weaving Helen's thought into the larger one of that endeavor toward
perfection sacredly enjoined upon us. With an impatience born of the
incomprehension of her mood, Lilian had listened to Helen. She did not
hear Elizabeth, who had scarcely finished speaking, when Lilian rose.
The girls looked surprised; but after the consecrated formula--"It seems
to me"--various expressions replaced the surprise. Some of the listeners
looked coldly bored or contemptuous, a few were amused, but the majority
sat ill at ease with pained faces. Lilian was arraigning them for so
much time spent in idle conversation, and in "feasting"--she fiercely
put it. She denounced them for their plays, their dancing. In her
excitement she assumed the tone and phraseology of the denunciations
she had been accustomed to hear from childhood and she went farther than
she intended. She said their pursuit of knowledge was only for its vain
shows. The nature of the silence into which her words fell should have
warned her, but some confused association of ideas carried her on to a
bitter allusion to Catholicism. She was recalled to herself by the
indignant protest on Helen's face. Clothilde and one or two others
present were Catholics. Lilian choked and stopped.
"Shall we not sing?" suggested Helen. Clothilde started the hymn. There
was no more speaking. Lilian was the first to leave the meeting. She
went out with unseeing eyes and hot cheeks, alone. There are times when
even the kindest hearts are cold, and for the moment there could be
nothing but alienation from one who had found tongue against the college
spirit--for they felt that the attack was really against this vague,
shadowy, stern, beloved thing of many hues and many forms--the spirit of
the college.
Outside, the moon had risen in a clear star-powdered sky, and was
silvering the crusted snow and the ice sheaths that rain and frost had
left on every twig and branch of the trees. The sparkle and splendour of
the night only smote Lilian as a part of that whole body of beauty
which, it seemed to her excited thinking, had been presented that
evening as of equal importance with goodness and morality.
There is little tea drinking on Sunday evening. Many girls are away. It
is the time for writing home letters, or doing a little quiet reading.
The rooms never seem so warm or the lights so bright as on other nights.
The halls are still and everybody goes to bed early. But this night
there was a little more excitement as girls stopped to talk with
indignation, amusement or indifference of Lilian's outburst. Katherine
Leonard found several girls in Edith's room when she stopped, after an
errand in Radnor. She sought each face questioningly, then dropped on
the couch. "How awfully _funny_--how dreadful it was!"
"I can't understand the state of mind that would lead to that," said
Alice Warburton. "Where has such narrow-minded egotism been fostered?
Such injustice! What an arid life she must have known."
"I admire her!" said Elizabeth Carrington decisively. "I was near enough
to her to-night to see how tightly she clung to the chair in front of
her. Her knuckles were all white and shiny. It was real heroism. I doubt
if any one of us will ever show as much."
"I should hope not!" Blanche commented energetically.
There was a girl lying on the couch who had been reading _Diana of the
Crossways_, all this time. She occasionally made notes on the margins.
Now she looked up. "For my part, I prefer goodness to cleverness," was
all she said. Then she went on reading again. The girls all laughed a
good deal. Then there was silence, and some of them laughed again--a
little. Some of them were very much of Lilian Coles' opinion in regard
to this girl, who was the junior Lilian had noticed in the gymnasium.
"She has greatly relieved my mind, at any rate," said Katherine. "She
can never hope for the fellowship now."
"You have no right to say that." Edith was a little sharp. She was
somewhat troubled within herself. She liked the serene state of mind
that her usual conduct of life granted her, and hated a mean feeling
with an intensification of the disgust that any contact with uncleanness
gave to her physical fastidiousness. In the dissatisfaction that she had
occasionally felt of late, it had occurred to her that she might settle
issues with herself by some plan involving sacrifice on her part. But
injustice was no dearer to her than selfishness. She fell asleep that
night with the healthy resolve not to be troubled by what she could not
help.
Meanwhile Lilian Coles was lying on her bed, in the dark, with
wide-open eyes. She was restless with a shamed sense that she had
violated her finest instincts. She continually wondered how she _could_
have done such a thing. Then all the questionings that had been forming
in her deeper consciousness for nearly two years, came forward,
insisting on a hearing. Helen Arnold's talk that evening passed through
her mind with a new meaning and force, but she was too much exhausted
then to come to any conclusions. She finally fell asleep, hoping that
every one would be too busy to remember her speech very long.
One Saturday morning in the spring Lilian started downstairs. It was
late, she was tired and vexed at her slothfulness. She had gone to bed
the night before so tired that one night's rest was wholly insufficient.
As she reached the foot of the stairs a girl came out of the bathroom
with a kettle of water. She nodded to Lilian, went on, then turned.
"Miss Coles, you are sure not to find anything hot for breakfast. Won't
you come into my room? We are going to have breakfast there."
Lilian hesitated. Something, perhaps an animating suggestiveness in the
spring air that was sweeping through the windows, perhaps the mere
yielding of tired flesh to kindly human influences, moved her to
accept.
Hester Grey's room looked over the fields and low hills. Two study
tables had been put together and were covered with white embroidered
cloths. A bowl of violets was on one table and a dish of strawberries on
the other, while the more substantial provisions for the breakfast were
on a side-table. This separation was due to an arbitrary distinction of
Hester's, food taking precedence in her ideas according to its appeal to
the eye.
There were two girls in the window-seat and another in a steamer-chair.
This one sprang up and insisted on giving Lilian the chair, tucking the
pillow behind her with an unceremonious friendliness very grateful to
Lilian.
Then she began cutting bread, urging that some one else pass Lilian the
olives.
"Do you think you will want more sugar in your cocoa?" Hester asked
Lilian. "Of course she will," said one of the girls in the window,
without looking up from her book. "You never make it sweet enough."
Lilian thought this was very rude, but Hester didn't seem to notice it.
She carried a cup to Lilian, who looked at her curiously. Lilian had
always had a thought of scorn in her opinion of this girl, whose erratic
work, spasmodic brilliancy and general idleness were known to the whole
college. Lilian knew that she would sit for hours on the stone wall of
the Harriton burying ground doing nothing, even if examinations began
the next day. No one ever seemed to be able to foretell whether she
would get High Credit or a condition in any examination. Lilian had seen
her absorbed in _Treasure Island_ the day before the English essays were
due. Hester's essay on Keats was written in one night, so rumour said.
It received the only High Credit. Lilian had read it, with something
like astonishment at the feeling aroused in herself by the revelation of
another girl's mind. She had come to have a feeling like reverence for
this girl, realizing at last that some gifts of the spirit are not to be
measured by so many hours of study, so many hours of exercise. And now
this same girl was apparently concentrating her whole mind on the amount
of sugar to be added to each cup.
Then Lilian had to think a little about the other girls in the room.
They had always seemed to her commonplace, doing but indifferent work.
At least they had won no distinction. She knew that the five were close
friends, that they couldn't have the fullest enjoyment with her in the
room, yet they were unaffectedly genial and hospitable to her. While
she, with a perversity which shocked her, did not care if they did enjoy
themselves a little less on her account. She wanted what they were
giving her.
It is a truism that some actions most important to ourselves or others
often seem but pure whim. Hester could have given no reason--in fact, it
was not her habit to await reasons--for asking Lilian Coles to take a
walk with her that morning. And Lilian, to whom even tying her shoe was
often occasion for a mental inquisition, did not care to explain to
herself why she accepted the invitation with eagerness. She had intended
to spend the morning in making a tabulation and synopsis of some second
year English reading. But the pain of that unforgettable Sunday evening
had wrought in Lilian a distrust of her own valuations, and she went
with Hester willingly.
The morning freshness was still in the air. Hester took Lilian through
the woods where the starting leaves wreathed the grey tree-trunks and
slim branches like trails of green smoke; to a wide bed of spring
beauties; past the pond fringed with willows; across the fields to a
stream that flung itself over the rocks with a sparkling abandon to the
joy of spring. Lilian saw all these things; and she saw, too, the
contrast between the rich black of new ploughed fields and the vivid
green of winter wheat. She heard a bluebird singing above them. They
went on to an old ruined mill, shadowed by tall dark pines whose roots
were washed by a wide, shallow creek. Across the stream, there were
woods. Here the girls sat under the pines and Hester read aloud from
_Undine_. Gradually the wash and splash of the creek were transferred
from Lilian's outward to her inward hearing and seemed to be singing to
her of a spirit that was in the water. Suddenly she had a vision of the
meaning of the old pagan ideals. She lay back on the grass and let her
eyes look very far into the blue above the pines. It occurred to her
that she would take some books home in vacation and read all the poems
noted on the margins of her Horace. She understood now, she thought,
something of the delight in that year's work which all the others in the
class had expressed and which she had, in some way, missed.
They stopped to rest again on the stone wall of the old burying ground
in the woods, and Hester read from Chaucer following her own liking
wholly. Lilian went back to her room with a new sense of the beauty of
nature, and of the dignity of free, wholesome joyous human life.
There was no time before luncheon for the intended tabulation of ballad
poetry, and in the afternoon she turned at once to the assigned reading
in Wordsworth and Coleridge. Before coming to college Lilian had been
allowed to read very little. Even her study of the Bible had been
scarcely more than a search for texts and illustrations in support of
the beliefs of her sect. All through this year the reading presented to
her had been stimulating her imagination and perception. But partly from
habit and partly from the fact of having detected a pleasure in the
exercise of these faculties, she had continued to read mechanically and
blindly. Now for the first time she permitted herself to read with
something more than a desire to go over so many pages in a given time.
As she finished the _Hymn of Chamouni_ she caught her breath as one
whose spirit has been lifted to an unknown height.
The twofold process of growth, of putting off the old and acquiring the
new went on in Lilian with alternations of pain and pleasure, the latter
increasingly predominating. When she entered college and for sometime
after, she had her father's contempt for what he called "mere learning."
But she was led to a very different way of thinking by a better
understanding of what scholarship means--of its untiring zeal and care
for truth, and of its outlook beyond the fact to the including law. She
even came to accept an opinion that, later on, she found thus
expressed: "... our deeper curiosity. There is a sense in which it is
all superfluous. Its immediate results seem but vanity. One could surely
live without them; yet for the future, and for the spiritual life of
mankind, these results are destined to become of vast import." Lilian's
nature was such, however, that she must always care chiefly for the
immediate practical application of the idea.
During her junior year she did some elective work in sociology which
completely revised her ideas of philanthropy. She saw how very
inadequate were the measures that she had once thought essential to
doing good in the world. Her hope of being a missionary was too much a
part of herself to be given up easily, yet she knew that she could not
represent her former views. She became greatly interested in college
settlement work but she found no time to give to it, for she gave to
tutoring all the time that she could spare from her regular work. The
mental submission and the claim upon her future involved in the
arrangement by which her expenses were paid had become impossible to
her, and she wished to become self-supporting as soon as possible.
One Saturday morning she was sitting in the biological laboratory,
carefully correcting her drawings of nitella, when Miss Hardy, a
graduate student with whom she had done some work in sociology, came in
and bent over her.
"Should you not like to go into town with me this evening to one of the
social meetings of a working-girls' club which has been organized
recently? I think you would be interested."
After a moment's thought Lilian decided to go. A girl whom she tutored
every Saturday afternoon was ill and that time could be given to the
usual Saturday evening work.
When they reached the Broad Street Station, Lilian was surprised to find
Helen Arnold, who had been spending the afternoon in town, waiting for
them. The clubhouse was in the lower part of the city. After their
arrival there, Lilian spent an hour in eager inspection of the small
library, the schedule of classes, and the furnishings of the rooms.
Helen had disappeared. Lilian asked for her, and Miss Hardy explained,
"She comes every Saturday if she can find any one to go to and from the
station with her. She is teaching two or three girls who can have better
positions as soon as they can write and spell better. This is the only
time they have."
Then they went into a large, brightly-lighted room with a waxed floor.
There was a piano at one end, and some one was beginning to play. The
girls, most of them neatly and prettily dressed, were gathered near the
piano, while a few young men, with very smooth hair and rather
conspicuous ties, stood in stiff self-consciousness near the door.
"Young men of good character are invited in once a month," whispered
Miss Hardy.
A half-grown girl, in heavy shoes, a crumpled red dress, with a soiled
ribbon knotted around her neck, crossed the room and stood in front of
Lilian. Her open scrutiny was beginning to be embarrassing when Helen
came in. She touched the girl on the arm, and was soon leading the
clumsy shoes lightly through a waltz. After two or three turns Helen
sought some one else, and the girl returned to Lilian.
"Say, ain't she sweet?" she said, looking after Helen with eager eyes.
"She teaches somethin' here, and I'm go'ne to learn it. And I want some
white ties like she wears."
It was still early when they started for the station, but on the streets
Lilian saw one or two things that made her glad to think of the many
girls they had left in the simple pleasures of the carefully-guarded
clubrooms.
A slight delay caused them to miss their train, and they had to spend
half an hour in the waiting-room. Miss Hardy found some evening papers.
Helen declined the one offered her, and drew a book from her
shopping-bag.
"What reading is this, Helen?" Miss Hardy laughingly questioned. Helen
blushed a little. "It is really only the third." On the train the book
happened to lie for a moment in Lilian's lap. She noted the title. It
was _Marius, the Epicurean_, and at her earliest opportunity she
procured the book and read it.
She read it with intense interest. Here were a care for life--for its
pleasures--and a consecration of time that found no necessary detail too
small for perfection. The charm of the book was upon her--its flawless
form, its sanity, its strenuousness. There was something of the old
defiance in her attitude toward this epicureanism, though the character
of it was so exalted and pure. But at the close, when Marius simply puts
himself aside and accepts death that his dear friend may live--happy in
a love denied Marius--she put the book down very softly. By the profound
stirring of her sympathies she felt how absolute was her acceptance of
the whole character--as consistent with itself in sacrifice as in
æsthetic enjoyment.
The constantly increasing deference given Lilian because of the quality
of her work contributed much to her contentment. The freer play of her
intelligence was making itself felt. By the beginning of their senior
year Lilian Coles and Edith Dareham were undoubted rivals for the
European Fellowship. But the real excitement over the fellowship was not
apparent until after the mid-year examinations. Then the strain began to
be wearing on the two girls and their friends.
"I wish the Faculty would come to a decision," said Katherine Leonard
one evening in Clothilde Barry's room. She was on the window-seat
between a big palm and a pile of notebooks. "If they don't very soon,
I'll not get a degree in June. I love this place but I don't want to
stay here all my life. It would be hard to fix my affections on another
class. But I can't study till I know."
"I think that possibility would stimulate them, if they only knew--"
began Blanche.
Just then the door was flung open and Alice Warburton came in
impetuously--her usual manner, but some dramatic quality in this present
haste must have made itself apparent, for the other girls assailed her
breathless silence with questions. What she finally said was: "There is
a Faculty meeting in Taylor." After a moment of comprehending silence,
Blanche went out quickly. Katherine followed her.
"Blanche, if you find out before the doors are locked, won't you come
and tell me?"
"I don't know how it will be." Blanche looked anxious and wouldn't stop.
Katherine went back to Clothilde's room, and after she had tipped over
the palm and broken the jardinière was advised by Clothilde to go home
and go to bed. In her own room she took a physics laboratory book and
made a feeble attempt to put order into its chaos, but only succeeded in
dropping ink over two important calculations. Then she took down a
volume of Mazzini's writings in which she had lately become much
interested. At the end of half an hour she became aware that she had not
turned a page. She left her room and went down to the parlour. All the
lights were out, even in the rooms. Over in Taylor there was a dim light
in a second floor window. It had no connection with the Faculty meeting,
but she chose to consider that it had, and crouched, shivering, in the
window until it went out. Then she went stiffly to bed and slept badly.
The next morning Blanche came to her soon after breakfast. "Edith wants
to see you."
"Oh, Blanche?" But Blanche was already backing out of the door. "I can't
tell you anything. Edith hasn't told me anything." Every line of her
face was non-committal.
Edith was sitting at her desk writing when Katherine entered. She looked
over her shoulder and smiled, but she was very grave. "I have it,
Katherine."
Katherine sat down on the window-seat, and bending over pressed her
forehead down on Edith's shoulder. Edith turned about and lifted
Katherine's face. She was crying--Katherine, in whom the repressions of
stoicism had been the least fleeting of many moods. After a while
Katherine said, "We were afraid at one time, Blanche and I--that you
might do something--rash." It was not necessary for Edith to ask what
she meant. She hesitated before speaking. "I have felt troubled. It
isn't reasonable, but I haven't been able to get rid of an uncomfortable
feeling about Lilian Coles. I _could_ go to Europe without the
fellowship, and I suppose she can't. But--I wanted it. I did try to
think of some way of helping her when I heard last year that there was
danger of her having to leave college. But even if I had had the
money--that's a sort of thing it is almost impossible to do. It might
have seemed a generous thing for me to let my work go a little, but I
could not be sure that she wouldn't do better than even my best. And,"
Edith gripped the desk hard, "it would have seemed to me a simply wicked
sentimentalism to do poor work deliberately for any reason whatever."
Katherine released the sleeve of Edith's gown that she had held crumpled
in her hand. "I am so glad you felt just that way."
Blanche came in then to gather up her notebooks.
"How did you find it out, Blanche?" Katherine asked.
"Oh. I found the note under her door when I came down from Ethel's room
last night"--Ethel was Blanche's sister--a freshman. "We had been
sitting up watching. But Edith was sleeping like a baby. I lit a candle
and roused her and gave her the note. I must say she was rather excited
until she got the note open and read it." Blanche stopped. "Did she tell
you then?" prompted Katherine.
"She hasn't told me yet. That honour was reserved for you. She lay down
again and I kissed her and covered her up and told her to be a good
fellow. Then she laughed and so did I, as silly as two loons. She went
to sleep. I went upstairs and awakened Helen and Elizabeth. I did not
tell them anything, but they understood, and we talked until two in the
morning. Imagine Elizabeth and Helen sitting up till two!"
Katherine was popular enough in college, but that did not account for
the way numerous groups, from seniors to mid-year freshmen, obstructed
her going from Merion to her own room, and thence to Taylor. They asked
her unimportant questions, and eyed her curiously. Her face was
impassive. The chapel was unusually full. Edith's friends had gathered
around her in her usual seat, well forward.
"But that doesn't mean anything," whispered a high freshman voice,
"they'd be there just the same anyway."
Lilian's chief supporters were among the graduate students. Those from
other colleges looked rather defiant. A few members of the Faculty came
in and sat in the back seats. After the short exercises, the
announcement was very quickly made. During the storm of applause that
greeted Edith's name Lilian sat apparently unmoved. Her hands were very
cold, but no one knew that. And no one would ever know how much she had
wanted that fellowship. She had been having a very bad quarter of an
hour since Clara West, who was back as a graduate student in Greek,
managed to find out and let her know that the decision had been made.
Three times before, Lilian had heard a similar announcement made, and
each time she had thought that the applause would have been just as
loud if the other possible girl had been named. Now she knew that there
would not have been the same gladness on the faces or the same
heartiness in the hand-clappings if she had been the one instead of
Edith. She could have made more friends, she believed, but she had
thought that she knew a better use for her time. A keen heart-longing
was mingled with her disappointment.
A few weeks later the presence of the students in chapel was again
specially requested, and more announcements were made, among them, that
the Fellowship in History had been given to Lilian Coles.