the unusual feat
of holding the attention of the girls, “the poor Sphinx can’t get
married because she never says enough for a man to know whether it’s
yes or no. She will just keep on loving her pyramids and cones, and
teaching algebraic riddles, until she dies. Knowledge will always look
so dignified that she will frighten men away. Father exclaimed to me,
when he met her, ‘What a lovely, calm, classical face!’ I said, ‘Yes,
that is our Knowledge all over.’ And you can imagine how I felt when
she opened those dignified lips of hers and remarked conversationally,
‘Say! Isn’t it hot as hot?’”
The girls laughed at poor Knowledge, and the cruel Infant continued to
read the future.
“Well, all of us will get presentation copies of Bab’s great work,
even I, who will be making home happy ‘if no one comes to marry me’”—
“‘And I don’t see why they should,’” finished Barbara, cuttingly. She
rapped the Inspired Soothsayer on her fluffy head with a curtain-rod.
“Your mind runs on matrimony to a disgusting extent, Infant,” she
warned. “I shall never marry unless I can carry on my writing.”
“And be a second Mrs. Jellyby?” inquired her friend. “All right;
I’ll come to live with you and keep the little Jellybys out of the
gravy while you unveil the characters of some Horace and Viola to the
admiring world. Oh, girls! The fudge is gone, and it’s twelve o’clock,
and even _my_ eyelids will not stay apart much longer.”
The girls rose slowly from their improvised chairs, and stood together,
half-unconsciously taking note of the dear, familiar room in its
dismantled, unfamiliar condition. Out in the corridor a few unseen
classmates began to sing,
“Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus—”
“What on earth are they gaudeamusing about to-night?” growled the
Infant; but no one answered her.
They stood looking at each other in silence.
“Some of you I won’t see again,” said Barbara, in a wavering voice. “My
train goes so early. Dear, dear Sphinxy,—and Atalanta—”
An odd, snuffling sound caused her to look around. “The Infant’s
crying!” she exclaimed.
The Infant threw her arms about Barbara’s neck. “I guess I have
feelings,” she sobbed, “if I did try to make things cheerful. Don’t
forget me, Babbie dear, for I do love you astonishingly, and expect
great things from you.”
Barbara hurried blindly down the corridor, with the faithful House
Plant beside her. At the end she turned, and faintly saw the four white
figures still watching her. They were looking their last at their
beloved companion, the girl whose strength of character and instinctive
leadership had first attracted, then held them together, through four
eventful years at college.
Barbara waved her handkerchief at the silent figures, and her head
dropped on her room-mate’s shoulder as they neared their familiar door.
“Oh, Helen dear!” she sobbed. “How can we ever leave this college?”