the show without me, so to speak, and naturally it's rather hard for
them to worry along. They may have given me up and laid my new little
single room at Lucilla Bradford's feet, which would more than trouble
me."
"Do they allow you to come back whenever you want to?"
Miss Cunningham's tone was that of an indulgent aunt toward a pet
nephew on his Christmas holidays, and Anne's reply was framed
accordingly.
"Oh, easily! They only insist on our being back for the Glee Club
concert. They're just bound up in that, you know. So we usually make a
point of it. I must say," she changed her tone, "I'd like to hear
Carol Sawyer's explanations to Miss Roberts! Carol has a fine
imagination, but she's used it so much of late that she'll have to
surpass herself this time to make much impression on Robbie. You see I
have the great good fortune to possess an accommodating relative: the
Amiable Parent is far from well, and asked me if I'd wait a week till
he could go on, and cheer his last moments--smooth his pillow, as it
were. So, since I've never gone away early once and only come back
late twice before, and once with an excuse, I thought I was safe to
stay. And I told him that, notwithstanding the fact that I was
languishing among dirt courts and single-piece drivers and Saturday
hops and--_and_ your noble family, I'd stick it out a week longer.
Said I to the Amiable Parent:
"_My own convenience count as nil;
It is my duty, and I will!_"
Next morning, when Nan came down to breakfast, pink under her tan and
with that air that she always carried of having just come out of the
tub, Marjory really regretted her going. She mentioned to her aunt
that she would have liked to see more of her, and that if she _did_ go
to New York in the spring she should surely go up to Northampton. It
was not only because Miss Gillatt danced and golfed and drove and
played tennis so well that Marjory's interest was for the first time
roused in a girl of her own age, nor because her clothes were nice and
her ways amusing; what struck Miss Cunningham was her guest's entire
absence of surprise at what she utterly failed to recognize as an
unusual amount of interest on Marjory's part.
"This is Marjory--how do you do, Marjory?" she had said easily on
their first meeting, and she had never cared to learn that Marjory
intended her own "Miss Gillatt" for a lesson to forward schoolgirls.
And she had taken Marjory's growing attentions quite as if she were
accustomed to have handsome young women talk to her and row her about
and give her their photographs. When she had herself mentioned looking
Nan up in Northampton, her proposition had not evoked the grateful
surprise that might have been expected.
"Glad to see you any time," the future hostess had returned. "Better
come up in the spring; it's a lot prettier." And Madge had decided
then and there to go, though her suggestion had been more or less
perfunctory.
She would never have considered it for a moment had it not been
perfectly obvious that the college girl did not regard herself at all
in the light of a possible example. Georgiana's lectures on the Higher
Education of Women and its Ultimate Effect on the Sex were not to be
thought of in connection with this athletic damsel, whose quotations,
though frequent, indicated a closer study of Lewis Carroll and W. S.
Gilbert than her alma mater's official catalogue would suggest. She
referred very little to the college and then only as the scene of
incidents in which she and her "young friends," as she invariably
called them, had taken amusing or amazing parts. Marjory's chief
impression had been that of the jolliest possible crowd of girls, who
seemed to derive great comfort and entertainment from one another's
company, and it was a half-envious desire to see if they really did
this to the extent that Anne implied, that drew her to Northampton one
fine day in the late spring.
As she stood on the station platform looking in vain for a tall girl
with broad shoulders and a persuasive grin, she heard her name called,
and turned to meet the outstretched hand of a very different person.
This person was small and slender, with a plain, distinguished little
face, intelligent eyes, and a low and charming voice. From the very
Parisian arrangement that topped her shining coils of hair to the
tips of her tiny shoes, she was one of the most thoroughly
well-dressed young women Marjory had ever seen. She reminded one
vaguely, though not disagreeably, of Mr. Wenzell's pictures, and
Marjory failed utterly in a dazed attempt to correlate her and
Georgiana.
"You are Miss Cunningham, are you not? I am Ursula Wyckoff. Nan is so
sorry, but Hodgkinson Davids or Davidson Hodgkins--I can't remember
the way--has come up from New York to play over the course to-day, and
of course all the golf people have to be out there. She and Caroline
have been there all the afternoon, and I'm to bring you out a little
later, when they serve the tea. Isn't it dreadfully warm? Nan's next
to Caroline and Caroline holds the championship, so they're naturally
interested. I don't play at all. I was so sorry to miss you at the
house-party: we all fell in love with your aunt. Oh, no, New York, but
I've lots of Western friends: you know I've met your aunt before, in
London. We bought some Liberty things, and we were staying at the same
hotel, and they sent us each other's parcels, so we got acquainted
picking them out. There was a lovely fan; she said it was for her
niece. Was it you? I dream of that fan yet."
They walked slowly up the long street, Ursula chatting easily, and
Marjory wondering how many of the girls they passed belonged to the
college. They paused before a druggist's window, all Huyler's and
violet soap, and Ursula walked by a long, shining soda fountain to a
room in green and white, with little tables and a great palm in the
centre. The tables were very nearly filled, and there was a cheerful
clatter of tall spoons and a businesslike bustle of clerks with trays.
"This is Kingsley's," said Ursula, with a comprehensive gesture. "Will
you have a chocolate ice?" While absorbing the inviting and pernicious
mixture, Miss Cunningham looked about her with interest. In one corner
four girls with rumpled shirt-waists and dusty golf stockings
squabbled over scores, and illustrated with spoons preferred methods
of driving and putting. Their voices rose above the level prescribed
for drawing-room conversation, and they called each other strange
names. In another corner a tall, dark girl with a grave expression
talked steadily in a low voice to her companion, a clever-looking
creature, whose bursts of laughter grew hysterical as the dignified
one continued, with a perfectly impersonal manner, to reduce her to
positive tears of mirth. To them Ursula bowed, and the narrator,
politely recognizing her, went on with her remarks, to an
accompaniment of gurgling protest from her friend. Near them a
porcelain blonde, gowned in a wonderful pale blue stuff with a great
hat covered with curly plumes, ate strawberry ices with a tailor-made
person clothed in white piqué, mystic, wonderful. She was all
stiffness and specklessness, and she looked with undisguised scorn at
the clamoring athletes, a white leather card-case in her hand. Near
one window a gypsy-faced child in a big pink sunbonnet imparted mighty
confidences to her friend, who shook two magnificent auburn braids
over her shoulders with every chuckle.
"And I heard a knock at the door and of course I thought it was Helen
or some of the girls, and I called to come in and, my dear, _who_ do
you think it was? It was the _expressman_! 'Will you sign this book?'
said he, and he brought the book right up to the bed and I leaned on
my elbow and signed it! My dear, wasn't that perfectly--"
"Oh, well, it's awfully funny here, anyway. That beastly old laundry
tore my lovely lace nightgown to shreds and it was new, and I put in
an old dressing-sacque that was all in rags and I was going to throw
it away, and they mended it carefully before they sent it back!"
As they left the room and Ursula waited while the clerk looked up her
soda ticket, the door flew open and an impish little creature, with a
large, deprecating, motherly girl in her wake, slipped into the shop.
"Now don't make for the back room, Bertie dear, for there isn't time.
We've got lots of places to do yet!" she called, and catching sight of
Ursula she dashed up to her.
"What do you think Alberta and I are doing? We're _so_ bored, and
we're going to stop at every drug store on this side and have an
ice-cream soda, and the same going back on the other side. Isn't that
interesting? I tell Alberta it's bound to be--sooner or later!"
"Is that a freshman?" Marjory inquired competently, and Ursula's eyes
twinkled as she replied gravely:
"No, that's a senior. She has fits of idiocy, but in her better
moments she's quite a person to know. She's in the Lawrence with me.
Why on earth she should go and get Alberta May and drag her into
degradation and dyspepsia, nobody knows, but she always does."
They rested for a while in Ursula's room, which was "more than
enormous," as Anne said--it was intended for a double room--and
furnished very delightfully. There were some beautiful Copley prints
and a cast or two and a long low shelf of books and fascinating wicker
chairs with puffy cushions. There was the inevitable tea-table and
chafing-dish paraphernalia and the inevitable couch with a great many
Yale pillows; but there were not more than a dozen photographs of
girls in any one place and only one Gibson girl, and she was very
small. There was a beautiful desk all littered with papers and little
photographs of Ursula's family and her horse at home, and a lot of the
pretty little cluttering things one picks up abroad. Marjory saw no
girl with such consistently fascinating clothes as Ursula's during her
visit, nor did she sit in any room so charming as hers, the college
girl being a generation behind her brother in this regard; but first
impressions are strong, and Ursula's silver brushes, her beautiful
etching, and the two wonderful rugs that nearly covered her shining
floor formed the stage setting for all Marjory's subsequent imaginary
dramas.
They went out to the links by trolley, through the long quiet street,
past pretty lawns and pleasant houses, into the real country of fields
and scattered cottages. Marjory learned how "the crowd" had vacationed
together more than once; how they were going up to Carol Sawyer's
place in Maine next summer for "the time of their lives"; how, after
their Commencement obsequies, they were going for two weeks to Nan at
Sconset and live in a house all by themselves, and then four of them
were going abroad together with Nan's father--"the dearest thing in
the world"; how Caroline was going to study medicine in Germany and
Lucilla Bradford was going to be married and continue to illumine
Boston, and Ursula and her sister were going to stay indefinitely in
France or Italy with various relatives.
They seemed to have a very intimate knowledge of one another's
affairs, Marjory decided, as they got out at the links and strolled up
to the tiny club-house. A straggling crowd was gradually melting away
there: hot, dishevelled girls with heavy bags, cool and fluffy girls
with tea-cups, men arguing in white flannels and men conversing in
frock coats. Important small boys--professors' sons and their friends
from the town--caddied for the great man and his followers,
patronizing the urchins who ordinarily amassed wealth from this
employment, and a crowd of interested golfers from the town trailed
about the holes, admiring, criticising, and chattering. Here and there
a crimson coat shone out, some of the ladies tilted gay parasols,
white duck dotted the grass everywhere. It was all very jolly and
interesting, and when Nan came up with a white-flannelled youth and a
cheerful if exhausted friend whom she introduced as "one of my little
mates--Caroline Wilde," Marjory could have thought, as she sipped her
tea and learned the score, that she was back on the links at home.
Caroline had learned much and Nan had held a reverent conversation
with the champion and was basking in the recollection of it. Marjory
met an ardent golfer in marvellous stockings, who was with difficulty
restrained from illustrating, by means of his empty cup and the
parasol his fellow-professor was guarding, the very latest method of
effecting a tremendous drive from a bad spot in the course, and his
friend turned out to be a classmate of her brother's; and so they
started from Yale, which is a very good conversational starting-point,
and their reminiscences attracted Ursula, who, with an adoring little
freshman--Ursula was never without a freshman--and the Church and the
Law wrangling pleasantly over a lost ball, was holding her court in a
near corner. They drifted up, and the Church and the Law were so
amusing and well set up that Marjory quite lost her heart to them and
wished they would come "West," as they persisted in calling Chicago,
remarking confidentially that nothing seemed to upset a person from
Chicago so much as that!
They rode home with the Church and the Law, while the assistant in
that great undertaking, the higher education of women, raced the
trolley on a Columbia Chainless, to the wild delight of the
passengers, who cheered his futile efforts and bribed the motorman to
an exciting rate of speed.
"Do you have lessons with him, really?" Marjory demanded, as they left
the rapidly churning golf stockings behind for the moment. Nan
grinned. "Do you, Ursula?" she repeated. Ursula sighed but said
nothing, and Nan explained that in the midst of his artless prattle
last week he had mentioned a written lesson in the near future, based
upon certain reference reading. "It comes off to-morrow," she added
cheerfully, "and the young Lucilla is hastily sprinting through the
volumes and gathering information. She sought the seclusion that a
cabin grants last night, and when I howled at her through the keyhole
that we were going to Boyden's for the evening meal, she said that if
she got through two hundred pages and her notes by then she'd be
along. Ursula does it bit by bit, and then tells us to go to the ant,
thou sluggard, but little Lucy thinks she knows him better than we do,
and she said he wouldn't do it. I told her, go to, he would; I saw it
in his eye. So Caroline started to fill her fountain pen--she calls it
that from force of habit--but what she really does is to fill the
room, and what drips over--"
"There's Lucilla!" said somebody, and they got off the car and teased
Lucilla--a small, tired person with a prim little face and beautiful
manners--all the way down to Boyden's. A striking, sulky-looking girl
with a stylish golf suit that made her look like the costumers' plates
of tailor-made athletic maidens, was holding a table for them, and she
turned out to be Carol Sawyer. She was the first girl of "the crowd"
Marjory did not like. Her voice was loud and her manner a little
overbearing; she wore too many rings and her attitude toward the
college was very different from the harmless nonsense that in the
case of the other girls covered plenty of good work and a real
interest in it. She was evidently very wealthy, and Marjory caught
herself wondering if that was why the others put up with her. When
they had half finished their supper--and a very good little supper it
was--a large girl, almost too tall for a girl, in a mussy short skirt
and badly fitting shirt-waist sauntered into the room. From their own
table and most of the others a chorus of welcome went up.
"Hello, Teddy!" "Don't hurry, Dody!" "Come over here, Dodo!"
"Theodora, dear child, your side-comb is nearly out!" "Have some
berries, Ted?"
She included them all in a cheerful "Hello!" and strolled up to Nan's
table. "This is little Theodora Bent," said Nan, kindly. "She is very
shy and unused to company, but her heart--"
"Her heart," little Theodora interrupted, dragging a chair from
somewhere and quietly appropriating Ursula's creamed chicken, "is not
here. It is with our friend, Mrs. Austin, who sits at a lonely table
wondering where her loved ones are to-night. I met her at the door.
'Dorothea,' said she--and why she persists in calling me Dorothea we
shall know, perhaps, when the mists have cleared away--'Dorothea,
there is hardly a Friday night that you girls are in to supper. I'm
sure I can't see why!' I said that it _was_ strange, but it just
happened so. Then she insisted on knowing why; so I suggested that
perhaps you found the noise in the dining-room trying--"
"Dodo! you didn't!"
"Certainly I did. I should suppose you might. Anybody who sits near
_you_ certainly does! And she said that some freshman or other had
been decorating the piazza all the afternoon, lying in wait for me to
tutor her, and suggested that I ought to manage better. And I told her
I'd tutored three hours and a half to-day and I had a written lesson
and Phi Kappa Farewell to-morrow night, and I thought that if she
didn't object to the freshman I'd leave her there till next week. So I
left her standing in the door--"
"_A thing she has never done before!_" sang Nan, softly, and they
laughed long and merrily, as people laugh who are not very ancient,
and who have just had a good supper and are the best of friends.
It was a little after that that the Glee Club sang on the steps of
Music Hall, while crowds of girls streamed out and sat on the grass
and wandered up and down or listened on dormitory steps. They sang
sweet songs and funny songs, and the audience sitting on the campus
clapped and clapped again. Their repertoire amazed Miss Cunningham,
who had been firmly impressed with the idea that _A Spanish Cavalier_
and _Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party_ were necessarily sung by the college
girl to the exclusion of all other melodies. She was used to them now,
used to pigtails and puffs, shirt-waists and evening dresses, Western
rolled r's and Eastern broad a's, handsome matronly young women, and
slim, saucy little chits, solitary walkers, devoted pairs, and
rollicking bands. The light faded imperceptibly, turning the ugly
brick to a soft pink, bringing out the pale mingling of colors that
spread over the smooth, green campus, with here and there a girl vivid
in crimson or violet. The leader raised her hand and they started a
medley, with queer changes and funny little turns.
Three blind mice!
See how they run!
They all ran after the farmer's wife--
For she was the jewel of Asia,
Of Asia,
Of Asia--
How happy they seemed, how well able to amuse each other!
Then, as the faces on the steps grew indistinct and the little night
noises grew plainer, just as the Club turned to go in somebody called,
"_Mandalay!_" The crowd took it up and "_Mandalay!_" sounded from all
the groups. Three or four girls with guitars turned up from somewhere,
and a mandolin was produced from the Hubbard; a tall, slender girl
stepped out a little from the rest and turned upon the waiting
audience the kind of soft, rich voice that sounds rough and strained
indoors, but only a little thrilled and anxious in the open air.
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin' an' I know she thinks o' me!
Some of the girls perched on balcony railings; some leaned on each
other's shoulders; the strolling pairs and groups stopped,
interlocked, and listened as attentively as if they did not already
know it by heart; their white dresses glimmered among the shrubbery.
Ursula and Theodora Bent, a strange pair, Marjory thought, had dropped
down on a bench, the little graceful figure balanced on the back of
the seat with one arm over the broad shoulders of her big, careless
friend. Nan's merry face took on the almost wistful look that music
always brought there, and Marjory wondered if the silent, waiting
group knew how soft their eyes grew and how much alike they all looked
suddenly.
An' the dawn comes up like thunder out er China 'crost the Bay!
A moment of silence, a burst of applause, and the crowd was scurrying
away as if a bell had struck. The chatter rose again, the faces
changed, and to crown the transformation a tall, dark girl with a
handsome face--the girl they had seen at Kingsley's--rose languidly
from the top step of the Washburn and sang with a startling imitation
of the first singer, to a group of girls about her:
Oh, that Road to Mandalay!
Must we hear it night and day?
For the author'd swear like thunder if he heard it sung that way!
Wild applause and a cry of, "Second verse, Neal! second verse!"
followed, and as they walked past the Hatfield by a group of girls
audibly disapproving of the parody and its singer, they caught the
second verse:
For they sing it ev'ry evening, and they sing it ev'ry morn;
They will sing it at my fun'ral--was it sung when I was born?
Just as soon as I reach heaven, and they teach me how to play,
Oh, I know the tune I learn on will be Road to Mandalay!
The juniors chuckled, and as Nan commended the abilities of the
cynical senior, Marjory remembered her face as it had been a few
minutes before, and wondered.
They took her to her boarding-house and left her to get to bed, for
she was tired. And in the morning she went, by previous arrangement,
to the Lawrence, whence Dody Bent took her down to Boyden's to eggs
and toast, and coffee in a shining silvery pot, and said that in
consequence of the apparently unchanged intentions of Dr. Robbins she
should necessarily be much engaged from ten until eleven and the few
scant minutes preceding those hours, and that Misses Gillatt,
Bradford, and Wyckoff expected to be similarly occupied. Caroline
Wilde, however, who apparently did little but work in the laboratory
and keep out-of-doors, would be charmed to row her about Paradise.
Accordingly, at a few minutes after nine, Marjory stood at the foot of
the main staircase, swaying backward and forward in the chapel rush,
and picked out Caroline, sauntering down with a cheerful "Hello!" for
everybody on the stairs and that air of leisure that was the despair
and admiration of the perpetually rushed; for she was one of the
notoriously busy people in the college--always "at everything,"
distressingly competent in several of the stiffest courses offered,
the first aid to the injured in any capacity, and the prop of more
committees than she had fingers. She was always perfectly well and
always wore a shirt-waist, and she was one of the exceedingly few
people who are equally popular with students, Faculty, and
ladies-in-charge.
She pulled Marjory about in the most scientific manner over a somewhat
restricted body of water boasting a great deal of scenery for its
size, conversing at length on basket-ball, in which she had been twice
defeated, and not at all on golf and tennis, in which she held the
college championship. In the course of her remarks it became apparent
that Ursula and Dodo formed one third of "their crowd," she and Nan
another third, and Lucilla and Carol Sawyer one sixth each.
Of Lucilla there seemed to be little to say: she was of extensive
ancestry and made the best fudge in the place. She was also a good
person to tell things to and was always quiet and polite. Dodo
spoke--very literally--for herself. She was one of the best actresses
in the college; she had some very bad quarter-hours back of her
continual nonsense; she was poor, and there was something the matter
all the time at home. Ursula was one of the all 'round girls of the
college; she did beautiful work, and wrote very well and knew a
lot--and her clothes! She dressed for the crowd. Nan was, of course,
the best girl in the world, as might be seen by anybody with an eye in
its head.