than any of her teachers. She quotes you frequently and seems
influenced by you. Arnold has made me promise that I will not ask her
parents to bring her home and that I will not write her. I will not.
But can you do anything? It is rather absurd to ask you to conspire
against your college, to give up one of your pupils: but you have a
great many, and remember that I have but one nephew! It is all rather
a comedy, but a sad one for me, if there is no change within three
weeks, I assure you. They are only two headstrong children, but they
can cause more than one heartache if they keep up their obstinacy.
Elizabeth has forbidden Arnold to come to Northampton on the score of
her work, and wild horses could not drag him there.
I offer no suggestion, I ask nothing definitely, I merely wonder if
you meant what you said on the _Etruria_, and if your woman's wit,
that must have managed so many young idiots, can manage these?
Yours faithfully,
ARNOLD M. RITCH.
IX
FROM MISS MARION HUNTER TO MRS. HENRY STOCKTON
_Northampton, Mass., Nov. 7, 189-._
MY DEAR MRS. STOCKTON: As you have certainly not forgotten that I
assured you in the early fall of my interest, professionally and
personally, in your daughter, you will need no further explanation,
nor be at all alarmed, when I tell you that Elizabeth is a little
over-worked of late. In the house with her as I am, I see that she is
trying to carry a little too much of our unfortunately famous "social
life" in connection with her studies, where she is unwilling to lose a
high grade. She entered so well prepared that she has nothing to fear
from a short absence, and as she tells me that she does not sleep well
at all of late, she will have no difficulty in getting an honorable
furlough. Two weeks or so of rest and freedom from strain will set her
up perfectly, I have no doubt, and she can return with perfect safety
to her work, which is, I repeat, quite satisfactory.
Yours very cordially,
MARION HUNTER.
X
FROM MRS. HENRY STOCKTON TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON
(_Telegram_)
_Lowell, Mass., Nov. 8._
Come home immediately will arrange with college and explain myself.
MOTHER.
XI
FROM MISS MARION HUNTER TO MISS CONSTANCE JACKSON
_Northampton, Mass., Nov. 10, 189-._
DEAR CON: I'm afraid it will be impossible for me to accept your
seductive invitation for Thanksgiving. We're pulling the girls up a
little sharply this year, and it would hardly do for me to come back
late. But it _would_ be good to hear a little music once more!
It was rather odd that you should have mentioned that idiotic affair
of mine in Paris--the hero of it has just written me a long letter
_apropos_ of his nephew, who wants to marry that little Miss Stockton,
whose Harvard cousin you knew so well. That portly squire of dames is
actually simple and straightforward enough to suggest that I
precipitate the damsel into the expectant arms of his nephew and
heir-apparent--he is used to getting his own way, certainly, and he
writes a rather attractive letter. I owe him much (as you know) and if
Elizabeth, who is a dear little thing and far too nice for the crowd
she's getting in with--you knew Carol Sawyer, didn't you?--has such a
weak-kneed interest in college as to be turned out of the way by a
sight of the destined young gentleman, I fancy she would not have
remained long with us in any case. She's a pretty creature and had
cunning ways--I shall miss her in the house. For I don't believe
she'll come back; she's not at all strong, and her parents are much
worried about her health. It is more than probable that the Home will
prove her sphere.
Personally, I don't mind stating that I would it were mine. When I
consider how my days are spent----
You might not believe it, but they grow stupider and stupider.
Perhaps I've been at it a bit too long, but I never saw such papers as
these freshmen give one.
And they have begun singing four hymns in succession on Sunday
morning! It's very hard--why they should select _Abide with Me_ and
_Lead, Kindly Light_ for morning exercises and wail them both through
to the bitter end every Sunday in the year is one of the local
mysteries.
I must get at my papers, they cover everything. Remember me to Mr.
Jackson; it was very kind of him to suggest it, but I must wait till
Christmas for the Opera, I'm afraid. If I should not come back next
year--and it is more than possible that I shan't--I may be in Boston.
I hope in that case you won't have gone away.
Yours always,
M. I. HUNTER.
XII
FROM MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON TO MISS CAROLYN SAWYER
_Lowell, Nov. 20._
CAROL DEAR: I am writing in a great hurry, as I have an engagement at
four, to tell you that I have decided not to return to-day, as I
intended. Will you get the key of 32 from Mrs. Driscoll, as Kitty goes
home over Sunday, so it will be locked, and get out my mink collarette
and my silver toilet things and my blanket wrapper, and I think there
is twenty dollars in my handkerchief case. I am extremely disturbed
and confused--when one is really responsible for anything one feels
very much disturbed. Of course, I don't believe a word of it--it's all
folly and nonsense--but still, six years is a long time. Of course,
you don't know at all what I mean, dear, and I'm not sure I do either.
I forgot to say that I'm probably not coming back to college this
year. Mamma feels very worried about my health--you know I didn't
sleep very well nights, and I used to dream about Livy. Anyway, she
and Papa are going abroad early in the spring, and really, Carol, a
college education isn't everything. If I were going to teach, you
know, it would be different, but you see I was almost finished at Mrs.
Meade's--I was taking advanced work--and it isn't as if I had had only
the college preparation. Then, if we go abroad, I must do something
with my French. You know there was simply _no_ chance to practise
conversation in such a large class, and I was forgetting it, which
Arnold thinks would be a pity. He speaks very fine French himself.
Then, you see, there'll be all the galleries and everything and the
Sistine Madonna and the cathedrals--they're so educative--everybody
admits that. It's hardly to be supposed that Geometry and Livy are
really going to be as broadening to me as a year of travel with Papa
and Mamma, is it? And though I never said anything to you about it, I
really have felt for some time that there was something a little
narrow about the college. They seem to think it is about all there is
of life, you know, with the funny little dances and the teas and all
that. Even that dear Miss Hunter is really _un peu gâtée_ with it
all--she thinks, I believe, that a college education is all there is
for anybody. She told Mamma that I wasn't well--she wanted me to keep
my high grade. Oh! Carol! there are better things than grades! Life is
a very much bigger thing than the campus even! I think, dear, that one
really ought to consider very frankly just what we intend to do with
our lives--if we are going to marry, we ought to try to make ourselves
cultivated and broad-minded, and in every way worthy to be--Oh, Carol,
dearest, I'm terribly happy! It isn't settled, of course: I am utterly
amazed that they all seem to think it is, but it isn't. Only probably
if I still feel as I do now, when we get back, I shall ask you, dear,
what we promised each other--to be my bridesmaid--the first one! I'm
thinking of asking Sally and Grace and Eleanor--all our old set at
Mrs. Meade's, you know. I think that pink, with a deep rose for hats
and sashes, would look awfully well on all of you, don't you! It seems
a long time since I was in Northampton: the girls seem very young and
terribly serious over queer little lessons--or else trying to play
they're interested in each other. Arnold says he thinks the attitude
of so many women is bound to be unhealthy, and even in some cases a
little morbid. I think he is quite right, don't you? After all, girls
need some one besides themselves. I always thought that Mabel Towne
was very bad for Katharine. Will you send, too, my Shelley and my
selections from Keats? The way I neglected my reading--real reading,
you know--oh! _c'était affreux!_ I'm learning the loveliest
song--Arnold is very fond of it:
_Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie?
L'heure s'enfuit, le jour succède au jour.
Rose ce soir, demain flètrie--
Comment vis-tu, toi qui n'as pas d'amour?_
I'm going out now for a walk. I'm sure you'll like Arnold--I think you
said you met him. He doesn't remember you. Remember me to all the
juniors I met, and if you see Ethel Henderson, tell her I'll write to
her when I get time. Excuse this pointed pen--I'm learning to use it.
Arnold hates a stub.
Yours always,
BETTY.
THE SIXTH STORY
_A FAMILY AFFAIR_
VI
A FAMILY AFFAIR
There are Jacksons and Jacksons. As everybody knows, many, possibly
most, of those who bear that title might as well have been called
Jones or Robinson; on the other hand, I am told that certain
Massachusetts families of that name will, on solicitation, admit it to
be their belief that Eve was a Cabot and Adam a Jackson. Without
asserting that she was personally convinced of this great fact, it is
necessary to state that Susan was of the last-named variety of
Jackson. She was distinctly democratic, however, and rather
strong-willed, and for both of these reasons she came to college. It
did not entirely please the family: neither of her sisters had gone,
and her brothers in particular were against it. It is probable that
she would have been decoyed from her plan had it not been that her
cousin, Constance Quincy Jackson, had been for a year one of the young
assistants who dash like meteors through the catalogue and disappear
mysteriously, just as astronomers have begun to place them, into the
obscurity whence they came.
Constance, like Susan, had been persistent, and was studying at Oxford
before the family had quite made up its mind how to regard her;
later, she frequented other and American institutions of learning and
bore off formidable degrees therefrom, and at about that time it was
decided that she was remarkably brilliant, and that her much commended
thesis on the Essential Somethingness of Something or Other was quite
properly to be ranked with her great-grandfather's dissertation on the
Immortality of the Soul.
She would do very well; she could be relied on; and entrusted to her
and further armed with letters of introduction to the social magnates
of the vicinity--which, I regret to say, she neglected to present till
her sophomore year--Susan began her career. Of the eminent success of
this career, it is not the purpose of this story to treat. Beginning
as freshman vice-president, she immediately identified herself with
the leading set of her class, and in her sophomore year was already
one of the prominent students in the college. She was one of Phi
Kappa's earliest acquisitions, and belonged to three or four lesser
societies, social and semi-educational; she had been on the freshman
Team; she was twice a member of the Council; in her senior year she
was literary editor of the _Monthly_ and class president, besides
taking a prominent part in Dramatics. She fulfilled all these duties
most acceptably, taking at the same time a very high rank in her
classes: in one department, indeed, her work was pronounced
practically perfect by a somewhat exigent professor. And in addition,
she was well born, well bred, and well dressed, and considered by her
most enthusiastic admirers the handsomest girl in the college, though
this was by no means the universal opinion.
You might imagine that Miss Jackson was therefore intolerably
conceited, but in this you would err. She took no particular credit to
herself for her standard of work; she had a keen mind, and had been
taught to concentrate it, and her grandfather, her father, and two
uncles had successively led their classes at Harvard. It seemed
perfectly natural to her to be told that she was the one young woman
on whose shoulders a golf cape looked really dignified and
graceful--had not her grandmother and her great-aunt been famed for
their "camel's-hair-shawl shoulders"? A somewhat commanding manner and
a very keen-sighted social policy had given her a prominence that she
was conscious of having done nothing to discredit; and as she had been
quite accustomed to see those about her in positions of authority,
and had learned to lay just the proper amount of emphasis on adverse
criticism, she steered her way with a signal success on the perilous
sea of popularity. Her idea of the four years had been to do
everything there was to be done as well as any one could do it, and
she was not a person accustomed to consider failure.
I mentioned at the beginning of this story the two classes of
Jacksons. Emphatically of the former and unimportant variety was
Elaine Susan Jackson of Troy, New York. Mr. Jackson kept a
confectionery shop and ice cream parlor, going to his business early
in the morning and returning late in the evening. This he did because
he was a quiet-loving man, and his home was a noisy one. Mrs. Jackson
was a managing, dictatorial woman, with an unexpected sentimental vein
which she nourished on love-stories and exhausted there. From these
books she had culled the names of her daughters--Elaine, Veronica, and
Doris; but prudence impelled her to add to these the names of her
husband's three sisters--a triumph of maternal foresight over æsthetic
taste--and they stood in the family Bible, Elaine Susan, Veronica
Sarah, and Doris Hannah.
Mr. Jackson was not a sentimentalist himself, and read nothing but the
paper, sitting placidly behind the peanut-brittle and chocolate mice,
and relapsing sometimes into absolute idleness for hours together,
deep in contemplation, perhaps, possibly dozing--nobody ever knew. At
such times he regarded the entrance of customers as an unwelcome
intrusion and was accustomed to hurry them, if juvenile, into undue
precipitance of choice. From this even quiet he emerged seldom but
effectively: when Veronica entertained the unattractive young men she
called "the boys," later than eleven o'clock, when Doris went to the
theatre more than twice a week, or when they had purchased garments of
a nature more than usually unsuitable and pronounced. Then Mr. Jackson
spoke, and after domestic whirlwinds and fires the still voice of an
otherwise doubtful head of the family became the voice of authority.
Elaine gave him no trouble of this sort. She did not care for young
men, and she never went to the theatre. Her clothes, when she had any
choice in the matter, were of the plainest, and she had never teased
her father for candy since she began to read, which was at a very
early age. _I Say No, or the Love-letter Answered_, was her first
consciously studied book, and between ten and fifteen she devoured
more novels than most people get into a lifetime. Incidentally she
read poetry--she got books of it for prizes at school--and one
afternoon she sandwiched the _Golden Treasury_ between two detective
stories. She did not care for her mother's friends, gossiping, vulgar
women, and she loathed her sisters'. She had a sharp tongue, and as
parental discipline was of the slightest, she criticised them all
impartially with the result that she was cordially disliked by
everybody she knew--a feeling she returned with interest. She found
two or three ardent friends at school and was very happy with them for
a time, but she was terribly exacting, and demanded an allegiance so
intense and unquestioning that one by one they drifted away into other
groups and left her.
In her second year at the high school they read the _Idylls of the
King_, and she discovered her name and saw in one shame-filled second
the idiotic bad taste of it--Elaine Susan! She imagined the lily maid
of Astolat behind her father's counter and became so abased in her own
mind that the school found her more haughty and disagreeable than
ever. From that moment she signed her name E. Susan Jackson and
requested to be called Susan. This met the approval of the teachers,
and as the schoolgirls did not hold much conversation with her, the
change was not a difficult one.
By the time she had been three years in the high school she was
considered by every one the most brilliant student there, and the
principal suggested college to her. This had never occurred to her.
Though they had never lacked for necessities, Mr. Jackson's business
was not conducted in a manner to lead to marked financial success, and
though he said little about his affairs, it was evident to them all
that matters were slowly but surely running down hill. Doris and
Veronica were eager to leave school and spend a term at the Business
College, some friends of theirs having done this with great success
and found positions as typewriters, but their father insisted on their
staying at school for two years at least. It would be time enough to
leave, he said, when they had to. It was significant of the
unconscious attitude of the family that there had never been any
question of the oldest daughter's leaving school: Elaine had always
been real bright, her mother said, and as long as books was all she
took any interest in, she might as well get what she could--she
presumed she'd teach.
But this acquiescent spirit changed immediately when she learned that
her husband had told Elaine he would send her to college for two years
anyway, and as much longer as he could afford. It seemed to Mrs.
Jackson a ridiculous and unwarranted expense, particularly as he had
refused to allow the term at the Business College partly on the
financial score. She lectured, argued, scolded; but he was firm.
"I told her she should, and she shall," he repeated quietly. "She says
she thinks she can help along after a while, and you needn't worry
about her paying it back--she will, all right, if she can. I guess
she's the best of the lot of us; she's worth the other two put
together. You let Lainey alone, Hattie, she's all right!"
This was during her last year at school, and as she had on her own
responsibility taken the classical course there, finding a fascination
in the idea of Greek, she accomplished the preparation very easily.
Her mother, bowing to the inevitable, began to plume herself on her
daughter "who was fitting herself to go to Smith's College," and rose
many degrees in the social scale because of her. But their ideas of
the necessary preparations differed so materially, that after
prolonged and jarring hostilities marked by much temper on both sides,
the final crash came, and after a battle royal Elaine took what money
was forthcoming and conducted her affairs unchallenged from that
moment. It was a relief to be freed from the wearisome squabbles, but
she cried herself to sleep the night before she left--she did not
perfectly know why. Later she told herself that it was because she had
so little reason to cry when she left home for the first time.
She went to the train alone, because the girls were at school and her
father at his business. She said good-by to her mother on the porch,
with the constraint that had grown to characterize her attitude
towards them all, but her mother was suddenly seized with a spasm of
sentiment, and kissing her wildly, bewailed the necessity that drove
her firstborn from her to strangers. Later the girl found it sadly
characteristic of her life, that absurd scene on the porch; with her
heart hungry and miserable for the love and confidence she had never
known, she endured agonies of shame and irritation at the
demonstration that came too late. She went away, outwardly cold, with
tight-pressed lips; her mother read _Cometh up as a Flower_, and wept
hysterically that Fate should have cursed her with such an unfeeling,
moody child.
It is hard to determine just what incident convinced Susan--for she
dropped the initial on her registration--that life had not changed for
her because she was to live it in Northampton, and that she must be
alone there, as she had been in Troy. Just before she left college she
decided that she had known it immediately: that from the moment when
she plunged into the chattering, bustling crowd in the Main Hall,
where everybody knew somebody and most people knew all the others, a
vague prevision of her four years' loneliness came to her: a pathetic
certainty that she could not, even with the effort she was too proud
to make, become in any reality a part of that sparkling, absorbed,
unconscious current of life that rushed by her.
Sometimes she dated her disillusionment--for she had had her dreams:
she knew them only by the pathetic disappointment of the obstinate
awakening--from the day that she saw her namesake laughing in the
midst of a jolly group of girls to whom she was presenting her father
and her aunt. They were handsome, well-dressed people with a distinct
air, and they were tolerantly amused at Sue in her new environment and
showed it in a kindly, courteous way that was much appreciated. As
Susan passed the group there was a great laugh, and she heard Sue's
voice above the rest.
"Truly, Papa, I thought you'd finished! You know, whenever I
interrupted, Papa used to make me sit absolutely still for a quarter
of an hour afterward--it's not so long ago he stopped, either!"
Her father laughed, and patted her shoulder, and Susan went on out of
hearing. It was only a flash; but she saw the gracious, well-ordered
household, the handsome, dignified people, the atmosphere of
generations of good breeding and scholarship, as clearly as if she had
visited them, and her heart swelled with angry regret and a sickening
certainty that all the cleverness in the world could not make up for
the youth she had been cheated out of. She thought of the bickering,
squabbling family table in Troy and tried to imagine her father
teaching Doris and Veronica not to interrupt: her cheeks burned.
In class Sue was often near her; she knew that she was recognized
chiefly by the fact that _she_ was Susan Jackson, too. On the first
day, when the instructor had called "Miss Jackson" and they had both
answered, "Miss Susan Jackson," when they still replied together, and
finally "Miss Susan Revere Jackson," when the matter was cleared up,
Sue had looked at her with interest, and after the class made some
little joking remark. If the other had answered in the same spirit,
nobody knows whether this story need have been written. But Susan had
heard Cornelia Burt ask: "Is she related at all, Sue?" and heard Sue's
answer, "Oh, dear, no! From Troy, I believe."
Now Sue meant absolutely nothing but what she said, but her namesake
read into the words a scorn that was not there--either in intention or
fact. Her heart was sore with a hot, vague jealousy: this girl, no
longer there than she, had stepped so easily into a place prepared,
apparently, for her; she knew everybody, went everywhere; admired by
her own class and made much of by the upper-class girls, she was
already well known in the college. She was a part of it all--Susan
only watched it. And because of this and because she admired her
tremendously and envied her with all the force of a passionate,
repressed nature, the poor child answered her little remark with a
curtness that was almost insolent, and the manner of an offended
duchess. Sue flushed a little, lifted her brows, threw a swift glance
at Cornelia, and walked away with her. Susan heard them laughing in
the hall, and bit her lip.
She could not know that Sue had described her in a letter to her
father as "a queer, haughty thing, but terribly clever. Nobody seems
to know her--I imagine she's terribly bored up here. I said some
footless thing or other to her the other day, and she turned me down,
as Betty says. Did you meet Dr. Twitchell? He was stopping with the
Winthrops...."
Susan used to wonder afterwards if it would all have been different
had she been on the campus. I know that most college people will say
that it would, and it is certain that campus life was the best thing
in the world for Martha Williams: nobody knows with what
self-conscious egotism she might have been spoiled if her friends and
foes had not conspired to laugh it out of her. But, on the other hand,
those who have watched the victims of that reasonless, pitiless
boycotting that only women can accomplish so lightly--so
unconsciously, do you think?--know the ghastly loneliness of the one
who, in the very centre of the most crowded campus house, is more
solitary than the veriest island castaway.