something like this: you pick out three utterly unrelated girls who
never had anything to do with one another in their lives, and call
them the supper committee; you pick out two clever, uninterested girls
and call them the toast committee; you pick out an extremely busy girl
who lives half a mile off the campus and call her the seating
committee; you pick out a popular girl who is supposed to be humorous
because she laughs at everybody's jokes and knows one comic song, and
call her the toast-mistress.
And this is the result of it: The supper committee meets, wonders what
under heaven induced the president to appoint the other two, finds out
what caterer they had last year, and after a little perfunctory
argument employs him again without further action, with the result
that one end of the table has five kinds of ice cream and the other a
horrifying recurrence of lukewarm croquettes; the toast committee
spends a great deal of time in hunting out extremely subtle quotations
from Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam, with the result that no one of the
toasters gets the least idea of how she is expected to elaborate her
theme; the seating committee is so harassed by everybody that she
gives up her diagram in despair, and successive girls erase and sign
and re-erase till nobody but the three or four leading sets in the
class are satisfied, and they are displeased because the toasters are
either put in a line at the head or scattered about the tables, and
that separates them from their immediate cliques; the toast-mistress
turns out to be more appreciative than constructive, and worries her
friends and bores her enemies beyond previous conception. The main
body of unimportant necessary people are crowded off by themselves and
feel somewhat flat and heavy and irritated at the noisy groups beyond
them; the toasts are apt to be a little sad and vague because the
girls don't fit them and talk too much about enduring friendships, the
larger life, four years of stimulating rivalry, and alma mater. Why
they do all this at this season and this alone, only the Lord who made
them knows.
But Ninety-yellow did not employ this method. It occurred to Theodora
somewhat originally, perhaps, as she looked around her that last
Tuesday evening, that a better class supper was never arranged. It
can hardly be asserted that it was a really good supper, for it is to
be doubted if a hundred and seventy-five women ever sat down to a
really good supper; but there was almost enough of it, and it was very
nearly hot. Kathie Sewall had picked the supper committee well, and
they knew one another thoroughly enough to give it all to the chairman
to do and to make fun of her till she was spurred on to a really noble
effort. She knew that it is always damp and cold class supper night,
and planned accordingly. Kitty Louisa Hofstetter managed the toasts,
and though Kitty Louisa was uneven and a little vulgar at times, she
was clever in her unexpected hail-fellow-well-met way and popular with
the class for the most part. She had a genius for puns of the kind
that grow better as they grow worse, and they were shamelessly
italicized in the toast-cards, which caused great merriment before the
toasts had begun. And the seating was very well done, for the class
was nicely broken up and mixed about among the tables till everybody
was within four or five of a reasonably important person.
As for the toast-mistress--well, you see, Theodora's opinion of her
might have been a trifle exaggerated, for she was Theodora's best
friend. How little she had changed, Theo thought, as she watched her
rumple her hair in the same funny, boyish way that she had freshman
year. Theo had seen her first in the main hall, floating with the
current of freshmen that pushed its way almost four hundred strong to
meet its class officer and find out that O. G. meant Old Gymnasium.
That far-off freshman year! Theo smelt again the clean, washed floor;
saw again the worried shepherds herding their flocks into the
scheduled stalls and praying that the parents might go soon and leave
their darlings, if misunderstood, at least unencumbered; heard again
the buzz and hum of a thousand chattering, scuffling girls, bubbling
over with a hundred greetings for each other.
"Hello, Peggy! Peggy! I say, _hello Peggy_!"
"Oh, hello! Have a good time?"
"Grand! Did you?"
"Perfectly fine--I saw Ursula and Dodo and--Oh, Ursula! hello! Here I
am!"
"Why, Peggy Putney, you dear old thing! When did you come? They say
you're in the Hatfield--how did you get there?"
"Two ahead of me and they dropped out. Miss Roberts only just told
me--"
Theodora had felt very lonesome and homesick just then--everybody but
herself knew so many people! And then Virginia had happened along and
jostled her and begged pardon, and they had fallen into a conversation
on the relative merits of the Dewey and the Hatfield. Later they had
studied Livy together and confided their difficulties to each other.
Virginia's mother was a Unitarian and her father was an Ethical
Culturist, and her room-mate was a High Church Episcopalian and never
ate meat in Lent! She thought Virginia would very probably be damned,
if not in the next life, certainly in this, and she intimated as much.
Virginia thought it was very hard to live with somebody who
disapproved of you so much.
Theodora had been brought up to be a neat, self-helpful little person,
and her room-mate, Edith Bliss, had never even seen her bed made up
and left her clothes in piles on the floor just as she stepped out of
them. She was horribly homesick and wept quarts every Sunday
afternoon, and confided to Theodora in moments of hysterical
relaxation that she thought every girl owed it to herself to have soup
and black coffee for dinner and that she was going to wire Papa to
take her home immediately. Theo looked at her now, eagerly devouring
a doubtful lobster concoction and openly congratulating herself on the
olives at her left. She was fond of Frankfurters now, was Edith, and
had recently alarmed the authorities by her ingenuous scheme for
annexing a night-lunch cart and keeping it on the campus: it would
have been so nice, she said regretfully, to slip out and get a
Frankfurter between hours!
How pretty the Gym looked! The juniors had decorated it as well as
they could at odd minutes, and they had lingered in a bunch as the
class came in to lean over the balcony and sing to them.
Theodora remembered how the Gym had looked the night of the sophomore
reception: all light and music and girls and a wonder of excitement.
She had never had an evening dress before, and her little
square-necked organdie had been dearer to her than any other gown
before or since. They played _Rastus on Parade_, and she had such nice
partners and some of the girls were so lovely and had such white,
beautiful shoulders--they seemed to count evening dress but a slight
and ordinary thing. By junior year house-dances are wont to pall, and
seniors have been known to make rabbits and read Kipling in
preference; even among the freshmen Theodora had found some
disillusioned souls who lamented the absence of men and found the
sophomore reception slow!
Across the table an odd, distinguished-looking girl, with a clever
face and dark, short-sighted eyes, smiled at her, and Theo's thoughts
flashed back to that great day when she first really loved the
class--the day of the Big Game. What a funny, snub-nosed little nobody
Marietta Hinks had been then! But how she played! How she dodged and
doubled and bounced the ball, and how they cheered her!
Oh, _here's_ to Mari_etta_,
For we _shall_ not soon _forget_ her--
Well, well, how they had grown up! Now she was "Miss Root" to the
little, dark-eyed girl in the back seat in chapel, who smiled so shyly
at her when the seniors led out down the middle aisle. Theo was
wearing her roses to-night, and as she scratched off a little note to
thank her she had seemed to see herself, another little dark-eyed
girl, sending anonymous roses to Ursula Wyckoff. Dear me! would
anybody ever again combine such graces of mind and body as that
ornament of Ninety-purple? She had gone on wheel-rides with Theo, and
once she had asked her over to wait on the juniors at a spread--Theo
had sat up and got her light reported in order to write home about it.
There are those, I understand, who disapprove strongly of this
attitude of Theodora's happy year: dogmatic young women who have not
learned much about life and soured, middle-aged women who have
forgotten. I am told that they would consider Theodora's adoration
morbid and use long words about her--long words about a freshman! I
have always been sorry for these unfortunate people: their chances for
reconstructing Human Nature seem to me so relatively slight.
When Theo had gone home that summer with hands almost as well cared
for as Ursula's, sleek, gathered-in locks, and a gratifying hold on
the irregular verbs (Ursula spoke beautiful French), her mother had
whimsically inquired if Miss Wyckoff could not be induced to remain in
Northampton indefinitely and continue her unscheduled courses! But
perhaps she was a morbid mother.
Her mother! The plates and flowers swam before Theodora's misted eyes,
and the sight of Virginia--so kind that year--brought back somehow
those waves of desolation that would come over her again and again, in
lecture rooms, in her own dear room, at meals--all that clouded
sophomore year. It was just as her good fortune came through the mail
to her--a room in the Nicest House--that her mother died, and rooms
mattered little to Theo, then. There were kindly aunts and other
children, and she was not needed at home; so it seemed best to go on,
and she had come up the steps of the Nicest House, a little
black-dressed figure, and into the arms of the Nicest Woman.
It seemed to her that there was never a room so cheerful, nor pictures
so lovely, nor a fire so red, nor tea and bread and butter so good,
nor a smile so comfortable as the Nicest Woman's. Mademoiselle and
Fräulein and Miss Roberts were sweet and kind, and the girls did all
they could, but it was to the Nicest Woman that one came when
conditions and warnings were in the air or one's head ached or one had
eaten too much fudge or been annoyed by somebody's banjo practice.
When the seniors of the Nicest House were eating and laughing there at
night, it was a gay room--the Nicest Woman's; but it was very dim and
quiet in the dusk, when Theodora slipped in by herself with reddened
lids, and sat on the couch, and they talked of things that started to
be sad but somehow always turned out cheerful; for when it was about
the children and Will at Yale little jokes were sure to come up, and
when Theo wondered if perhaps she hadn't been careless about writing
home, and if Mother had gotten more letters in the spring, maybe--the
conversation always changed, and she found herself feeling so glad and
thankful that she'd gone right home in June and not visited at
Virginia's.
Virginia had gone into Phi Kappa that winter, and Theo had been so
proud of her. She was in the first five, and as she really hadn't
expected it at all it was quite exciting. Adelaide Carew went in too,
and though she went about with the seniors a great deal and called
most of her class "Miss," she was much more generally liked than in
her freshman year, and Virginia had got to know her better and better.
Through her Theo had seen more of Adelaide, and she had been amazed to
find out how really kind-hearted and human she was beneath her
unapproachable ways.
But then, you never could tell--girls were so queer! Only last night,
when they were walking about under the lanterns after the concert,
she and Virginia and Adelaide, with two of the junior ushers, and the
juniors, sophisticated young people, had cynically suggested that
perhaps they'd better take themselves away in order that the three
might seek out their Ivy and bedew it with their final tears, Adelaide
had coughed a little huskily and suggested that perhaps when they'd
planted their own Ivy they wouldn't be feeling so gay! They had stared
at her blankly, hesitated, decided that coming from such a source it
must have been an extraordinarily acute sarcasm, and gone away
giggling, leaving Theo to wonder and Adelaide to flush and talk very
hard about Bar Harbor and the comfort of a big room all to yourself
once more.
Such a strange room-mate as Theo had had that year--she seemed fated
to room with girls who had never made up their beds. This one had
lived freshman year with friends in the town, and had had everything
done for her, and when Theo asked her one day if campus life was
wearing on her, she had turned two stormy gray eyes on her and burst
out, "Oh, no, Theodora, but I am so _deadly_ tired of picking up my
night-gown every _single_ morning, I think I shall _die_!"
On one historic occasion, early in the year, Theo had happened to
make up her bed for her, and upon her pleased recognition of the fresh
linen it had come out that she had been for some weeks accustomed to
change her upper sheet and leave the under one undisturbed on the
bed--it had seemed more logical, she said, and how was she to know?
They had teased her about it till the Nicest Woman interfered and
fined every girl who mentioned it, and they bought _Sentimental Tommy_
with the money, and read it evenings in the Nicest Woman's room after
supper.
Well, well, they'd sit about her fire no more, as the poem said that
somebody wrote to go with the silver tea-ball the seniors gave her
when she served them their last tea. They'd come in no more after
Alpha and Phi Kapp to tell her all about it--how nice she had been
when Theo got into Alpha! That was junior year and they took her to
Boyden's for supper, and her bowl and pitcher were full of violets for
days. Everybody seemed so glad, and Martha Sutton had pinned her own
pin on Theo's red blouse. Kathie Sewall had taken her over--nobody
dreamed that Kathie would be senior president then--and what a
hand-shaking there had been! And such a funny, clever play, with
butlers and burglars and lady's-maids--it was illustrative of American
literature, she learned later, but it was not a pedantic illustration.
Theodora loved plays, and she had delighted in her very humble part in
the House play. She was a little house-maid, and said only, "Yes,
madam," and "No, madam," and, "Oh, sir, how can you--a poor girl like
me!" but she had a great American Beauty and two bunches of violets,
and she sent the programme home. Next to its basket-ball decorations
she remembered the Gym arranged for a play, with the running-track
turned into boxes and the girls prettier than ever against the screens
and pillows. She had been chairman of the stage-setting committee, and
the _Monthly_ had especially commended the boudoir scene.
Were they ready for the toasts so soon? Where had the time gone? she
thought, as Virginia, with solemn pomp, called upon Miss Farwell to
respond to "Our Team." Dear old Grace--she stammered a little when she
was excited, and she was not the most fluent of speakers, but they
cheered her to the echo. "Team! Team! Team!" they called, and the
teams, freshman and sophomore, Regulars and Subs, had to stand on
their chairs and be sung to. As Theo balanced on a tottering seat,
she caught sight of a crowd of girls moving toward the Gym, and as
they sat down a shout from below greeted them:
Oh, _here's_ to Ninety-_yellow_,
And her _praise_ we'll ever _tell_--_oh_,
Drink her _down_, drink her _down_, drink her _down_,
down, _down_!
A cheerful, aimless creature at the bottom of one of the great tables,
whose one faculty was for improvised doggerel, instructed her
neighbors rapidly, and they sent back a tuneful courtesy:
Oh, _here's_ the Junior _Ushers_,
And I _tell_ you they are _rushers_!
Theodora had "ushed," in classical phrase, in her day, and the bustle
of last year, so much more exciting somehow than this one, came back
to her. Her little, white-ribboned stick was packed now--in fact,
everything was packed: she was going away for good! Some one else
would lounge on the window-seat in her room in the Nicest House, and
light the cunning fire....
Who was this? Oh, this was Sallie Wilkes Emory, responding to "The
Faculty." Kitty Louisa, whose soul knew not reverence, had attached to
this toast the pregnant motto, _That we may go forward with Faculties
unimpaired_, an excerpt from one of the President's best-known chapel
prayers, and Sallie was developing the theme in what she assured them
was a very connotative manner. Theo saw them pass in review before
her, those devoted educators, from her dazed freshman Livy to her
despairing senior Philosophy--_that_ was over, at least! Theodora was
not of a technically philosophical temperament. Sallie was quoting
liberally from a recent famous essay of her own: _The Moral Law, or
the End-Aim of Human Action According to Kant_, apropos of which she
had remarked to the commendatory professor that she was glad if
_somebody_ understood it! Sallie was a great girl--how grand she had
been in the play! Theo had been in the mob herself, having first tried
for every part, and had enjoyed every minute of it, from the first
rehearsal to the last dab of make-up. She had been an attendant and
hadn't an idea how pretty she looked, nor how many people spoke of her
and called her graceful.
It may have been because Theo had so few ideas about herself that she
had so many friends. And how many she had! She took great pride in
them, those fine, strong, good-looking girls that hailed her from all
directions, and always wanted a dance or a row or a skating afternoon
with her. She wondered if anybody so ordinary--for Theo knew she
wasn't clever--ever had so many jolly good friends. There was the
Mandolin Club, now--all friends of hers. She got on late in junior
year and played in the spring concert. Her father came up and said
he'd never seen such a pretty house in his life--packed from orchestra
circle to balcony with fluffy girls alternated with dapper,
black-coated youths. He gave Theo such a darling white gown for it,
all ruffled with white ribbon, and she had her picture taken in it,
holding the mandolin, and sent it to him in a big white vellum frame
covered with yellow chrysanthemums, with "Smith" scrawled in yellow
across one corner. He kept it on his desk and was tremendously proud
when his friends asked about it.
Here were the class histories. Theodora thought she listened, but
though she laughed with the rest and applauded the grinds, it was her
own history that she was reading as face after face recalled to her
some joke or mistake or good luck. Not that it was sad--oh, dear, no!
If any member of the class of Ninety-yellow dared to be sad that night
there was a fine, and more than that, the studied coldness of the
class directed toward her: it was an orgy, not an obsequy, as Virginia
elegantly put it. Just as the junior history, which is always the best
for some unexplained reason--perhaps because of the Prom--was
finished, there was a loud knock, and a big bunch of yellow roses from
the class that was having a decennial supper somewhere was brought in
by a useful sophomore. They clapped it and sent some one back to thank
them--a point of etiquette that some self-centred classes have been
known to omit--and then they remembered that Ninety-green was supping
at its first reunion in the Old Gym, and sent over some of the table
flowers to them. Virginia motioned to Theo, and proud of the mission
and blushing a little at the eyes that turned to her as she went, she
took them over. They clapped and sang to her:
Oh, _here's_ to _Theodora_,
And we're _very_ glad we _sor_ her!
Martha Sutton waved to her and the toast-mistress thanked her for the
class, and she went back--alone, because, being an older class,
Ninety-green didn't need a delegate. On the way, two juniors met her,
and they condoled with her cheerfully: "How do you feel, Theo dear?
Isn't it kind of dreadful? Do you keep thinking it's the last time?
Goodness--I should!" One of them threw a sympathetic arm over her
shoulder and looked at the moon, but Theo grinned a little and said
that she was tired as a dog and that if there was one place in the
world she wanted it was her room At Home. And as the juniors gaped at
this matter-of-fact attitude, Theodora added, pausing at the Gym door,
"Of course I've had a perfectly grand time here, and all that, but
I've been here four years and that's about long enough, you know. And
they want me, of course, and--I want to come! I think it gets a
little--well, toward the end, you know--"
But Theo was tired, and so are seniors all, and until three or four
generations of them have learned how to do it easily, so will they be.
They were doing stunts upstairs: Clara Sheldon had seen Cissie Loftus
who had seen Maggie Cline who sang _Just tell them that you saw me_,
and Clara, who was the most tailor-made and conventional creature
imaginable to the outward eye, was forced by those from whose
farther-reaching scrutiny she was never free, to imitate the imitator
at all social functions that admitted song. She used stiff, absurd
gestures and a breathy contralto that never palled upon her friends.
Cynthia Lovering danced her graceful little Spanish dance for them,
and Leslie Guerineau told them her best darkey story in her own
delicious Southern drawl. And then there was a murmur that grew to a
voice that swelled into a shout as they drummed on the table and
called, "_We_ want _Dutton_! _We_ want _Dutton_! _We_ want _Dutton_,
_Dutton_, _Dutton_!"
She said no; that she'd had a toast; that they knew all her stunts by
heart--but they hammered on her name with the regularity of a machine
till she got up at last with a sigh and, "Well, what do you want?"
They wanted a temperance lecture, and she drooped her head to one
side, and with an ineffably sickly smile and a flat nasal drawl she
told them "haow she'd been a-driving 'raound your _graounds_, and
they're _reel_ pleasantly situated, _too_, dears, and your
_President_, such a nice, _gentlemanly_ man, accompanied me, and
pointed aout to me your _beeyutiful_ homes and I said to him, 'Oh,
what a _beeyutiful_ thought it is that all these _hundreds_ of young
souls are a-drinking _water_, nothing but _water_, all the time and
every day!'"
She was going to teach in a stuffy little school in the wilds of
Maine, and Ethel Eaton, who had been taught in that school, was going
to travel abroad for a year--it was a strange shuffle.
What, was it half-past eleven? Impossible! But somebody had started up
their great song that had been their pet one since freshman year, and
they were shouting it till the Gym rang:
_Hurrah!_ _hurrah!_ the _yellow_ is on _top_,
_Hurrah!_ _hurrah!_ the _purple_ cannot _drop_;
_We_ are Ninety-_yellow_ and our _fame_ shall never _stop_,
_'Rah_, 'rah, _'rah_, for the _seniors!_
They sang all the verses, and then the watchman and the superintendent
of buildings, waiting like sleuth-hounds to prevent any demonstration
from without, gritted their teeth and dashed furiously down the wrong
stairs as Ninety-green, who had softly assembled at the back of the
Gym, having come from different directions, burst into the traditional
tribute:
Oh, _here's_ to Ninety-_yellow_,
And her _fame_ we'll ever _tell_--_oh_!
"'Ere, 'ere! stop that now! Miss Sutton, it ain't allowed--will you
please to go 'ome quietly! No, they ain't a-comin' h'out till you
go--'e says they ain't!"
"Oh, come now! We aren't students any more! We can do what we like--"
"Oh, come on, girls! Don't make a fuss; we don't want to stay,
anyhow!"
They sang themselves away, and the class upstairs looked around the
tables and thought things, for it was time to go. And here I am afraid
I shall lose whatever friends I may have gained for Theodora, for it
is necessary to state that none of those comprehensive, solemn moments
of farewell, known to us all to be the property of departing seniors,
came to her. She was conscious of a little vague excitement, but all
the last days had been more or less exciting--generally less--and her
mind was occupied with irrelevant details. Had Uncle Ed remembered to
change at Hartford? Had Aunt Kate packed her black evening dress?
Would the post-office forward that note to the little freshman? Could
she get Virginia up in time for the 9.15? Had she lost the slip with
the Nicest Woman's address on it? And had she given Marietta that
senior picture yet?