Elinor’s Junior Year

Chapter XV

A Screw Loose

At Thanksgiving Lydia insisted upon carrying Ruth away to the city for a much-needed rest. Mrs. Howard, even handsomer in her silvery middle-age than her daughter, was so shocked by her guest’s wan angularity that she kept her a willing prisoner until Monday, while Lydia returned to college Thursday night in order to attend a rehearsal on Friday. Arriving about eight o’clock she found two disconsolate young ladies stretched in easy chairs in the dusky study.

“We feel perfectly horrid,” moaned Myra without raising her head, “three hours at the table and everything too good to waste.”

Elinor endeavored to sit up hospitably. “Are you hungry, Lydia?”

“I’ll rout out something,” she replied, rummaging in the pantry, which consisted of a shelf under the window-seat, “what’s all this?”

“That? Oh, it’s a box that reached us at noon.”

“Ah, I comprehend. Then it was not entirely the dinner.”

“Dinner wasn’t till three,” explained Myra in languid accents, “and we almost starved. That cheese just about saved our lives, and the sugar-kisses with nuts in them —”

“A small freshman beside me ate every course at first, but she grew sadder and sadder till she barely had spirit to taste the last ones, which happened to be the best — Nesselrode pudding and things. Do you want to know what I think?” Elinor propped her chin upon one nerveless hand. “I believe in renunciation. If a girl goes to college, she must give up dances that last till two or three o’clock in the morning, or else she will lose her health. If you choose a single life, you won’t reign in a home of your own as a rule. That’s what somebody said to me last summer,” she added hastily at sound of a snort from Myra. “If you wish to keep your friends, you must sacrifice time and have your feelings hurt quite often without resenting it. If you prefer the first part of a dinner you may be obliged to skip the last part.”

“I never realized before that life is so melancholy,” groaned her fellow sufferer, “next year let’s propose that the Students’ Association vote to send the dinner to the newsboys’ home or somewhere.”

Lydia preserved a polite countenance, which in consideration of the surrounding shadows was really a superfluous courtesy. “This morning in town I offered a chrysanthemum to a ragged boy; and he turned on his heel with a haughty : ‘Naw, I don’t want yer old flowers!'”

Myra sprang upright. “He did! And last May I got up every Saturday at six and took wild flowers down to catch the early train for the Settlement kindergarten!” she cried indignantly, “just catch me doing it next year!”

Elinor relaxed from her startled jump at the sudden movement. “You are hopelessly feminine in your method of reasoning,” she sighed, “you invariably refer every argument to the personal equation. By the way,” she cleared her throat and tried to speak in an off-hand manner: “Lydia, where did you leave Ruth? Has she gone up to her room?”

Lydia’s account of her mother’s gracious tyranny concluded with, “It must be that Ruth is working too hard over the magazine this fall. She surely looks miserable, and she never has time for anything outside of classes and that editorial business.”

“She simply lives behind an engaged sign,” contributed Myra, “and actually she does not always smile when I dance a jig outside her door to let her know I’m there.”

“She declines so brusquely when I urge her to drop in between whiles and be sociable like old times that I am afraid to ask her any more,” said Elinor with an effort to treat the subject naturally, “maybe she is tired of us. Geniuses are erratic, you know, and difficult to understand. She has been so changeable of late that I am never quite certain how to approach her.”

“You’re changeable yourself, madam,” commented Myra, reviving sufficiently to produce an additional supply of nuts and candy from her pocket to spread before the traveler. “One day you are as sweet as syrup, and laugh if I merely turn to look at you in Chapel; the next you snap my head off when I venture to give my tongue a bit of exercise. Now don’t be sarcastic.”

But Elinor was too much in earnest to seize the opening for a taunt about the dire necessity of exercise for that lively member. “Indeed, Ruth’s eccentricity is growing upon her. The girls notice it more than they used to, and are beginning to talk about her strange solitary ways and indifferent manner. She is utterly lawless in breaking engagements. She is continually wandering off alone on long tramps, and she passes her best friends in the halls without recognizing them. It offends the girls.” Elinor stirred uncomfortably in the dusk and lifted her finger to touch her reddening cheek. She could not forget the shock of an unexpected meeting with Ruth on the Monday after that memorable Sunday evening of her irritable outburst. Ruth had been wafted away from the sorrowful earth for two hours with Prometheus Unbound in the library. On her way to her room afterward she had come suddenly face to face with Elinor at a bend in the staircase. The rapt eyes had gone instantly blank and darkened for a single moment to an expression of terror as if shrinking from a blow. Then she had nodded with an abrupt little jerk of her neck and walked on without a word. Astonished mortification had kept Elinor sleepless only to find the next morning that Ruth’s manner toward her had veered to an unobtrusive formality. That, she assured herself over and over, was exactly what she had always desired.

“It strikes me then that girls are easily offended,” commented Lydia as she perseveringly speared for pickles in a jar of jam. “Their attitude toward the unusual is a point where I have been disappointed in college. I had rather expected that everybody here would be perched on a watch-tower with a spyglass on the look-out to discover any signs of extraordinary and original personalities. But, no. If an individual appears who is unlike the mass of the others, who has peculiar ways and unconventional habits of speech, who lives in her own thoughts and —”

“Is fond of associating with herself,” chimed in Myra, “and goes to concerts all alone and sits by herself in the gallery and listens with her eyes shut, and doesn’t bother about what people may think.”

“What they do think is that she hasn’t any friends,” put in Elinor.

“Young ladies, will you kindly permit me to conclude my sentence? I had almost finished the protasis, or if clause, and was about to polish the apodasis. If, I repeat, a conspicuously unique character enters this homogeneous community, the normal feminine — seven hundred and ninety-nine strong — gazes at her —”

“— aghast,” continued Myra in triumph over anticipating the word.

“No, askance. They gaze at her askance and say in their minds, ‘If you happen to be a genius, maybe that’s some excuse, but you’ll have to show us. Go ahead and do something fine and then perhaps we shall forgive you for being different, but we don’t approve of it in the least.’ That is what they think in their souls, for woman, my dear young companions, is the eternal conservative.”

“‘And this from you?’ he said,” murmured Elinor, “‘And ’twere not for thy shapely head —'”

“‘And ’twere not for thy hoary beard,'” corrected Myra, “‘Such hand as Marmion’s had not spared,’ and so forth. Ahem, Walter Scott. Oh, I know now what’s the matter with Ruth.” She straightened up in alert forgetfulness of the dinner. “She’s writing the prize story, and of course she neglects everything and everybody else in her absorption. When Carlyle had a book under way, he used to be queer too, and cross and dyspeptic and he wanted to be let alone. Just consider Ruth! Why, she even avoids Elinor.”

Elinor moistened her lips in the darkness. “Well, there’s her chance to show the girls that she is capable of doing something fine. Then they will alter the gaze askance to the stare adulatory. The average artistic temperament is such a nuisance to have around that it is no more than fair for the eternal and agreeable conservative to demand justification in deeds. Hop up, Myra Dickinson, and light the gas. I intend to make Lydia a cup of chocolate.”

A week later on the evening of the Hall Play, in which Lydia was to take part, Myra captured Ruth in the throng that was pouring out of Chapel and insisted upon escorting her to the little theater above the gymnasium.

“You’ve simply got to come,” she asserted masterfully, “or else I won’t go myself, and I should never recover from the disappointment. It would be all your fault. So do come along, dear, dear Ruthie, and show the girls that you can be sociable when you feel like it. Some of them say that you are growing to be more and more of a recluse, and it is a pity. Elinor is afraid that melancholia begins that way.”

“What!”

Myra flinched before the new deep note of anger in the usually indolent tones, and bit her lip. “Oh, she was just talking. She didn’t mean that you — she didn’t mean anything, you know. She was wondering if you would go to the play to-night, and she said she sincerely hoped you would, because such industry was morbid — and —. Well, she hoped you would. Will you?”

“Yes,” said Ruth.

So Ruth with her mouth fallen into its old stern lines of self-repression followed Myra through the December starlight to the hall, and pressed on, crowded elbow to elbow, up the curving stairway to the floor above. She was careful to pilot Myra to the place between herself and Elinor on the bench reserved for them. Elinor, who was already there, welcomed them with her most radiant smile that faded uncertainly at meeting Ruth’s unresponsive glance.

On the little stage the play went merrily. When the hero in a red striped blazer and a white serge bell-skirt proclaimed his undying love, the audience giggled even before his black mustache twitched awry. The ranks of heads dark and fair bent like wheat under a breeze of laughter over his speech : “Ah, no, when I see those pale cheeks—”; for the heroine’s cheeks were scarlet — partly paint and partly heat and excitement. Lydia as a gray-bearded old fellow with a graceful skirt swinging about her ankles stamped to and fro so rampagiously that she was called before the curtain for applause, and that too though she was neither the hero nor the villain.

After the last scene was over, the three companions surged forward with other enthusiastic spectators to fall on the necks of the actors, rejoicing with kisses and relieving their elation in ecstatic shrieks. As Lydia’s party of admirers began to make its way toward the door, Myra clutched at her trailing flounces and fled, her ribbons fluttering behind her.

“I left the ice cream on the radiator.”

Elinor, who had purposely drifted to the side of the group farthest from Ruth, caught a whispered remark from beyond: “Myra Dickinson is getting flightier every day. Influence of Miss Allee, I suppose. They say that there is really a screw loose. She is exceedingly peculiar herself, and her mother, you know, is insane. Doubtless an hereditary blight —”

Elinor hurried forward out of ear-shot, her hands unconsciously clenched. How cruel — how cruel it was to talk about poor Ruth like that! What a contemptible slander! How despicable! A screw loose! Such a rumor floating from mouth to mouth would ruin her reputation, crush out life and hope. Somebody ought to warn her to pay a little more regard to appearances. Perhaps Lydia would do it. Yes, Lydia was the one. What a horrible thing to say about anybody! But about Ruth — Ruth whose life had always been hard and unhappy — dear old Ruth!

Elinor lowered the lids over her burning eyeballs and then lifted them in swift astonishment at the blur of tears on her lashes. How ridiculous! Of course she did not truly care. And anyhow she could not afford to bother about it now on the evening of Lydia’s celebration.

The guests arrived at the study to find Myra sorrowing over a dish of floating pink and green and brown liquid.

“I set it down for a minute and forgot,” she wailed, “because the bell rang for Chapel and I had to run. That’s what comes of compulsory services. Oh, dear! I am so thirsty!”

“It’s pretty good.” Ruth dipped a spoonful for a cautious trial. “It tastes like —” she wrinkled her brow reflectively, “well, like Alice in Wonderland, you know. It sounds like Alice, too, don’t you think? — warm ice cream.”

The others laughed at the whimsical speech, but Elinor, glancing around keenly, fancied that two or three of the visitors exchanged looks of comprehension. To be sure, it was not an impeccably rational comparison, though no more nonsensical than the average chaff. Still Elinor wished she wouldn’t talk so before outsiders just at present. Elinor forgot that she had persisted in considering Ruth herself as an outsider until very lately; say, for instance, until that week when Ruth had stared at her with terrified eyes as if shrinking from a blow.

It was a democratic gathering in honor of Lydia’s success on the boards. There were girls on window-ledges and chairs, on the couch and on the floor. An artist’s daughter in embroidered linen made a place beside herself for the brightest freshman in the class, whose father earned his living in some inconspicuous and unreported fashion. The sophomore president, who had chosen a new frock in the college colors instead of a winter coat, sipped her melted ice cream close to an heiress who actually brought three trunks with her every year. A girl who had never been twenty miles away from her native village across the river kept up a stream of chatter that sent the senior next to her into gales of laughter — a senior who had traveled from England to Japan and spent two winters in Rome.

Myra piled up a shaky pedestal of books on the center-table and boiled chocolate over a gas-stove that persevered in catching fire with a pop at the wrong aperture. Elinor passed the sandwiches and Ruth distributed the olives, while Lydia sat in state listening to comments on the play. There had been a strong-minded woman among the characters, and the conversation veered toward a definition of the ideal college woman of the present.

Some maintained that the college girl is exactly like other girls, while others claimed that she was different, or else she would have stayed at home. One in mentioning an essay on the subject in a current magazine said that the writer evidently required college graduates to be just about perfect.

“So they ought to be,” agreed Lydia sagely, but —”

“If that is true,” exclaimed Myra, “I shan’t graduate; that’s all. There isn’t any fun in barely measuring up to what is expected. I’d rather surprise people by rolling up gratuitous virtue.”

“You see,” explained Elinor, “Myra and I are rolling up a quantity of good deeds to our account this year. There is no credit in doing your simple duty. Therefore I make up Myra’s bed, which is an act of pure disinterested virtue and unselfishness; and she makes up mine, which is ditto. Consequently we are both nobler than we might have been if each had attended merely and strictly to her own affairs. It is the same with dusting and darning.”

“This is surely a selfish place,” remarked a guest, “when I am ill — just too miserable to study — it is maddening to watch the girls flying back and forth, too busy to spare a minute to amuse me. I don’t see how we can be turned out perfect after four years of it.”

“Why don’t you write an editorial about it, Miss Allee?” inquired another.

Ruth lifted her head slowly. “Last Sunday we were told of the mission work among prisoners. Her face was the face of a Madonna. She is giving her life for others, and she is happy. I wonder, is anything worth while except self-sacrifice?”

No one spoke for a minute. Elinor crumbled a fragment of bread between her nervous fingers. It sounded odd to talk like that before all these girls. Of course everybody had such feelings at times, but there was no need to utter them. People would think Ruth was a visionary without reticence or a sense of the fitness of things. Heavy moralizing did not mix well with ice cream whether melted or not.

“I never saw the students so carried away by a lecturer,” she hastened to bridge over the pause, “Myra declared that she could listen all night. But I don’t believe I could listen to any one all night — Patti or Paderewski or the music of the spheres. It is a pity to be tied down to poor human bodies with their see-saw of energy and exhaustion.”

; “‘If woman were mere intellect,” they cried. How could we ex?'”

chanted Myra, “Myself I think it’s fun to have a human body for swimming and skating and breathing — specially breathing. These snapping days every time I put my nose out of doors I meditate on what a good idea it was to create man with an apparatus for breathing. And then I suppose if we didn’t have bodies we couldn’t have brains, and where would our intellects be?”

“Query,” laughed another, “I reckon mine would be exactly where it is now — mainly in my notebooks. I don’t know a fact outside of those precious pages. That reminds me of a written test Monday. Thus I tear myself away. Good-night, everybody!”

Elinor waited until the last one had vanished and Lydia had gone for hot water to wash the tiny spoons. Then she pounced upon Myra.

“Tell me, Myra, did you ever repeat to anybody a single word of what I said once about Ruth’s mother?”

“Of course I didn’t,” exclaimed that young lady promptly, “but —” her voice wavered and she fidgeted in embarrassed hesitancy.

“But what?”

“But — oh, Elinor — there were some girls in front of us quite near — didn’t you notice? — and — and one of them glanced around. You — you said it out loud. Elinor, oh, Elinor, don’t look like that. You didn’t say it so very loud. Maybe she didn’t hear. Of course she didn’t hear. Oh, I am sure she couldn’t have heard. And anyhow it wasn’t any harm. Elinor!”

But Elinor in her turn had gone into her room and shut the door.