CHAPTER I

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.