When Miss Eva Hungerford married Stanhope there was one young lady
intensely glad of it, although it was whispered that there were also two
or three who were quite the contrary. But Mrs. Renford Phillips--once
Miss Violet Featherstone--had particular reasons for rejoicing, and she
wrote a long letter to Miss Hungerford when she heard of the engagement,
and said that she hoped “by-gones would be by-gones now, and that she
was sure her friend would be a broader-minded and more perfect woman, if
that were possible, now that she was going to have the additional
experience of getting married.”
Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for
several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been
during the first three years of their college life.
The blow had fallen very suddenly, and Miss Hungerford had found it hard
to forgive what she called, in her heart, her friend’s tacit deceit and
culpable silence. But, as she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Phillips’s
letter, her opinions had undergone a decided change, and she felt that
perhaps she had been a little hard on her friend and had not understood
her feelings and the pressure brought to bear upon her, and she
acknowledged that circumstances might materially alter one’s views and
actions. And Miss Featherstone, who had been the most talked about girl
in college during the last semestre of her junior year, and who had
suffered acutely under Miss Hungerford’s indifferently concealed
displeasure and surprise at her conduct, replied that now she could be
truly happy in her husband and her home, and insisted that Mr. and Mrs.
Stanhope should visit her in the Berkshire Hills that summer.
This they did, and though, of course, each thought her husband much the
handsomer and more distinguished-looking, still they were very
affectionate toward each other, and planned to be at Cowes together the
next summer for the yachting.
As has been said, their estrangement happened very suddenly and came
about by an unfortunate occurrence one morning in the office of the
college.
Anyone who has never had the privilege of being in that office on a
Monday morning, just after chapel, can have but a faint idea of
pandemonium. The whole seven hundred students seem to be revolving
about. There are the young women standing around, waiting to take the
next train into Boston, not having been able to go on the early express
because they had foolishly forgotten to get a leave of absence on the
Saturday previous, and who are furtively trying not to see their friends
who are not going on at all, so as to keep from having to attend to
their commissions; and there is the girl who is telephoning for roses to
wear at the concert that night, and those who are booking boats and
tennis courts, and others reading bulletins; and when there is an extra
commotion and the crowd is forced back a little to let the cords be
pulled up around the desk so as to clear a space; and when the carrier
comes in and tumbles the big mail-bags into the middle of it with one
hand and unlocks them at apparently the same instant with the other; and
when about ten young women fall upon the bags and rend their contents
from them, and begin to assort and number and tie up the letters, all
the time besieged by their excluded friends to give them their mail on
the spot as they are going away, the noise and excitement reach a
climax.
But it is all very pleasant and enlivening except the telephone bell,
which rings constantly and is wearing on the nerves. It rings not only
for all telephone messages but for all telegrams, for the college, being
a mile or so from the telegraph station, everything is simply telephoned
up to save delays, and that a long and continuous procession of small
messenger boys may not be forever circulating between the college and
the station.
It was this unfortunate custom of telephoning telegrams, unknown of
course to the majority of outsiders, that precipitated the affair. On
that particular Monday morning, when the confusion in the office was at
its worst, the telephone bell suddenly rang unusually loudly and long,
and the nervous Freshman on duty jumped toward it with a warning motion
to the rest to keep quiet.
“Hush! it’s a telegram,” she said in a moment, and instantly there was
silence, for a telegram is always dreaded where there are so many to
whom it could bear ill news. She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil
to take it down. From the other end came “Important. Repeat slowly as I
deliver it.” The nervous Freshman said “All right,” and braced herself
against the support to write.
“To Miss Violet Featherstone.” The docile Freshman repeated it and then
said “Wait!” and looked around.
“If Miss Featherstone is here,” she remarked, “she can come to the
telephone;” but someone volunteered the information that Miss
Featherstone had left by the early train for Boston, and the telephoning
proceeded.
“My darling--” the Freshman gasped a little and then repeated slowly “My
darling.” There was some suppressed commotion for an instant among the
crowd around the doors, and the two at the telephone went at it again.
“I have not heard from you for three days.”
“I have not heard from you for three days,” mumbled the Freshman.
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”
* * * * *
When Miss Featherstone reached the college that afternoon she thought
she detected a suppressed excitement about the whole place, though she
felt rather too tired to think much about it, but when she got to her
room she found a telephone message for her which made her sink weakly
into a chair.
An appalling vision of the consequences rose before her. She tried to
think connectedly, but the effort was too much. Her only thought was of
the effect it would have on her friend Eva Hungerford. She would go to
her immediately and find out how much she knew.
As she went along the corridors more than one acquaintance smiled
knowingly at her, but she only hurried on. When she reached Miss
Hungerford’s rooms, she found that young lady looking dejectedly out of
the windows. Her melancholy turned to stony haughtiness, however, when
Miss Featherstone approached her tremblingly.
“Yes, the whole college knew of it,” she assured her. “The message had
been telephoned up when the office was crowded, and by this time
everyone was aware of what her best friend had not known.”
Miss Featherstone rebelled a little under Miss Hungerford’s chilling
glance and attempted to explain, but her friend was very sad and firm,
and said she did not see how any explanation could do away with the fact
that Violet Featherstone had broken the solemn vow they had made
together never to marry, but to devote themselves to serious study as a
life-work. But when Miss Featherstone quite broke down under her
friend’s disapprobation, Miss Hungerford relented a little and asked her
if she were really so fond of Renford Phillips, and if she thought life
with him in Morristown would compensate her for the loss of Oxford and
the Bodleian. Miss Featherstone cried a little at that, and said she
thought it would, and that she had started a hundred times to tell her
dearest friend about her engagement, but she knew how she thought about
such things, and how she would lose her respect for allowing anything to
interfere with their plans for mental advancement. And Miss Hungerford
only sighed and wrote that night to her mother that another of her
illusions had been dispelled, but that she was firmer than ever in her
determination to make something of herself.
Miss Featherstone did not return for her degree, but had a pretty church
wedding that summer at Stockbridge, and Miss Hungerford sent her a very
handsome wedding gift, but refused to be present at the marriage. They
did not write to each other much the next year, and Miss Hungerford
worked so hard that the Faculty had to interfere, and when she left
college with a B. S. degree, smiling sadly and saying that she would be
a bachelor as well as an old maid, everybody remarked what a superior
girl she was to her friend Violet Featherstone.
“MISS ROSE”
She was always called that, and there were very few of the seven hundred
students who really knew or cared whether it was her little name or her
family name. The uncertainty about it seemed particularly appropriate
someway--her whole personality was vague. That is at the beginning;
later----
For the first month she passed comparatively unnoticed. In the wild
confusion of setting up household gods and arranging schedules, hopeless
as Chinese puzzles, of finding out where the Greek instructors can see
you professionally, and when the art school is open, and why you cannot
take books from the library, and when the elevator runs, anyone less
remarkable-looking than an American Indian or the Queen of the Sandwich
Islands is apt to be overlooked. But after the preliminary scuffle is
over and there is a lull in the storm, and one begins to remember
vaguely having seen _that_ dress or face before somewhere, and when one
no longer turns up at the history or art rooms instead of the chemical
laboratories, and when one ceases to take the assistant professor of
physics for the girl who sat next to you in the trigonometry
recitation--then the individual comes in for her share of attention.
“Miss Rose” possibly got more than her share. Curious young women soon
began to nudge each other, and ask in whispers who she was. And just at
first there were covert smiles and a little cruelly good-natured joking,
and the inevitable feeble punning on her name and withered looks. There
were some who said she could not be more than forty-five, but they were
in the minority, and even the more generously inclined could not deny
that her face was very old and wrinkled and tired-looking, and that her
hair was fast getting gray around the temples, though her eyes still
retained a brilliancy quite feverish, and an eager, unsatisfied sort of
look that struck some of the more imaginative as pathetic. As a freshman
she seemed indeed to be hopelessly out of place--though not so much so,
perhaps, as the little Chicago beauty who was so much more interested in
her gowns and looks than in her work, that at the beginning of her
second semestre she went home with an attack of pneumonia, brought on by
having been left out in the cold after an examination in conic
sections.
That type, however, is not uncommon, while “Miss Rose” was especially
puzzling. They could not quite understand her, and there were even some
among the august body of ridiculous freshmen who somewhat resented her
entrance into their ranks, and wondered rather discontentedly why she
did not join the great body of “T-specs” to which she so evidently
belonged.
But it was characteristic of this woman that she preferred to begin at
the beginning and work her way up--to take the regular systematic grind
and discipline of the freshman’s lot--to matriculating in an elective
course where she could get through easily enough if she were so
inclined. She saw no incongruity in her position; she rarely seemed to
notice the difference between herself and the younger, quicker
intellects around her, and she worked with an enthusiasm and persistence
that put most of the young women to shame. That she had taught was
evident--in what little out-of-the-way Western town, or sleepy Southern
one, no one knew; but sometimes there were amusing little scenes between
herself and the professor, when the old habit of school-room tyranny
which she had once exercised herself was strong upon her, and she lapsed
unconsciously into the didactic manner of her former life. And sometimes
she became discouraged when the long lack of strict mental discipline
irked her, and when she saw in a glimpse how far she was behind the girl
of nineteen beside her, and how hopeless was the struggle she was making
against youth and training. There were moments when she realized that
she had begun too late, that the time she had lost was lost
irretrievably. But the reaction would quickly come and she would work
away with renewed energy, and they were very patient with her and would
lend her a helping hand where a younger student would have been let most
severely alone, to sink or swim after the approved method.
But if her mathematics and chemistry and Tacitus left much to be
desired, there was one field in which she shone resplendently. “No one
could touch her”--as one young woman slangly but enthusiastically
remarked--“when it came to the Bible.” There she was in her glory, and
her vast knowledge of the wars of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and her
appalling familiarity with Shamgar and the prophets, and the meaning of
the Urim and Thummim, and other such things, was the envy and despair of
the younger and less biblically inclined. And if at times she was a
trifle too prolix and had to be stopped in her flow of information,
there was very genuine regret on the part of the less well informed.
And in time she came to make a great many friends. Her peculiar ways no
longer struck them as comical, and if anyone had dared make reference to
the plainness of her gowns or the strict economies she practised to get
through, that person would have very soon discovered her mistake; and
they pretended not to know that she would not join any of the societies
because of the dues, and that she did her own laundry on Monday
afternoons. Indeed, she was so kindly disposed and so cheerful and
helpful, and seemed so interested in all the class projects and even in
the sports, at which of course she could only look on, that little by
little she came to be a great favorite, and the one to whom the rest
naturally turned when there was any hitch or especial need for advice.
And then, of course, as she was not to be thought of in the light of a
possible candidate for president or vice-president or captain of the
crew, or any of the other desirable high-places, those misguided young
women who did have such literary, social, or athletic aspirations would
go to her and confide their hopes and fears, and in some strange way
they would all feel very much more comfortable and happy in their minds
after such confessions. And so she got to be a sort of class
institution in a very short while, and the captains of different stylish
but rather un-nautical freshman crews vied with each other in
invitations to “come over the lake” with them, and the president of the
Tennis Association sent her a special and entirely superfluous
invitation to the spring tournament on the club’s finest paper, and the
senior editor of the college magazine, whose sister was a freshman, was
made to ask her for a short article on the “Study of the Bible,” and at
the concerts and receptions many young women, kindly and socially
disposed, would introduce her to their brothers and other male relations
who had been enticed out, before taking them on to see the lake, or a
certain famous walk, or the Art Building, or the Gymnasium.
* * * * *
It was about the middle of the winter semestre that it happened, and of
course it was Clara Arnold who knew about it first. Miss Arnold had
liked “Miss Rose” from the beginning. She had taken a fancy to the
hard-working woman, who had returned it with wondering admiration for
the handsome, clever girl. And so Miss Arnold got into the habit of
stopping for her occasionally to walk or drive, and it was when she went
for her to go on one of those expeditions, that she discovered the
trouble. She found “Miss Rose” sitting before her desk with a crumpled
newspaper in her hand, and a dazed, hopeless expression on her face
which cut the girl to the heart. Her things were scattered about the
room, on the bed and chairs, an open trunk half-filled stood in one
corner. Miss Arnold stared around in amazement.
“The bank’s broken,” said “Miss Rose” simply, in answer to her
questioning glance, and pointed dully to the paper. “I might have known
that little bank couldn’t hold out when so many big ones have gone under
this year,” she went on, half speaking to herself.
Miss Arnold picked up the paper and read an article on the first page
marked around with a blue pencil. She did not understand the
technicalities, but she made out that the “City Bank” of a small town in
Idaho had been forced to close, and that depositors would not get more
than five or ten cents on the dollar.
“Every cent I’ve saved up was in that bank!” The woman turned herself
slowly in her chair and laid her face down on the desk with her arms
above her head. She spoke in muffled tones into which a strange
bitterness had crept.
“I’ve worked all my life--ever since I was twenty--to get enough money
to come to college on. I had barely enough to stay here at all--and
now--” she stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “I haven’t been here a year
yet,” she broke out at last.
“Well, I’ll have to go back to teaching. Great heavens! I thought I’d
finished with _that_!”
Miss Arnold seated herself on a clear corner of the bed.
“Look here, ‘Miss Rose,’” she said, excitedly, “of course you aren’t
going to stop college now, when you’re doing so well and--and we all
like you so much and--and you’re just beginning your course.” She
stumbled on--“Has everything gone?--can’t you do something?”
“Miss Rose” looked up slowly--“Everything,” she said grimly, and then,
with the pathetically resigned air of one who has been used to
misfortunes and has learned to accept them quietly, “I’ve worked all my
life, I suppose I can go at it again.” She looked around her. “I’ll be
gone this time to-morrow, and then I won’t feel so badly;”--she put her
head down on the desk again.
Miss Arnold looked thoughtfully at her for a few minutes and then, with
a sudden movement, she got up and went out, closing the door softly
behind her.
It was about nine o’clock that evening and “Miss Rose” had almost
finished packing. She was feeling particularly disheartened and was
taking the books from the cases one by one in a very mournful way, when
she heard footsteps and a subdued but very excited whispering outside
her door. She got up languidly and threaded her way among the books and
cushions and odd articles of clothing heaped up on the floor. As she
opened the door, the light from her student-lamp fell upon the very red
face of a freshman propelled apparently into the room by the two or
three others behind her, who seemed to have a wild desire to efface
themselves entirely.
“Miss Rose,” gasped the blushing freshman in the van, “here--here is a
letter for you. We’ve just had a class meeting--” she looked nervously
at the others who were edging away.
There was an indistinct chorus from them which sounded like “hope you’ll
accept,” and then they retreated with as much dignity as possible, but
in great haste.
“Miss Rose” opened the letter and gave a little cry as a check for a
good round sum drawn on the class treasurer fell to the floor. And then
she sat weakly down on the bed and cried a little from pure happiness as
she read it all over.
“The class of ’9--have just heard of ‘Miss Rose’s’ financial
embarrassment occasioned by the failure of the ---- City Bank, and being
most unwilling to lose so valuable and appreciated a member, beg that
she will accept the enclosed and continue with the class until the end
of the year.”