{"id":725,"date":"1906-06-01T14:00:00","date_gmt":"1906-06-01T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/?p=725"},"modified":"2024-12-27T18:49:13","modified_gmt":"2024-12-27T18:49:13","slug":"elinors-junior-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/1906\/06\/01\/elinors-junior-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Elinor’s Junior Year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Chapter XIII<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Room for Contemporaries<\/h4>\n\n\n
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Vassar 1900<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The corridors were lined with trunks and alive with girls flying in and out of their rooms. Here was one lifting a tray of crisp white ruffles. There another unfolding herself cautiously from a prolonged investigation of the deepest recesses rose with a pile of books tottering on one arm. A third unwrapped tissue paper from a flower-laden hat with such tender care that a fastidious freshman who was passing at the moment decided on the spot that she was an awfully nice girl because she knew how to treat pretty things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth strolled into sight, her hands full of radiant nasturtiums, and paused to sympathize with a sophomore who was mournfully scraping bits of glass and raspberry jam from a woolly tam-o’shanter. A great rattling of castors beyond the transverse proclaimed the triumphant return of a searching party; and Myra and Elinor straightway appeared trundling a couch-frame by a long cord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Everybody keeps asking if we are settled yet,” complained Myra, rubbing her palm where the string had reddened it, “till we are too tired even to smile.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She began to sit down gingerly for a rest on the edge of the frame, which promptly tilted, depositing her on the floor and sending the opposite side threateningly into the air over her head. Elinor, springing nimbly to the rescue, pushed it back into stable position with a bang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“See here, Myra Dickinson, this is my couch and cost me two dollars and a quarter. In future you will kindly teeter-totter on your own property.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You broke my steamer-chair,” grumbled Myra as she propped her weary self against the wall, “and yet I put a cheerful courage on.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ho! Put a cheerful courage on, did you? Because I happened to be underneath when it went down, that’s why. It wouldn’t have ripped at all if you hadn’t tried to sit on my lap.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Dear, dear! You two are certainly worn out. Run up to the orchard for a change. Never so many apples left before, and girls gathering them in scrapbaskets! The garden is sweet-sweet-sweet.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That sounds like a bird,” said Elinor with a keen glance at the face that seemed to glow under its pallor. “You’re glad to get back this year too, aren’t you? It is a beautiful place, as places go. I wonder if you care for the mode of life here or just the work. Imagine it a house-party or a summer resort with the same people and community intercourse but no insistent work. Would you still love it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“‘Blessed is the man,'” quoted Ruth lightly, “‘who has found his work. Let him ask no other happiness.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ah, yes, but Carlyle doesn’t say, ‘Blessed is the woman.'” Elinor stooped with apparent carelessness to pick up the loop of cord. “Work isn’t enough for a woman, you know. By the way, has Miss Ewers come yet?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I haven’t seen her,” answered the happy voice, “she ought to arrive at any hour now.” Ruth held the spicy flowers before her shining eyes. She was carrying these blossoms to put as a welcome in the room of this friend. For their junior year the other girls had chosen a suite for three on the fourth floor, with Ruth in a single on the fifth at the head of a neighboring stairway. All through the lonely summer Ruth had looked forward joyously to the prospect of living in that single, for was not Miss Ewers’ room close by? She would see her every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m quite fond of Miss Ewers myself,” remarked Myra graciously, “we’ll have her in for fudges every little while and help break up the monotony of being a faculty with no fun going on. Isn’t it lovely to be a junior! Everybody says it is the best year of all.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here the bumping rumble of trucks sounded from the elevator; and Lydia appeared with a cast of Venus under one arm, a pillow under the other, while she marshaled a procession of her household goods drawn by two meek-shouldered men. She halted for a word, though her anxious gaze continued to accompany the desk that lolled unsteadily upon a packingbox, at intervals bestowing sly kicks against the tea-table in front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Girls, isn’t it provoking! Miss Ewers is not coming back this year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a moment of silence. Then Elinor’s hands fell with a thud upon the trunk at her side, and Myra stammered, ” B-b-but how did you hear?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I don’t believe it,” said Ruth slowly as if to herself. I don’t believe it. It isn’t true. It isn’t true.” The flowers in her grasp sent forth a spicier fragrance from their bruised petals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s true enough. Mrs. Vernon has just received a telegram to say that Miss Ewers has accepted a sudden call to another college. Better position, higher pay, more chance of advance, and so on. She’s gone, that’s all. The seniors are disgusted. What is it, Elinor?” for slender fingers had grasped her wrist with aching pressure. She followed Elinor’s warning glance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ruth, I didn’t think. Do you care so much as that? Oh, Ruth, she is only a woman like all the rest of us. We are here with you. We are your friends. We won’t let you miss her. Her successor is a famous teacher. The English course will be better than ever.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth swayed in her place and brushed her hands across her eyes, the flowers dropping unregarded. “It isn’t true,” she repeated dully, “I don’t believe it. It can’t be true. It can’t, it can’t, I tell you. I don’t believe it. Lydia is always making mistakes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia’s brows lifted in indignant amazement. “Do you think that if it were only a rumor \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hush!” Elinor laid a finger on her lips. “She’s dazed. It was a shock, didn’t you see? She doesn’t even hear us. We mustn’t let her go away by herself. There, she almost staggered. Come, Myra.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They sped after the hurrying figure. Elinor reached her first end slipped a firm arm around her waist. Ruth pushed her violently away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Leave me alone!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra sprang forward barely in time to save Elinor from falling, but Ruth passed swiftly on without a backward glance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then followed twilight days for Ruth when the girls were like vague forms gliding by at a mistily indifferent distance. She seemed to have forgotten how to smile. The voluble regret of other students irritated her, worn and nervous as she was after her exhausting summer newspaper work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One afternoon Myra raced up the tower stairs and rattled the knob of Ruth’s locked door. The older girl rose from the bed, where she had been lying face downward, and turned the key. Then stepping quickly to the high window, she stood with her elbows on the sill, her face set steadfastly toward the purple hills beyond the hazy river. Taken aback at sight of the forbidding posture, Myra paused for an abashed moment. Then with a confidingness that had been nourished by her petted home life, she moved nearer and reached out to pat one limp hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know how you feel, Ruth, I know exactly how you feel.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a minute of maddening exasperation Ruth snatched it away. “You do it merely to be kind, and I wish you would leave me alone.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra drew back with a hurt little gasp and stood watching the desperately averted profile. A sudden piteous quiver of the compressed lips won her to hurrying words. “Ruth, we do love you \u2014 all of us. We didn’t at first maybe so much,” she explained honestly, “because you seemed so different from everybody else. But now it wouldn’t be our crowd at all without you. Lydia says that you are one of the finest girls in college and she fully expects to be proud to claim acquaintance some day. Elinor declares that you have wonderful ability, though \u2014 though \u2014 oh, well, she admires you tremendously even if she doesn’t understand you. I’m awfully fond of you, Ruth. Why, the new freshmen have heard of you. I saw one point you out to another yesterday, and \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I used to believe that Miss Ewers cared for me,” cried the sore heart, “but she went away without a thought of how \u2014 how I’d feel. She has written only once, and she speaks about her energy being limited. That means that she does not wish to keep up a correspondence. She \u2014 she likes the other college better \u2014 and the other girls.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra hesitated, her worried glance traveling from the white bedspread to the bare washstand, from the dusty desk to the curtainless window. An empty rose-bowl showed its dingy facets on the stone-ledge brushed by sprays of scarlet woodbine. Ruth’s favorite picture leaned its glass against the wall at her feet. She did not care how her room looked this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra inhaled a long preparatory breath. “You won’t mind, please, Ruth, if I \u2014 if I say something you may not like. Somebody told me this once, and I do believe it is true. A teacher who has seen hundreds of students come and go every year simply cannot care for all who admire her. She has got to hold herself indifferent. Oh, of course,” she added hastily at sign of an out-thrown protesting hand, “she likes some better than others \u2014 far better \u2014 but don’t you see it isn’t the same? She has her own friends \u2014 has had them for years and years and years. And so I think that you ought to try to care most for your contemporaries. Don’t you remember what Emerson says in Compensation<\/em> about letting old angels ‘go that archangels may come in?’ You have always been so much absorbed in Miss Ewers that you neglected others. I’m quite sure that new friends will come to take her place. And anyhow even if she loved you better than her own contemporaries, still you could not ask her to give up such an opportunity as this?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Don’t I know that?” exclaimed Ruth impatiently, “but it \u2014 it hurts.” A silence; then: “I never have anything,” she burst out in passionate resentment, “you and Elinor and Lydia have everything \u2014 father and mother, brothers and sisters, homes and friends and money and all you want. But I \u2014 just when I find one friend dearer than the rest \u2014 who might take the place of all the rest \u2014 I \u2014 I \u2014 lose her. It is not fair. It is not just.” shut her teeth and stared drearily away across the river to the unchanging hills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra swallowed hard twice. Was it always so discouraging to attempt to console people? After all, her sermon had not done one bit of good. Whenever she wanted to help persons, she made them feel worse than ever, and \u2014 and \u2014 Ruth talked dreadfully. Here she caught her breath hard and burying her face in Ruth’s skirt sobbed so heart-brokenly that the original mourner found herself thrust into the role of comforter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You little goose!” she pleaded with caressing pats and awkwardly soothing hugs, “now stop that, won’t you? You ought to stay away from this grumpy individual till she recovers from the blues by herself. I won’t mind after a while \u2014 perhaps. You see, I had planned for special work with Miss \u2014 Miss Ewers, and it takes time to adjust my ideas. It helps a lot to have you so sweet to me. Don’t worry any more about it, you little idiot!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point swift steps fled lightly through the corridor below and mounted the stairs that seemed to creak more joyously under the winged tread. A tap at the door was followed by a vision of Elinor. Her bright face shadowed for a fleeting instant at glimpse of the tears. Myra glanced at her, and quickly the grieving corners of her mouth curved in delighted greeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Something nice has happened,” she sighed expectantly, tucking her damp handkerchief into a ball and nestling her head farther into the hollow of Ruth’s arm. “Go on; I’m all right. Don’t you bother.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No, it hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen, I’m sure. Ruth, it’s a chance for you. One of the big magazines is offering a prize for the best story by a college student. You can do it. You can win it. Think of what that will mean! The announcement is published to-day. As soon as I saw it, I came a-running.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten minutes later Myra’s heels clattered in swift staccato down the narrow stairs in her favorite rapid transit fashion. Dashing after Elinor she overtook her at the entrance to their study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You’ve made her happy, nice girl! Nice sweet dear girl! I want to hug you. She looked as if the sun had suddenly broken through the clouds. Funny person! Fickle, I call it, to forget Miss Ewers just because of an old magazine prize offer.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She doesn’t forget her, but there is no use in brooding; and this will occupy her thoughts. I know how it is to grow melancholy when I haven’t things to distract my mind and keep me busy, I am very glad I noticed the announcement.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So am I. So is Ruth.” In her joyous circling around her friend Myra managed to deposit a kiss on the tip of her ear. “You’re improving, too, same as Lydia. And Ruth looked at you \u2014 did you observe how she looked at you?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why, no!” Elinor lifted her lashes in innocent questioning, but the iris seemed cloudy again as if withdrawn behind a veil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Well, she looked at you as if she liked you a lot \u2014 more than she likes me \u2014 ‘most as much as she always liked Miss Ewers. You’ve always been second, and now I guess you’re going to be first. I’m jealous.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor pressed her lips together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes, sir, I’m jealous. Here I liked you best from the very first glimpse I had of your curly head and charming smile and nice low ladylike voice. Though of course I didn’t see your voice exactly, but I heard it and I liked it and I like you, and Ruth needn’t think she is going to have more than a third of you or maybe half a third \u2014 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I do wish you would hush up!” fretted Elinor, “you’re getting sillier and sillier every day that you live. And she did push me away from her that first day \u2014 you know she did.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter XIV<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

All Kinds of Sense<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“‘Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense,'” chanted Myra one Sunday morning in October as she pulled papers from drawers and pigeonholes and emptied them in a heap. “‘Fine sense and exalted sense’ \u2014. Heigho, Elinor, what are you squealing about?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A centipede, a centipede!” shrieked a voice from Elinor’s bedroom, “come rapidly and stand by me while I throw my shoe at it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Pshaw! Take my shoe. I ‘sackerifice’ it on the altar of friendship because you object to having yours contaminated. Open the window and shoo him out. He never did you any harm. Heigho, heigho!” the papers rustled energetically under her fingers, “‘Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as \u2014 ‘ Well, what’s the matter now?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor had emerged, stepping warily, and stood hugging herself, her delicate face screwed into an expression of shrinking distaste. “See there! A lot of horrid little fat worms curling over the rug. O \u2014 oh! take them away!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hm-m, only three \u2014 no four. They crawled out of my chestnuts on the plate under the tea-table,” explained Myra, rising with an envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, “I’ve picked up seven already this morning. Don’t be afraid; they won’t bite.” She stooped to shove each one gently upon the paper and deposit it outside the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Be sure you wash that pencil,” shuddered Elinor, “or throw it away altogether. How can you bear to touch it? Once I knew a girl who allowed her white mice to run up her sleeves. Ugh!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra had returned to her fluttering papers. “‘Fine sense’ \u2014 that’s your kind. Miss Offitt \u2014 ‘and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense.’ That is a quotation, permit me to enlighten you; I did not make it up myself. Heigho! eight letters to be answered to-day. ‘Fine sense and exalted sense \u2014 ‘ Good morning, my lady Lydia, did you get all the plum bread you wanted for breakfast?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I never eat plum bread,” replied Lydia with her customary reverence for fact whether familiar or not, “it is not nearly so nutritious as whole wheat. Ah!” she raised the window and inhaled the crisp sweet air, “what a beautiful morning!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Honest? Who’d have thought it! Heigho! ‘Fine sense and exalted \u2014’ Listen, Lydia, the common sense belongs to you all right. Where’s Ruth?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Gone to Cedar Hill for a walk all alone. She wouldn’t listen when I urged her to wait for company. She knows that Mrs. Vernon forbids us to go far into the country unless in parties of three or more. She flung back her head in that restive fashion she has, and glared at me. It’s another mood. She is queerer than ever this year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

” \u2014 ‘and exalted sense’ \u2014 that’s Ruth’s kind. But it isn’t half so useful as common sense. Girls,” she sprang up regardless of scattered sheets, “let’s all go to the Hill this bee-yutiful morning, and maybe I shall find some chestnuts. We have two hours before service.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What variety of sense is yours?” inquired Elinor with an air of gloomy interest, and answered herself quickly, “Nonsense! Oho, ho, ho!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the avenue of maples strolled the three girls, with the yellow leaves and the scarlet wafting slowly down in the sunshine to lie glowing underfoot. In the lane beyond the orchard, Myra lingered to knock down a few apples from a tree that leaned invitingly over the stone wall. Farther on she loitered to poke hopefully amid the grass under a chestnut tree. When finally she arrived at the brow of the hill, she found Lydia already seated on a stone, her eyes speculative over the principles of descriptive narrative while they rested on the gorgeous foliage of the woods below. Elinor leaned against a cedar, her gaze following a speck that went zigzaging across a field stacked with golden corn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There goes Ruth \u2014 and yet I am almost certain that she saw us approaching. She must be on her way to the old ‘deserted mansion’ as the girls call it. It’s two miles distant on the loneliest road!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I warned her at breakfast,” said Lydia in a tone of resigned disapproval, “and she paid no heed. We shall have barely time now to return and dress for services.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I want to visit the ‘deserted mansion,’ “teased Myra. “Somebody’s told me that it is a thrilling place with a mouldy lake and a barred window and ghosts very likely. Ruth has been there more than once. Elinor, let’s chase after her. I haven’t used all my cuts yet this semester; so I can skip church. Besides that, I think we really ought to go along to take care of her.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is only October, and the three cuts must last till February. You’d better not,” advised provident Lydia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor twisted her fingers together. “What makes her do such things? Is every genius so queer and uncomfortable to have around? She exaggerates every interest into a question of life and death. First it was college, then Miss Ewers. Not even she herself knows what next. Come, Myra, we’ve got to watch her. There’s no use going to church when I couldn’t sit still because of worrying.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia remained statuesque and contemplative on the summit till the two slender figures were half way down the slope. Then rising with abruptness she shook herself chidingly and started after them. Myra heard the click of her low broad heel on the pebbles, and turned to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s right.” she called gaily, “you’re improving steadily, dear mellowing Lydia. Misa Howard playing truant on such a beautiful morning! Look at the trees and the sky. Breathe \u2014 breathe down deep. See Ruth throw back her head and stretch out her arms to the wonderful world. Aren’t you glad you came?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On they roamed across a meadow besprinkled with feathery lavender asters and sturdy spikes of yellow snap-dragon. Into the radiant woods they followed where far ahead among the trunks Ruth’s tall form disappeared and reappeared, swaying in the shadows from sunlight to leaf-light. Along the winding road bordered with vine-covered walls wild grapes reached down purple clusters and thorn-trees jeweled with redhaws flamed in settings of dark evergreens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A shrubful of nannie-berries at the foot of an ancient vineyard brimmed Myra’s cup to overflowing. “I know I shall never, never, never be so perfectly and absolutely happy again!” she declared rapturously scanning the meagre branches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I think I shall write up this walk for a daily theme,” announced Lydia with a keen glance traveling across the road to the “deserted mansion.” “Sweep of neglected lawn, gate on broken hinges, piazza warped, shutters loose. What is the word to convey the impression \u2014 the atmosphere? Abandoned \u2014 ruined \u2014 deserted \u2014 ah, forsaken! It is a forsaken old place.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I fail to spy a barred window.” said Myra rubbing her cheek against Lydia’s shoulder in excess of bliss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There’s Ruth,” whispered Elinor intent upon glimpses between the ragged spruces of a gloomy little lake, rock-encircled. The slight figure flitting along the shore glided into a tumble-down boathouse. Then something cracked, and a splash in scum-thick bubbles brought the girls flying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They discovered Ruth sitting rather breathless on a rotten railing, one foot pressed against a waterlogged rowboat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nothing but a snake,” she said, “it startled me at first and a board snapped. Let’s explore.” She was lawless from excitement. “It’s a haunted house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

; “‘Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You should not have run away alone,” rebuked Lydia surveying the prospect with professional interest in her daily theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I have taken care of myself so far \u2014 years and years. See! I dare, I dare, I dare!” At the edge of the water she went leaping like a witch from slippery rock to rock, even poising for a heart’s beat on a rotten boat \u2014 its planks slowly settling beneath her weight \u2014 before bounding on again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ruth, stop, stop!” shrieked Myra hopping up and down in an agony of apprehension, ” come back to land, you horrid, horrid girl! I want to shake you \u2014 shake you \u2014 shake you!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth mocking her whirled farther and farther, more and more recklessly, till a glance backward showed her that Elinor had sunk down suddenly at the foot of a tree and with closed eyes was resting her head against the trunk. Ruth sped to her, the wild gleams quenched from the elfin features, the eyes sober and steady again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, my dear!” she cried softly, “oh, my dear! my dear! I did not know you cared. I will be good. See, I will not do it any more. Look up, Elinor! Look, dear! I’m all right”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor’s eyes flashed open and then shut swiftly again to hide the dismay in their depths. Ruth thought she cared enough to faint at sight of the danger. Why, oh, why had she yielded to that contemptible weak quivering of the knees? Ruth thought she cared, but she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Elinor sat up and smiled a dim sweet smile at the repentant genius. “Never mind, Ruth,” she said, “only the water is so unpleasant and scummy that it would surely have ruined your clothes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is full of algae,” contributed Lydia, “doubt less it also contains vorticellse and paramsecia and all sorts of fascinating creatures. Girls, yon don’t realize how much you have missed by not electing biology. For instance, the earthworm \u2014 oh, the beautiful interior of the earthworm!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I didn’t mean to startle you, Elinor,” persisted Ruth, “it was an experience. That is my business; I’ve got to do things and feel things and then try to express them. In my story for the prize contest I think I may use this haunted lake. I should like to put you into a story sometime, Elinor, as a heroine.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Me?” she exclaimed in quick alarm, “in a story? Oh, don’t. I’m not worth it. It’s lovely of you to flatter me so, but you couldn’t make me into a heroine. I’m a regular coward about being hurt. Lydia is the prima donna for you, or Myra either. She would keep the story lively. Why, where has she vanished?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She is poking about in the rubbish around that shattered conservatory,” answered Lydia as she rose from her resting place on a comfortable stump, “she disappeared half a minute ago beyond that comer at the back. By the way, Ruth, in your story you must start with the plot, not with the scenery. Don’t you remember how Miss Ewers told us in our freshmen year that the plot is the main thing, with the characters next, and conversation and scenery last? An incident is something which happens and something that comes out of that happening.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nothing ever happens at college,” said Elinor springing hastily to her feet in time to avoid Ruth’s outstretched hand, “you’ll be obliged to make it all up out of your head, Ruth. Put a lot of thrill in it \u2014 adventures and fights and blizzards and tornadoes and shipwrecks and earthquakes and volcanoes and people that live and move and do things. Don’t let them maunder over psychology and moulder over books, as we do. Oh, if I were a man and could get out into the world where there is action, the rush and whirl of events, air to breathe \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The air is very good here, Elinor,” said Lydia, “come away from that malarial pool. What an absolutely perfect day it is with the crystal sunshine lying on the quiet fields and that deserted old house! Nothing moves; even the grasses are still.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The very windows seem asleep,” murmured Ruth softly, “behind those dull panes who knows what dead eyes \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Help, help, help!” Myra sprang into sight and darted toward them, panting, stumbling, leaping across the tangled lawn, while behind her a ragged old woman with a savage face and straggling black hair plunged awkwardly in pursuit, brandishing her fists. Something long and bright gleamed in her hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Run!” Ruth seized Elinor’s shoulders and started her with a push toward the road. “Run!” She dashed to Myra, sent her with a shove after Elinor, and began to jump up and down, waving her arms. “Go back! Go back! Go back!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia \u2014 sensible Lydia \u2014 glanced around swiftly in search of a weapon, saw a stout stick and a slender twig lying side by side, snatched at the twig and advanced to the rescue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The old woman stopped short about ten paces in front of the two heroines \u2014 one hopping to and fro and shooing her back as if she were a chicken, the other standing firm and impressive with a small switch upraised threateningly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Waal, I never!” she screamed hoarsely, “Git off my land, and stay off, I tell ye! I’ll hev ye took up fer trespass. Git! I won’t hev no more gals prying ’round my kitchen, college or not. Now git, will ye?” The metal-backed comb glittered in her grasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth and Lydia turned and mildly “got.” The four girls climbed silently over the stone wall and walked away down the winding road whence they had come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After they had safely passed the second curve, Myra recovered her power of speech. “I was exploring and peeked through the window and there she was combing her hair. Then she chased me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How did she know you were from the college?” inquired Lydia, who had regained her scientific curiosity in the interval since the ignominious retreat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I \u2014 I guess I hollered it when she started to run for me,” confessed the craven, “people excuse a good deal to college girls, you know, because we are having the fun of our lives, and it adds three years to our youth. A crowd of girls were out here last week and carried back a pile of apples.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ah, that explains her attitude. She is doubtless only the care-taker. I wish we had been slightly more dignified.” And Lydia sighed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You see, I wasn’t a heroine, Ruth,” said Elinor, “I ran.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I ran too,” chuckled Myra, “crackie! I thought she was going to scalp me. Didn’t she look like a raving crazy maniac! And there we were all alone two miles from everybody, with not a house on the road or a buggy in sight. Two miles! Eheu! we’re two miles from our Sunday dinner.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I can’t help it.” Elinor dropped upon a convenient log. “Go on, if you want to. This is where I stop for at least five minutes. I feel as limp as a rag, and the trees keep dancing, and every little while the path jumps over the stonewall. I’m sorry.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth flew to her side. “It’s been too much for you. Lean on me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia regarded her keenly. “You are pale. Try to brace up, Elinor. It wouldn’t do for you to go to pieces away out here.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Let’s make a stretcher. Wouldn’t that be fun! Oh, no, of course I don’t mean that exactly, dear sweet Elinor. You just sit there as long as you feel like it, and then we’ll start and peg ahead so slowly that you won’t know you’re moving hardly. ‘Put one foot before the other, and then put t’other before the one.’ It’s easy. While you’re waiting, I’m going over to gather that clematis in the woods there. Maybe we’ll be in time for dinner after all.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I think I shall go too, if you don’t need me, Elinor,” said Lydia, “it will be a good chance to collect some foliage so that I can describe it accurately in my theme. If I deal with the subject in an impressionistic manner, blocking; out masses of crude colors \u2014 red, yellow, russet, crimson, and so on \u2014 without entering into details of streaks and veins, and shadings, I’m afraid I shan’t have enough material to fill the two pages. I shan’t be gone long.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor watched the energetic figure cross the grassy lane with rapid steps, pick its deliberate way through a strip of meadow, and move from tree to tree for a business-like examination of the leaves. She turned to Ruth with an involuntary little half smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes,” said Ruth in answer to the unspoken appeal for comprehension, “Lydia is amusing \u2014 all the more so because she has absolutely no sense of humor.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor’s eyes darkened with swift displeasure and she bent her head aside to conceal the resentful frown between her brows. Ruth had no right to criticize her friend in words. It was impertinent. It was assuming that the tie between Ruth and Elinor was closer than that between Lydia and Elinor. Ruth was an outsider really; she did not belong to the exclusive inner circle where Myra and Lydia had a place. Such frankness in her was an offense all the more distasteful because it had been unconsciously invited by that little half smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Lovely weather, isn’t it?” said Elinor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth glanced up absently. “I thought at first that the old woman was actually a maniac,” she began, with restless fingers prying up fragments of bark from the lightning-blasted tree on which they were sitting ; “do you know that it is easier to defend yourself against a wild beast than against a violently crazy person? You cannot terrify some madmen because they haven’t sense enough to be afraid. A beast has the power of reason and can run from harm. But for pure recklessness take a maniac in a frenzy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor shivered nervously. “I’d rather not think of it just now, Ruth,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“My mother is in an asylum,” continued Ruth softly, “it was caused by overwork before I was born. I have never spoken of it to anyone else, Elinor, but I know that you will understand. When I think of her pacing to and fro, to and fro, in that long gloomy corridor, while I am here \u2014 her daughter \u2014 in this wonderful place, with such wonderful friends! Oh, Elinor!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Impulsively Elinor stretched out her hand. Ruth took it and held it against her cheek for a moment. “Dear Elinor!” she whispered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor moved a few inches away, drawing back her hand as she did so with a smile that seemed to glow with caressing sympathy. Ruth saw only the smile, and responded to it with such an expression in her eyes that Elinor wanted to scream: “Don’t, oh, don’t! You mustn’t like me so much!” Instead of that she smiled again before gazing anxiously around in search of Myra to the rescue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through the rest of the day the consciousness of this new claim rankled in Elinor’s mind. She felt as if she were being helplessly wound about in the meshes of an unwelcome friendship. Ruth was presuming and intrusive and selfishly egotistical to impose upon her the burden of such an intimate secret. What difference did it make to her \u2014 Elinor Offitt \u2014 whether an ill fate or a fair fortune had befallen Ruth Allee’s ancestors? Ruth Allee was merely a temporary acquaintance thrust upon her by the exigencies of college life. The final snapping of the factitious bond would be one of the anticipated joys of Commencement day. How could she endure the bother almost two years longer? Hour by hour after the strain of the morning’s experience Elinor felt herself sliding nearer and nearer to the edge of her self-control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toward the end of that Sunday afternoon one of Myra’s friends climbed the stairs to invite the four girls down to meet a guest in the senior parlor. With their privacy defended by an engaged sign, they were variously occupied \u2014 Lydia reading, Elinor lying down, Ruth revising proof, Myra writing letters. The visitor took the sign down and then knocked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I simply had to see you,” she announced, and as my principles do not permit me to rap over engaged signs, I removed it first.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This surprisingly easy solution of a difficulty often recurring in Myra’s sociable career was assimilated with a wicked sparkle behind demure lashes. Certainly they would be delighted to spend the half hour before dinner in the senior parlor. The frosty lamplighted dusk found them there in the pretty drawing-room. Myra and Elinor sat in one big chair; Ruth perched on the piano-bench; Lydia was gracious to the guest and her hostesses on the narrow divan. Around the claw-footed table other seniors were reading quietly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Now, Socrates,” began the mistress of ceremonies, addressing Myra, “say something. What is justice?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Don’t you know that even?” exclaimed Miss Ready-Tongue, lifting herself erect and proceeding to reel off her nonsense more gaily than usual because of the exhilarating morning out-of-doors. Every time she paused in fleeting diffidence at sight of the watching faces one of the others interpolated, “By my soul, Socrates, I do not know what I do think.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the gong struck for supper nearly everybody in the room had joined the hilarious circle to listen to a dissertation on Emerson as a corrupter of youth because he had said, “Trust thyself,” whereas Solomon, the wisest man, had declared that “in the multitude of counsellors “a thing is established.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the corridor Elinor drifted beside Myra on their way to the dining-room. “Did you notice how she introduced you?” It was as ‘Miss Dickinson, one of the most entertaining of our college freaks.’ A freak!” she repeated tauntingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Did she really?” ejaculated Myra in a gratified tone, “does she truly consider me original? Why, I just go ahead and say the first thing that comes into my mind.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’ve frequently wondered how you did it,” laughed Elinor, “however you appear impervious to the implication that you are peculiar, queer, unique, abnormal, eccentric, a museum exhibit, in short a freak!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Just like Ruth,” sighed Myra blissfully, “only she is a genuine genius and has ideas all the time. The difference is that I shall get over it while she won’t. You remember that Walpole was not certain whether a young man owed his brilliancy to ‘parts’ or to mere youthful spirits. With Ruth it is indisputably ‘parts.’ “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I dare say,” said Elinor listlessly, “we won’t quarrel over her ability. Let’s talk about something more interesting.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The seniors admire her too,” went on Myra musingly, “Two minutes ago just before you caught up to me I heard one of them say, ‘Miss Allee has a fascinating face. Did you observe her while Myra Dickinson was jabbering?'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Gibbering,” corrected Elinor softly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“And the other one answered, ‘I caught a glimpse of her while she was gazing at Miss Offitt in an adoring way. Miss Offitt is a sweet and charming girl, but this was worship. It is mighty foolish, especially in a genius who ought to live for her work and not care too much about ordinary people.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor was breathing quickly. “Myra! Did they say that about me? Do they talk of Ruth and me together \u2014 together?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, I guess so,” she nodded, “what are you fussing about? Everybody knows that Ruth admires you next to Miss Ewers, and now she’s gone. Ruth isn’t ashamed of showing she likes her friends. She has written sonnets to you and maybe she will put you in her prize story. Anybody else would be flattered.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Flattered!” groaned Elinor, “flattered to be held up as a laughing-stock before the whole college! To be made ridiculous by such idiotic exaggeration, silly sheep’s eyes, heart on her sleep for daws to peck at! Flattered! Her mother is crazy, crazy, do you hear? She herself is next door to it. Her wild moods, that insane leaping around the lake, her \u2014 her lack of taste. She is worrying me wild. Keep her away from me. Don’t let her touch me or speak to me. Sit between her and me at the table to-night. Please, please, don’t let her come near me or I shall scream. Always \u2014 always sit between her and me! Don’t let her look at me! I am afraid of her. I don’t like her. Her mother is crazy already, and she is a genius. I hate, hate, hate \u2014 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth who for the past minute had been sauntering unobserved behind the two girls stood quietly where she had stopped until the clutch of pain in her left side was loosened. Then slipping into a side stairway she climbed up to her solitary room, stumbled blindly in, and locked the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter XV<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A Screw Loose<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

Elinor endeavored to sit up hospitably. “Are you hungry, Lydia?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

“That? Oh, it’s a box that reached us at noon.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ah, I comprehend. Then it was not entirely the dinner.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She simply lives behind an engaged<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What they do think is that she hasn’t any friends,” put in Elinor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014 seven hundred and ninety-nine strong \u2014 gazes at her \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“\u2014 aghast,” continued Myra in triumph over anticipating the word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“‘And this from you?’ he said,” murmured Elinor, “‘And ’twere not for thy shapely head \u2014'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“‘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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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 \u2014 and \u2014. Well, she hoped you would. Will you?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes,” said Ruth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014”; for the heroine’s cheeks were scarlet \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I left the ice cream on the radiator.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor hurried forward out of ear-shot, her hands unconsciously clenched. How cruel \u2014 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 \u2014 Ruth whose life had always been hard and unhappy \u2014 dear old Ruth!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The guests arrived at the study to find Myra sorrowing over a dish of floating pink and green and brown liquid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s pretty good.” Ruth dipped a spoonful for a cautious trial. “It tastes like \u2014” she wrinkled her brow reflectively, “well, like Alice in Wonderland, you know. It sounds like Alice, too, don’t you think? \u2014 warm ice cream.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 a senior who had traveled from England to Japan and spent two winters in Rome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So they ought to be,” agreed Lydia sagely, but \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This is surely a selfish place,” remarked a guest, “when I am ill \u2014 just too miserable to study \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why don’t you write an editorial about it, Miss Allee?” inquired another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

; “‘If woman were mere intellect,” they cried. How could we ex?'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

chanted Myra, “Myself I think it’s fun to have a human body for swimming and skating and breathing \u2014 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?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Query,” laughed another, “I reckon mine would be exactly where it is now \u2014 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!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

“Of course I didn’t,” exclaimed that young lady promptly, “but \u2014” her voice wavered and she fidgeted in embarrassed hesitancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“But what?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“But \u2014 oh, Elinor \u2014 there were some girls in front of us quite near \u2014 didn’t you notice? \u2014 and \u2014 and one of them glanced around. You \u2014 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!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Elinor in her turn had gone into her room and shut the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter XVI<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A Day of Events<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It was a day crowded with events. The first event was the finishing by Ruth of her prize story in the early dusk of the winter morning. After fastening the sheets together she sat staring at it somberly, her arms folded across her narrow chest. Once she put out her hands and seized the manuscript with a sudden fierce motion as if about to tear it in two. Then the bell rang for breakfast; and with a little reckless shrug of her shoulders she slipped the papers into a drawer of the shabby desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second event was her stopping in at the study on her way down the corridor and waiting for company. She stood at the door for a minute, looking wistfully around at the books and pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I suppose,” she said as Myra presented herself with both shoes laced and her belt almost buckled, “that the walls in a hospital are generally bare.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Maybe so and maybe no,” was the frivolous reply, “what’s the dif? Dear Ruth, are you planning to associate with me on this journey down the corridor?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“If I am invited,” she answered and shut her lip grimly at sound of Elinor’s voice : “Quick, Ruth! I am asking first. May I have the pleasure of escorting you? There, I beat you that time, Myra Dickinson!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The end of the squabble was that Ruth entered the dining-room with a rival hanging on either arm. Once she forgot and nearly laughed outright under the cross-fire of raillery. Just then she felt Elinor’s clasp loosen and then press more firmly again with a convulsive force that hurt. Glancing sidewise she observed that the delicate face was very pale and the gray eyes darker than usual were fixed straight ahead. In her wonder over this curious change from the preceding gayety, she did not notice that a group of girls at a table had drawn closer together to whisper and gaze furtively at Ruth herself. But Elinor had noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third event trod upon the heels of the second. At the ringing of the gong for the earliest recitation Myra burst into the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He was walking down the hall just as fast as anything, and away up at the transverse came the professor hurrying after him. She beckoned to me to stop him, and I said his name out loud, and he turned around and waited for her. It was the German grammar man!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He is to lecture this evening,” said Lydia absently picking up a fountain-pen as she moved toward the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m going to a concert in town instead and perhaps we’ll take dinner at the restaurant if Myra has any money left,” declared Elinor with vivacity a shade exaggerated. “By the way, Miss Howard, may I request that the next time you desire to embezzle another person’s pen, you will kindly pass out via Miss Dickinson’s desk? She doesn’t care a hang. For why? ‘Cause it’s broken. See?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra swerved lazily from contemplation of the snowy landscape outside to remark that Miss Offitt’s slanginess was ceasing to be even an incident, let alone an event or an episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You two are the rudest creatures to each other I ever saw,” commented Lydia, while Ruth, who \u2014 strangely enough! \u2014 was again waiting on the threshold, regarded them soberly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I like it,” she said. She looked at Elinor who was bending her head over a sheaf of history notes, and then turned to Myra. “If you really intend to go into town for dinner, Myra, will you take a manuscript in to be typewritten for me?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, it’s the story!” Myra gave a jubilant little skip. “It’s finished at last. It will be ready in time. And you’ll win. Hip, hip, hurrah! Now we’ll show the girls! Ah, Ruth, wait a minute. Is Elinor in it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes,” answered Ruth slowly, ” Elinor \u2014 is \u2014 in \u2014 it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor bent her head lower over her notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as Ruth had gone, Myra attacked her briskly. “Elinor, why didn’t you say something? She has really put you in the story.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Say something?” echoed Elinor almost in a groan, “say something? What could I say? It’s done now. She has written the story. It is her great chance. Do you advise me to interfere now?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Interfere?” exclaimed Myra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor swung around in her chair. “Myra Dickinson! You think it is an honor. You think it is flattering. You think I like it. Like it! You think it is \u2014 is \u2014 nice. Like it! Oh \u2014 my \u2014 soul!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh-o-oh!” Myra was beginning to see. “You don’t know what she has said about you, and you’re afraid people will recognize the portrait. And if she has idealized you, they’ll smile ; and if she has painted your faults \u2014 only I don’t believe she knows yet that you have any \u2014 they’ll \u2014 they’ll talk.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes,” assented Elinor, ” they’ll undoubtedly talk.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Well,” Myra brightened at the new idea, “the solution is simple enough. If you don’t want to be in it, tell her to take you out of it before it is typewritten.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Go away!” Elinor turned back to her notes with a jerk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, I understand. You’re afraid it may spoil the story, and you wouldn’t ruin her chance for any thing. You’re willing to make a little sacrifice for \u2014 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Go away!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

” \u2014 for her sake because you are sorry and you really do care \u2014 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Will you go away?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra slid hastily across the rug. “Yes, yes, you old Gorgon, you! Stop glaring like that. Anything to oblige. I’m going, going, gone!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor dropped back into her chair alone. ” A little sacrifice!” she repeated softly, “a little sacrifice!” The rubber band on one of the packets snapped under her fingers and the papers flew scattering far and wide. “A little<\/em> sacrifice!” She flung out her arms over the desk and buried her face from the light. “Oh \u2014 my \u2014 soul!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next event of the day was the discovery by Myra of an “Excellent” in red ink on her written topic in history. Overjoyed at this smile of fortune she began immediately to ponder how to treat the next one. After emitting sundry pale flashes of ideas throughout luncheon time, she was impelled to benefit Elinor by sharing the fire of inspiration toward the best endeavor. Her opportunity occurred while they were skating on the lake that afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You ought to try harder yourself,” Myra counseled earnestly, “it is a great satisfaction, creates a warm and pleasant sensation within, and also helps to raise the standard of scholarship.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ook-a-rookaroo!” crowed Elinor, impudently jerking her elbows at every syllable, “don’t talk shop in recreation hour. Come on. I’ll race you to that chair.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one end of the white-bordered lake a game of hockey was being played by short-skirted girls bent angularly as they went darting after the skipping ball. In a smooth corner others were frisking through a square dance, while a venturesome row “snapped the whip” farther on, and a long line of hilarious seniors skated single-file, each with her hands on the shoulders of the one in front. With an underclass admirer supporting her timid steps, Lydia was taking a first lesson in the art of balancing her stately proportions on narrow blades of steel. Other beginners less fortunate in their ability to attract self-immolating devotion stumbled about by themselves. A chair disconsolately overturned lay at the edge of the ice. Elinor, reaching it first, propped it unsteadily upon its three remaining legs and sat tentatively down for a rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra swaying to and fro before her counted off on her fingers: “Item: a girl; item: skates on the girl; item iterum: reposing on a broken chair. What’s the inference? Prexie will catch you if you don’t watch out. Result: notice on the bulletin board about destroying college furniture in learning to skate by pushing a chair.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, no!” cried Elinor in swift distress, “I wouldn’t have anybody think I did it under any consideration. It isn’t honest.” She sped away to a distance secure from the likelihood of compromising implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Wait, Elinor!” Myra shot in pursuit, calling out while passing a beginner prone to frequent floping, “There is Miss Gay \u2014 on skates!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How unkind!” sighed the floored one, but Myra was beyond reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Now, Elinor, what I want to know is why you object to being regarded as careless about furniture though you do not mind one bit if people say you are indifferent to your work.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The chair isn’t mine, while my work concerns nobody except myself, you see. It’s my own life and my own time and I intend to live it to suit myself. If I estimate other interests of greater importance than digging in the library or dazzling in recitations, whose business is it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Lots of persons’ business. Ever so many girls sort of look up to you and follow your lead because you have a way with you. You’re a granddaughter, too. They get it into their silly heads that it isn’t quite the proper caper \u2014 hm-m, jig \u2014 ah, posture, I mean \u2014 to aim high intellectually. They notice this and they notice that. They put two and two together \u2014 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Lydia says it isn’t polite to put two and two together,” disputed Elinor, be a lady, a charming, agreeable, superficial lady.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, hush, simpleton! Somebody said to me yesterday, ‘Miss Offitt has the reputation of studying less than any other girl in college. I haven’t looked into a book since the fourth hour, have you?’ And I sat on her,” continued Myra emphatically, “I sat on her so hard \u2014 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point a cynical twig, underfoot, sent her skates wildly slipping and deposited the censor of public morals in a tangled heap on the ice. Before she could collect her various extremities into their normal compactness, the grudgeful Miss Gay scrambled laboriously by, exclaiming sweetly as she passed, “There is Miss Dickinson \u2014 on skates.” She confided afterward to Elinor that nobody could possibly imagine how much it had cost her to get there in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There’s Ruth!” Myra darted away with Elinor, their hands interlocked. ” See! Prexie is stopping to speak to her. Hasn’t he a talent for looking right through a person without seeming to! He is studying her awfully hard; I can tell from the way he smiles. Ah, I beg your pardon, little one. Did I bump into a real live freshman?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big fresh-colored child with a red tam-o’shanter above her long braid swung around clumsily in a circle before recovering her imperiled balance. “It’s my fault,” she answered sociably, “I shouldn’t have stood here in the middle of everything \u2014 and me taking up so much room anyhow. But I happened to be watching Prexie. That girl he is talking to over there by the road \u2014 is she the one they say is going crazy? She writes weird things for the Monthly, and has spells of being out of her head and wanders off by herself and acts queer. She does look wild, don’t you think? All the girls are wondering \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Stop!” Elinor thrust Myra to one side. “That is a wicked slander. It is a cruel lie. Ruth Allee is no more crazy than I am. She is sane and strong and sweet and \u2014 and all right \u2014 every bit all right. And I wish you’d tell everybody so. It is a wicked cruel lie. I \u2014 I beg your pardon,” her voice faltered, ” Miss \u2014 I don’t know your name, but won’t you please contradict that rumor whenever you hear it? It isn’t true. Please. I shall be ever so much obliged.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The freshman regained her breath. “Not at all. Why, of course I will do it. It is the most interesting thing; everybody says so. And Prexie must have heard the rumor too, I guess. Maybe that is why he is speaking to her so long. Isn’t he dear! Goodbye.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra dashed after her friend. “Elinor, wait Where are you going?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I am going to take off my skates and walk with Ruth, and you are going too. We’ve got to show those gossiping idiots that she has plenty of friends who stick to her and believe in her and \u2014 and love her and care for her reputation. The girls are jealous, some of them, because she is a genius, and the others haven’t anything else to talk about. We’ll show them. We’ll sh-show them. We’ll \u2014 we’ll \u2014 show \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Here’s my handkerchief, Elinor,” whispered Myra a few minutes later, “it’s clean and dry.” Then she considerately turned away to watch the beautiful big round moon come sailing up over the evergreens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That moonrise had the pomp and majesty of an additional event. It was by no means the last, however, that marked this winter day. At dinner the conversation quivered with accounts of mysterious thefts in the different buildings. One teacher had missed forty dollars from her bureau drawer. A senior had lost a new suit and hat worth eighty-five dollars. A man at twilight had sprung from behind a spruce tree and snatched a purse from a junior’s wrist. A tall woman in black, closely veiled, had been seen stealing through the corridor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Chapel time two freshmen had been frightened in the lower hall by a masked man who proved afterward to be the watchman with a toothache. The German grammar man found his audience distrait, and the concert in town was startled from its polite enjoyment by the screaming of an hysterical woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that night about one o’clock the laundry at the college burned to the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The maids who slept on the upper floors had all escaped except one. She had climbed to the roof and was shrieking for help while the flames roared below and licked up over the cornice. From windows in the dormitories students leaned out to watch the rapid movements of the firemen with hose and ladders. Elinor was wringing her hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the rescue capable Lydia ordered her two roommates back into the study. “I shall make you some chocolate to soothe your nerves for sleep,” she announced in tones muffled somewhat by the moderate depths of their pantry shelf. “Beat this mixture one minute, Myra, till I fetch Ruth.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one minute lengthened to fifteen before she reappeared with her grave face more excited than through the thrilling hour of the fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Girls,” she said, “Ruth has decided to give up this selfish college life and become a trained nurse. She is planning to leave to-morrow. She has been thinking about it for several weeks; and to-night when she saw the heroism of the firemen she knew in a flash that nothing is worth while except self-sacrifice.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra opened her mouth very wide, shut it again, dropped the spoon, covered her face with her hands, and burst into tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor tossed aside the pillow which she had been hugging against her lips while she listened. She picked up the spoon and began to stir vigorously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Myra Dickinson!” she snapped, “I do wish you would get over being such a baby. If Ruth Allee wishes to leave us, let her go, I say. It’s her own affair. Everybody knows she is crazy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Well, I must say!” ejaculated Lydia, lifting her arms and letting them fall in a gesture of helpless dismay, “Ruth renouncing college, Myra crying, Elinor cross! We certainly need that hot chocolate in a hurry.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter XVI<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cela M’est \u00c9gal<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The following morning, which was Saturday, saw Lydia rise in the early darkness, determined to dissuade Ruth from her new resolve. On the foregoing night even Lydia had been infected by the prevailing atmosphere of excitement, and she had accepted the plan with rather awed approval. Reflection, however, evolved cooler views \u2014 all the cooler for the depression of spirits in the natural swinging of the pendulum from exaltation. In the clear-sighted hour before dawn she perceived sharply outlined the folly of unreasonable heroics. Up on the instant and away to the tower room, where cautious steps told of packing betimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Listen, Ruth,” she whispered, closing the door and adjusting the transom in mindfulness of sleepers behind thin partitions on all sides, “I’ve been thinking it over, and it won’t do at all. You’re not strong enough for such an occupation. Furthermore your talents lie in a different sphere; that is exceedingly important. Finally even if you should persist that this business of nursing is unmistakably your life work, you ought first to finish the college course without doubt. If you believe in education, you will understand clearly that the better the preparation the better the service.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth lifted heavy eyes. “I have considered every objection,” she replied, “and I have decided.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia felt an unaccustomed sensation as if buffeting against a stone wall. She glanced almost pleadingly about the dim room where the light burned low for fear of disturbing neighbors by the reflection on the white ceiling in the hall. Through the window the western sky was blanching to gray above the distant hills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She sought a foothold for argument. “Tell me again exactly why you have resolved to go.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth drew a tired breath, for she too was troubled secretly by a reaction of mood. “It is my duty,” she said, “the world is full of sorrow and suffering and nothing is worth while except to try to help. Here I am helping no one. I am even injuring some by my very presence. I irritate and annoy without intending to do so. My departure would mean the removal of a wearisome burden. Another can accomplish more good in my position \u2014 make a better editor and find greater joy in the work. Hundreds of applicants are denied admission to this college every year. I can leave my place to be occupied by some girl who has been disappointed about entering. There’s economy for you. The sum of human happiness will be increased on every score.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nonsense!” snapped Lydia brusquely. “It’s fine and unselfish in you to think that, though it is not one bit true. Come, now, Ruth, listen to reason.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She listened, indeed, passing to and fro engaged in folding, sorting, and arranging. Lydia talked with her habitual fluency till smitten with a sudden exasperating conviction of the uselessness of it all, she departed abruptly to dress for breakfast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the study she discovered the two girls moving about with a subdued gravity as if waiting for news from a sick-room. At the report of her ill-success Myra sputtered, but Elinor was silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’ll speak to her myself,” declared Myra, “do you realize that it will break up our crowd if she goes away? Maybe that has not occurred to her. We four have always stuck together, and \u2014 oh, dear me! \u2014 we’ll miss her dreadfully. She always understands.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ah!” Lydia paused with the ribbons of her dressing-gown half untied, “I never thought of it in that light before, and yet I see that it is true. Though Ruth is different from us and the rest of the girls, we are fond of her because she understands.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra was delighted at her own hit. “Yes, of course, that is where her genius lies \u2014 sympathetic insight united to power of expression. I read that definition somewhere. I understand you; Elinor understands you and me; Ruth understands all three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that I understand Ruth a little, even about this ridiculous scheme of leaving college. Just give me a chance to convince her of her mistake! “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor turned around from her diligent and unnecessary rearrangement of ornaments on the bookcase. “Lydia, did she mention any other pretext for leaving in the middle of the year except the missionary impulse?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia reflected. “I believe she made a remark about being an annoyance and irritation to people here instead of a help. She is evidently under the impression that her presence is a burden to someone who dislikes her. I told her that such a notion was absolutely morbid and unwholesome as well as egotistical. And it is too.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How peculiar!” Elinor noted with a throb of relief that Myra had providentially retired into her bedroom. “Hark! There is the gong beginning to whir for breakfast. Isn’t the clangor worse every day?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it really was as she had suspected through the sleepless hours. Ruth was going away because of her. Because of her, Ruth was going away from the happiest life she had ever known. Elinor’s fingers trembled so clumsily among the bric-a-brac that Lydia halted on the threshold at the sight of her best vase half toppling from its place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Come to breakfast, Elinor. It isn’t dusting-day. Why, child, you are as pale as Ruth. That fire upset you completely. We shall see if the maid cannot bring you some soft-boiled eggs for a change. That is the only proper kind of a diet in winter. Ruth avoids them, to be sure, but she is entitled to an equipment of idiosyncrasies, mental, moral, and physical. Everybody cannot be a genius. It is a crime for her to make such a mistake as that nursing will be.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ah, I’m not so sure,” answered Elinor airily as she stepped into the hall, “nine persons out of ten believe they have a gift for writing. Hundreds of girls shine in college magazines, and then go blinking and flickering down to ashes after Commencement day. Oh!” Elinor halted suddenly. “There she comes now down the tower stairs. I think I’ll run back to wait till Myra is ready for breakfast.” She retreated so precipitately that the lines about Ruth’s mouth set in an expression of even greater sternness than before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the table Elinor clung to Myra as a shield of talkativeness to cover her own stubborn silence toward Ruth. If Ruth wanted to go, let her. If she wanted to go, let her. It was all the same to Elinor. Cela m’est \u00e9gal. Cela m’est \u00e9gal. Cela m’est \u00e9gal.<\/em> The phrase drummed over and over in her aching head. She remembered Myra’s trick of droning the French in a maddening sing-song with a pronunciation carefully pruned and flattened to, “Slam at a gal. Slam at a gal. Slam at a gal. Which means it’s all the same to me. I don’t care.” No, of course, Elinor did not care a jot whether Ruth went to Jericho or New York or the Philippines or remained at college. It was all the same to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The forenoon passed, and still she had uttered no protest. In the afternoon Myra blew into the study, flung herself on the couch, and beat her palms together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That stubborn, obstinate, pig-headed girl! Though I’ve coaxed and coaxed, she won’t yield an inch. Only,” here gleamed a spark of fleeting self-congratulation, “she isn’t going to-day. The fact is that she cannot get off so soon because she must first consult Prexie and Mrs. Vernon and have her trunk brought up from the catacombs and resign from the Board of Editors, and several little affairs like that. Isn’t she flighty! Fancy her living by herself in a great city! She will surely fall ill with none of us there to bring her hot milk and toast. I argued that she owed a quantity of duties to the college and to us and to herself and to the Alumnae Society, which lent her the money to come \u2014 duties a heap more pressing than that of nursing poor miserable sick folks who are all strangers to her and likely to prove cranky and ungrateful. She says that I fail to understand her attitude and must allow her to judge for herself. Yet all the while she is so nervous that she can’t lie quiet without jerking her hand away from me every minute. I do believe that she will break down with nervous prostration just as soon as possible. Oh, dear! She acts as if I am telling a story when I say we will all miss her terribly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Where is she now?” asked Elinor, rising from her desk and standing motionless while awaiting the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The last I saw of her she had started for the gym to get her suit from the locker. And she says that it is an ir-ir-irrevocable finality.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Of course,” commented Elinor, “it generally is with such temperaments.” And she departed with an air of conspicuous superiority to emotion-ruffled young persons who burrow into kindly silken pillows to hide their teary lashes and quivering lips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A portion of the lower floor in the gymnasium building was occupied by a swimming-tank; and there in entertaining contrast to the snowstorm outside a dozen students were frolicking. One shrinking figure descended the marble stairs, inch by inch, with apprehensive little cries of, “You won’t touch me now, will you? You won’t pull me in?” Another was teaching a novice to swim by supporting her at the end of a curtain-pole. Whenever the amateur instructor cruelly permitted a ducking, a friendly spectator plashed indignantly to the rescue. Others in play that they were water-sprites danced about with much whirling of white arms and showering of silvery drops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor perceived Ruth leaning with both elbows on the railing while she watched the sport. After a moment of hesitancy Elinor took two steps in flight toward the nearest door, then stopped herself with a jerk, straightened her shoulders, advanced to Ruth’s side, and laid one hand lightly on her arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth turned her head slowly. At her first glimpse of the face near her own, her dreaming eyes widened with utter amazement as if she could not believe in the vision. The expression of amazement gradually changed to radiant joy, glowed for a heart’s beat, and then went out suddenly, leaving the pupils contracted and the iris curiously dull. She turned back to the swimmers without a word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor cleared her throat. “May I speak to you a minute?” she asked, almost in a whisper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Speak away.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Not here!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I prefer it here.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ruth.” Elinor cleared her throat again and glanced appealingly at the averted profile. ” Ruth, have you told anybody else of your plan?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a moment’s pause. “Not yet,” she answered in a tone tinged with sullenness as if resenting the possible suspicion that this delay might hint at a wavering of her decision. “I shall attend to that later. Look! Doesn’t that girl swim well on her back?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ruth, I wanted to tell you \u2014 I came to say \u2014 That girl certainly does swim well. But they shouldn’t try to dive. The tank is too shallow for diving right there.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth drooped her eyelids and moved a few steps farther along the railing. Elinor apparently did not notice. She spoke easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I wanted to tell you, Ruth, that I am ever so sorry about the manuscript. Myra and I forgot to take it down town to be typewritten yesterday.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know it,” said Ruth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Good-bye for a little. I must run back to finish my Greek. You are positive that it doesn’t make any difference about the story?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No, it doesn’t make any difference.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside the door Elinor lifted her hand, unclenched it absently, and stared at it without seeing the reddened marks where her finger-nails had pressed into the flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Cela m’est \u00e9gal,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said it again to herself that evening when Myra clung to Ruth through dinner and chapel and escorted her to the concert afterward, while Lydia hovered sternly in their vicinity. At the concert Elinor sat by herself in the back pew, though as a rule she would choose to miss an entertainment altogether rather than to make herself, as she supposed, conspicuous by going alone. She was afraid that people might think she was queer and unpopular. On this evening, however, at the sound of the gong at eight o’clock, she dropped the paper which she had been holding before her in the reading-room and joined the leisurely stream of girls in the corridor without a single anxious glance around for some stray acquaintance whom she could invite to accompany her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lights were turned low in the chapel except for a single gas-jet over the organ. From her seat in the rearmost corner Elinor could turn the slats of the window-blind beside her and gaze through narrow spaces at the pallid snowy world without where a dim moon was struggling behind a web of clouds. Or, if she liked, she could watch three heads some distance farther forward near the middle aisle. That symmetrical outline with the chin well up and the shoulders erect belonged to Lydia. The contour of the second one was hazier in the dusk because of the blur of looser, wavier hair; and it was drooping in an affectionate nestling way toward the third. The third, though very stiff and still, had a curiously huddled look as if the nerves had relaxed in the darkness. Elinor’s’ restless eyes kept traveling from the window to that ungraceful shadowy figure. “Oh, dear!” she fretted to herself, “Ruth has done her hair at the wrong angle again.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the concert was over, Elinor glided out among the earliest departures and escaped to the study, where after some uneasy wandering from book-case to bedroom she decided to mend stockings for awhile. Sitting down just as she was in her filmy white crepe she carefully threaded all her needles, sorted all her stockings, examining each one with fastidious slow scrutiny, rearranged her basket, studied the monogram on her thimble, and then, at the sound of quick steps in the alleyway, began to darn very fast and earnestly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra burst in. “Elinor, Ruth won’t send it in. We forgot to take it down and she says it’s fate and she doesn’t care about it now anyway, because she will give up writing and won’t have time for it, and it’s just as well, and she’s going to burn it up. Hurry! You’ve got to coax her.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes?” Elinor raised her head inquiringly and murmured the monosyllable with maddening sweetness, her needle arrested politely. “Was there anything I can do for you?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Idiot! Ruth’s going away, I say, and she won’t submit her story for the prize. She has the best chance of anybody in this college, and the girls will be disappointed, and she owes it to us, and I can’t make her budge. And oh, Elinor, if you could only see her and talk to her, you would understand. She will get over this nursing fad and then she will be sorry. It is throwing away her best chance. Lydia argued with her. And it’s our fault, because we forgot to take it down to be typewritten. Elinor, go coax her to do it. She always used to like you best.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor smiled dubiously. “I am so extremely busy this evening, Myra, you see,” she answered gently, “but if you really think it would do any good \u2014 “She paused, leaving the conclusion to her sentence artistically vague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes, yes, run along. It may do good. And the story is fine. Miss Ewers read it and said so in a letter. It’s a shame and a sin. She looked around to find the matchbox, but I hid it in a hurry while she was packing something else. Give me those stockings. I’ll mend them in a jiffy. Run!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Of course, there is the gas,” suggested Elinor with mild interest, “and if she honestly intended to do it, you know \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Beg pardon, what did you say? Oh, do stop mumbling and run, Elinor, please.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor moved in quite leisurely fashion until she reached the foot of the tower stairs. Then she picked up her fluffy skirts, ran swiftly and lightly up to the hall above, and rapped on Ruth’s door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Come.” The voice sounded weary, and the face that glanced up from a box of papers on the bed at her entrance looked pale and tired. “Ah, it is you, Elinor,” she nodded gravely in greeting. “Will you sit down? If you wait one minute, I will clear the clothes off a chair for you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, the bed will do, thank you.” Elinor fluttered across the little room. “Can’t I help you with the packing?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I don’t believe you can,” said Ruth as she slipped elastic bands around one packet of notes after another. She was wearing a long robe of outing-flannel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor could see the hollows in her throat when she breathed. There were hollows too under her cheekbones, and her eyes had dark half-circles under them. Elinor watched her silently for a minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, Ruth!” she burst out at last in a soft little cry of pity. “You are so tired! Let me help, please, do let me help.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You always try to be kind, Elinor,” answered Ruth without raising her lashes. “I’m just as much obliged, thank you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor shifted her seat a few inches so that she could brace herself against the footboard. Even with this support she found it necessary to open her mouth twice before her will pushed on the words to the point of articulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ruth, Myra says that you have changed your mind about submitting your story in the prize contest, and \u2014 and I am very sorry. I wish you would send it in. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to the college and to \u2014 to us. You ought not to sacrifice your talent for such things to a sudden impulse for self-abnegation. You really ought not. I wish you wouldn’t. Please, Ruth, don’t you think that it will be better for you to \u2014 to think it over and stay at college and send in the story for the prize. Won’t you, Ruth? I wish you would.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth finished fitting the various packets neatly into the box. Then she looked up. “Elinor, do you know that the story is about you? I wrote it at a time when I was angry \u2014 but it is a picture that will be recognized. Miss Ewers recognized it when she read the manuscript. She says that the story will be likely to win one of the prizes or at least be bought for publication. And she also said that I would not submit it if I cared for you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor closed her eyes for an instant; then opened them again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Elinor, you may decide for me. You may choose whether I shall remain at college and submit the story, or burn it and go.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ha-ha-ha!” It was such a shrill falsetto laugh that Elinor herself was astonished and caught her breath after it. “The idea! But you don’t care for me, you know. And so of course you will submit it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth shoved aside the box on her lap, rose without haste, stepped across to her desk, pulled out the drawer, took from it some written sheets and carried them toward the gas-jet near the bureau. Elinor watched her scan the wall and the floor beneath in search of the matchsafe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Myra has hidden it,” she volunteered with an odd little smile, “you’d better not. It may burn your fingers and the ashes will litter the carpet. It is an awfully messy thing to do.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth thrust one comer of the manuscript into the gas-flame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor sprang to her feet. “Ruth, stop! I choose for you to stay. Blow it out! Quick! Drop it!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Don’t touch me.” With the sheaf of blazing paper in her outstretched hand Ruth stepped across the space to the washstand in order to finish the bonfire in the basin. A match which Myra had dropped snapped under her shoe, caught the fluff at the edge of her outing-flannel, and leaped upward in a swiftly licking flame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor saw her amazed expression as she stood motionless while the flickering papers began to flutter down from her loosened grasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Unbutton it!” She darted toward Ruth, seized the burning robe, tore it off, crumpled it into a ball to smother the blaze, and then flung herself down with her face pressed close to the floor and her arms shielding her head; for the flimsy stuff of her own gown had taken fire and was flaming lightly around her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few minutes later she tried to struggle free from the folds of the blanket which Ruth after emptying the pitcher of water upon her head had crushed over her body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m all right now. Please let me up.” She rose unsteadily, and Ruth, kneeling beside her, brushed away a spark or two that lingered smouldering in the charred ruffles. “Are you hurt, Ruth? Oh!” she could not stifle the moan of the pain as Ruth’s lips pressed her fingers, “oh, don’t! They sting so.” She looked down at the other with a brave little smile. “You will stay, Ruth, won’t you? I choose for you to stay.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth swerved suddenly and hid her face against the bedside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Crackie!” Myra stood open-mouthed on the threshold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor turned toward her uncertainly, her pretty head swaying oddly to and fro above the scorched rags that clothed her shoulders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ruth is going to stay, Myra,” she said; and fainted dead away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter XVII<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Three Dummy Idiots<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Field Day that spring was rainy. In the garden yellow lilies lifted fragrant cups to the gentle drizzle. The lilacs swayed low with their burden of glistening drops, and the pansies watched tearfully outside the archway in the hedge around the Circle. Umbrellas filed past them, some bobbing along sedately, others jerking and rolling at an agitated canter, while here and there a waterproof trotted by unsheltered, its owner defiantly hopeful of seeing blue sky any minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra in her gym suit, her hair braided in the old freshman fashion, had entered the lists for the hurdle race, the two-hundred yard dash, and the running broad jump. She won in the first, and fell into Elinor’s arms amid a chorus of ecstatic yelling from that section of the benches where the juniors huddled under umbrellas. In the dash she was tired at the start, and found herself dropping farther and farther in the rear. Still she pegged along, elbows crooked, breath coming hard. When she staggered up twenty feet behind the winner at the goal, she was received again by Elinor, all compassion this time, while from the spectators rose sympathetic murmurs of, “She’s half dead,” “Poor Myra!” and, “She did well anyhow.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the competition in jumping the rain began to beat down more persistently. One contestant after another landed with both feet and sitting suddenly down slid merrily onward in the mud. Myra jumped so far that she was invited to try a second and third time in hopes of breaking the record. At her fourth effort the space showed less, for she was reaching the limit of her strength. When she heard the shouts of, “Try again, Myra! Try again, Myra!” and an encouraging, “Dickinson forever! Hurrah, girls, hurrah!” she muttered, “I think you’re all horrid!” Nevertheless the acclaim spurred her on to further endeavor. Being rewarded only by a longer, muddier slide she was rescued by indignant Lydia and marched away for dry clothes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interclass games in basketball had been scheduled for the afternoon. In the gray dusk of the lower hall after luncheon, it was a melancholy Field Day Committee that assembled on a truck while waiting to expostulate, as they termed it, with the doctor and the principal. It was not raining so awfully hard after all, and the sky was liable to clear at any moment. This was the sole Saturday remaining that could be taken for the important \u2014 unspeakably important \u2014 tournament. There was the new and beautiful championship pennon patiently draping the gymnasium wall, and nobody to win it if the authorities turned coward before a trifle of dampness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The said authorities hard-pressed at length granted reluctant permission for the games to begin the minute that the pools in the road showed no dimpling trace of new droppings. Myra, who was sufficiently restored from the morning’s exertions to take her usual place on the team, watched the brown spattered water unremittingly till so tantalized that she threatened to hold an umbrella over it while the players escaped with smooth consciences from the clutches of the gymnasium director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nothing but a boarding-school, isn’t it, Myra?” laughed Ruth as she halted at the window on her way to a Board meeting. Ruth’s angles seemed to have softened somehow since February, and a contented twinkle gleamed oftener in her eyes. It was pleasant to care for her “contemporaries,” and to have them care for her. The knowledge that she had won affection was giving her greater self-confidence socially. She brushed a streak of mud from the athlete’s sleeve with an affectionate pat. “Take courage, youngster. Wasn’t it glory enough for you this forenoon? You’ll make your mark some day. This decorative spot looks very much like a beginning.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra twisted around. “Oh, Ruth, that’s exactly what I heard somebody say about you. The Hall of Fame \u2014 well, it isn’t much, you know \u2014 not one of the girls in it yet! There’s your chance. Ah, hulloa, Elinor! What’s the news?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in a gym suit Elinor appeared graceful and girlish in comparison with Myra’s boyish litheness. She was twirling an open letter between her fingers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s from mother,” she said slowly, “and if I choose I may go abroad next year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“And not come back here to graduate?” gasped Myra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor’s head dipped assentingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How utterly ridiculous! Doesn’t she know that you have been elected vice-president of the class for our senior year?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another speechless nod replied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Don’t go,” said Ruth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor fumbled with her letter. “I never wished to enter college in the first place. It is such a narrow life \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Heigho, Dickinson and Offitt!” a shout came ringing down the corridor, “hurry up there! Rain’s over and the team’s ready to start. Trot along and be sure to bring all the lemons you can steal. ‘Rah, ‘rah, ‘rah for the juniors!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the Board meeting when Ruth hastened out to the Circle, the sun’s level rays had slipped low enough to shine from under a curtain of cloud. Grass and trees glowed a wonderfully vivid green under the purple sky. Where the shadow of the hedge stretched far across the campus she beheld a confused mob of girls. They were mostly in one another’s arms, whirling, dancing, and shrieking triumphant proclamation of victory. Around the outskirts of the courts members of the vanquished teams departed with dejected step amid sympathizing friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Presently Lydia separated herself from the tumultuous mass and insisted upon extricating Myra and Elinor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What a looking object!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She went head first over a bench,” laughed Elinor, “and you should have seen the hats sent flying. She was blind to everything except that big leather ball bounding into space. The space happened to be a scattering crowd of innocent victims; she didn’t notice. By the way, Lydia, are you definitely positive that my face is clean at last?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Fairly so,” replied my cautious lady, “that is, it looks so from the outside. Why do you ask?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh, thank you!” she turned to address Ruth, “You see, I am only a sub, and I spent my time sitting around on a rug and watching the game. Between the innings every girl with a wet sponge \u2014 Lydia among them \u2014 urged me to have my face bathed, and they refused to be argued out of their duty. I flatter myself that I needn’t scrub it again for a week.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Elinor,” broke out Myra with unimpaired energy, “why don’t you go in for athletics in earnest?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are quick and cool and strong for your build. You could do anything well if you only resolved to make the effort.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Am I not an honorable and not inglorious sub? Don’t I sit around gracefully and cheer my famous companions? Do I not practice faithfully and seize the ball quite frequently even when somebody else wants it? Don’t I say, ‘Beg pardon’ in every scrimmage?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes, you do. It sounds so funny. You ought to get over that habit and also cultivate strategic ability.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Strategic ability!” echoed Elinor stopping to laugh at the edge of a shadow where the sunbeams caught the gold in her hair. “So that’s why you put your finger to your lips and hop up and down like a dismayed robin whenever the ball bounces in your direction. Then a swoop \u2014 and it was hurtling over the heads of your foes. Strategic!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I was only thinking,” explained Myra abnormally oblivious to the joke, “that if you were on the regular team your mother would understand how atrocious it is for her to suggest your going abroad next year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What’s that?” inquired Lydia aroused from her habitual incurious serenity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During Myra’s annotated report Elinor slipped ahead of the others and pressed into the crowded elevator just before the door was shut. When the three reached the study a few minutes later, they met her emerging in her dressing-gown. Myra with a whoop raced her down the corridor to the bathroom. Elinor being unaware of a certain hasty consultation near the staircase wondered why nobody alluded further to the prospect of her release from the necessity of completing the college course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their silence was, to say the least, perplexing. At dinner the conversation fluttered perseveringly over the day’s contests. After Chapel there was a grand fudge party in one of the smaller dormitories; and the four friends did not escape till ten. The following day brought scarcely a moment’s peace to the study. The girls from the next suite sauntered sleepily in to secure the bread and milk which Lydia had engaged to bring up from the breakfast room. Then after a run around the garden \u2014 a run varied by happy little skips between steps and by pauses for blissful sniffing at this blossom and that \u2014 they all dressed for services. Till dinner time half a dozen callers dropped in to discuss the sermon. Throughout the afternoon others kept wandering in to chat and to nibble the peanuts and maple sugar which had been smuggled from the dinner table. A Sunday supper of chocolate, scrambled eggs, and rarebit cooked over their own gas-stove busied the party till time for the Bible lecture. Finally after a few short calls given and received, they wandered into their alleyway on the journey to bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth lingered at the door. ” Good night, girls.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I wish you and Lydia belonged to the teams, so that you both might go to the waffle-supper to-morrow evening. Strawberries, waffles, salad, chocolate cake!” Myra’s eyes rolled blissfully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Just two weeks till examinations and then ho, for vacation!” Elinor’s voice subsided in a mild quaver. “Maybe a long vacation for me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astonished by the silence that greeted this bid for vehement pleading she glanced at the others. Myra was doubled up on a low ottoman, her knees almost touching her chin, her fists pinched into her cheeks. Lydia was twisting the lower part of the droplight as if intent upon creating a brighter glare. Ruth leaning against the door jamb was staring absorbedly at her own shoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor surveyed them with a puzzled frown. She was accustomed to being treated as a young person of importance. “Girls, if I choose, I can go abroad this summer to stay two years.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody said anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I have always wished to travel in Europe instead of vegetating in college. It is so much more broadening.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra dug her fists a quarter-inch farther into her round cheeks. “Yes!” she said, hurling out the unadorned syllable chopped off clean with its consonant. Under ordinary circumstances she was apt to pronounce the word yep.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Certainly it is,” agreed Lydia with even more than her usual distinctness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We shall be sorry to miss you,” added Ruth politely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor looked at them out of the corner of her eye. “I needn’t return here if I do not desire to do so,” she repeated as if musing over the problem for her own benefit, “and I have never cared for this life.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No!” Myra shot out again like a pea from a pop-gun, “you have always hated it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lydia gave a vigorous screw of the lamp-cock that sent the flame blazing outside the mantel. “It will doubtless be an excellent advantage for any individual,” she commented smoothly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruth shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “In case you determine to accept this offer, we shall not be bothered about endeavoring to secure that suite for four on the senior corridor. I have heard rumors of two or three other groups aiming for it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rubbing one hand across her forehead in a dazed way, Elinor walked over to a window and began to fumble with the curtain-cord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We shall live in Paris \u2014 my brother and I. We shall do exactly as we please and have the most beautiful time! It maddens me to reflect that I have already wasted three years in this little monotonous hole of an institution.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myra opened her mouth with a snap; then at a warning gesture from Lydia shut it again by means of a frantic clutch at her jaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That will be extremely charming, I am sure,” responded Lydia in her most beaming manner, while the flame went flickering down into the tube under her earnest manipulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We shall be delighted to hear from you occasionally,” was Ruth’s contribution with suspicious over-emphasis on the adjective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elinor gave the cord such a vicious jerk that the shade flew up with a whir, and then tumbled crashing down to the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You are all just too horrid for anything!” she burst out on the verge of exasperated tears, and actually kicking the poor curtain from her path, “here I am trying my very best to decide about next fall while you three dummy idiots stand around and shove all the responsibility upon me all alone. It would serve you right if I should simply pick up and go and never come back to finish the senior year.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone shuffled softly by in the corridor outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So,” began Myra with diabolical gravity, “you seem to imply that you may possibly condescend \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Elinor, I am ashamed to say, threw a book at her. But it was a limp-covered book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Next: Senior Year<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter XIII Room for Contemporaries The corridors were lined with trunks and alive with girls flying in and out of their rooms. Here was one lifting a tray of crisp white ruffles. There another unfolding herself cautiously from a prolonged investigation of the deepest recesses rose with a pile of books tottering on one arm….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlywithdrawal.net\/victoriana\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}