Chapter V: Part 5

After she had entered the room one would have realized that they had really been waiting for her. Her mere presence seemed to make a difference. It was this magnetic quality which rendered her so irresistible and all adverse criticism of her so absurd. People might differ as to her beauty--there were some indeed, who said that she was too large, or that her eyes were not very expressive, or that her mouth was too small, but they all fell under her influence in some remarkable way, and were very much flattered when she asked them to drive with her, and never failed to point her out to their friends as “the College Beauty, you know;” and even those who honestly wondered how she ever got through her examinations were forced to admit that she had a great deal of natural talent, which she did not always care to exercise. She was a fine tennis player too, using either hand equally well, and when the Tennis Association got itself into debt and she saved the situation by beguiling, in some inexplicable way, the famous musical organization of a certain university into giving a concert for its benefit, her popularity reached its climax. To the less sought-after girls, her composure and ease of manner while surrounded by an admiring circle of college men was nothing short of marvellous, and the recklessly generous disposal which she made of these youths to her less attractive friends seemed to betoken a social prodigality little short of madness.

Miss Lavington looked at her imploringly.

“Make them keep quiet, won’t you?” she said. The Beauty looked around her--“Are you trying to make her ill again, so she can’t go?” she asked.

Her words had the desired effect, and the girl who had been twanging abstractedly at a banjeurine put it down.

“She oughtn’t to leave!” she declared, plaintively. “It’s a shame! Here we are, just beginning the semestre, and she’s only half through her college course anyway, and just because her father wants her she has to give up everything and go.”

“Yes, and you know she’ll be sure to have jungle-fever or get bitten by a cobra or something, and die,” suggested someone cheerfully, if a trifle vaguely.

The girl lying on the tiger-skin looked up.

“I know why her father wants her,” she began calmly. “There is an officer--young, handsome, well born, a fine place in Surrey or Devon or Kent, been in the family for generations, old uncle, no children--just the thing for her. Her father will take her up to some place in the Himalayas to spend the summer, and he will arrange for the handsome, young, etc., officer to be there, and next fall we will receive the cards. It sounds just like one of Kipling’s stories, doesn’t it?”

They were all laughing by the time she had finished, but The Beauty, looking at the girl beside her, suddenly stopped smiling. There was a conscious flush on Miss Lavington’s face which set her to thinking, and then she glanced over to the big Scotch girl and waited an instant.

“Tell us all about it,” she said finally to Miss Lavington. The girl looked up quickly and then dropped her eyes again.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she began. The others were listening now. Even Kan Ato, smiling in her pensive, oriental way, leaned far forward so as not to lose a word.

“He isn’t rich and he hasn’t any place in Surrey--or anywhere else that I know of, except perhaps in India,” she went on. “But he is young and handsome. We used to know each other when we were children--he is a sort of cousin--but I haven’t seen him for years. We used to be very much in love with each other.” She smiled. “My father writes me that he says he is still in love with me, and so--perhaps we are to be married.”

“I knew it,” sighed the girl on the tiger-rug, in a satisfied sort of way.

The Beauty looked at the English girl curiously. “And you haven’t seen him for years? and yet you think of marrying him! How do you know you will love him now?--you are both changed--you may be two totally different people from the children who fell in love.” She had spoken vehemently and quickly, and Miss Lavington gazed at her with languid surprise.

“You are not in love with him yourself?” she said, smilingly.

The girl made a quick, impatient gesture.

“I am speaking seriously,” she said. “You are several years younger than I am, and you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t let your father--don’t let anyone--persuade you to bind yourself to a man you don’t know, whose life has been so vitally different from your own as to render the possibility of sympathy between you very slight.”

Miss Lavington looked at her rather coldly.

“You are interesting yourself unnecessarily,” she said; “I loved him not so many years ago--it cannot be possible that so short a time would change us completely.”

The Beauty leaned her head back with sudden wearied look on her face. “A few years at our time of life makes all the difference in the world,” she said, earnestly. “What pleased and interested and fascinated us at eighteen might very possibly disappoint and disgust us at twenty or twenty-two. I do not mean to preach,” she said, smiling deprecatingly and turning to the rest, “but you know as well as I what an influence this college life has on us, and how hard it is to go back to former conditions. If we get stronger here we also get less adaptable. We are all affected by the earnestness and the culture and advancement of the life we lead here for four years, whether we will or no, and it is very hard to go back!”

They were all looking at her in amazement. The Beauty was not much given to that sort of thing. She stopped abruptly as if herself aware of the sensation she was creating, and laughed rather constrainedly.

“Don’t marry your handsome officer unless you are in love with him!” she said insistingly still to the girl beside her. “Don’t mistake the childish affection you felt for him for something deeper. You have your whole life before you--don’t spoil it by precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion!” There was an anxious, troubled look in her eyes.

The girl still stretched out on the tiger-skin glanced up again at The Beauty. “I seem to have started a subject in which you are deeply interested,” she said gayly to her. “And one in which you have had enormous experience too. Do you know you have an almost uncanny way of fascinating every man who comes near you. It’s a sure thing. None of the rest of us have a chance. I believe you could marry half a dozen or so at any time that you would take the trouble to say ‘yes’!”

The girl addressed looked openly amused--“Please take a few off your list,” she said. But the other refused to notice her remark and ran on in her light way.

“And they are all so nice too--it is really hard to choose, but I think on the whole I prefer a certain young man who shall be nameless. Now, would you call his devotion to yourself ‘mad precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion?’” She moved herself lazily over the yellow skin until her head rested against the girl’s knee.

“And he is such a nice, eligible youth too. I hope you are not going to spoil his life by refusing him. Only think how lovely it would be to have one’s father-in-law representing the majesty of these United States at an Emperor’s court,” she went on, turning gayly to the others. “And he is so handsome and clever! He will be representing Uncle Sam himself some day, and she will be reading up the rules of court etiquette and receiving invitations from the Lord Chamberlain to dine with the Queen, and fuming because the Grand Duchess of something or other has the right to walk in to dinner before her.” She was not noticing the girl’s significant silence. “Of course he is just the man for you--you wouldn’t make any but a brilliant match, you know, with your beauty and society manner. But just for the present--well, next winter you will début, and you will be much talked about, and the youth will not be with his father at the European capital, but will be very much _en évidence_ here, and then--after Easter we shall get _your_ cards!”

She twisted her head around, smiling, so as to get a look at the girl’s face above her. It wore so grave and hopeless an expression that she gave a little cry.

“Forgive me,” she said, confusedly, “but you do love him, don’t you?”

The Beauty turned her eyes away and shook herself slightly, as if awakening from a dream.

“As confession seems to be the order of the hour,” she said in a dull tone, and smiling peculiarly, “I don’t mind owning that I do love him very much.”

She got up abruptly and moved toward the door amid a chorus of protests, but she would not stay. At the threshold she turned to Miss Lavington.

“Send your things down by the coach,” she said. “If you will let me I will be glad to drive you to the station myself to-morrow.”

* * * * *

When she got to her own study she found a letter thrust under the door with the familiar number of her room scrawled upon it in pencil. She picked it up, and as she looked at the address an expression of profound dislike and weariness came into her face. She opened the door slowly and put the letter down upon her desk, looking at it thoughtfully for a few moments. The handwriting was irresolute and boyish. She shivered slightly as she took the letter up with sudden resolution and tore it open. As she sat there and read it a look of hatred and disgust and utter hopelessness, strangely at variance with her usual brilliant expression, settled harshly upon her lovely, young face.

“MY DEAREST WIFE,” it ran, “Forgive me! but this is about the only luxury I indulge in!--calling you in my letters what I dare not call you as yet before the world.

“I am in a retrospective mood to-night, and feel like writing all sorts of things which I am afraid you won’t much like. Do you know I think that college is doing you harm! Don’t get angry at this, but sometimes I’m afraid you have repented of our boy and girl runaway match; but God knows I haven’t, and I’m glad I didn’t go to college but came out West and went to work for us both. I haven’t succeeded very brilliantly and may be the life has roughened me a bit, but I guess you can have the best there is out here, and I am still as devoted to you as in those old days of the summer before you went to that confounded (excuse me!) college, when you were just eighteen and I barely twenty-one. How interminably long four years seemed to wait then! But it was a case of getting married secretly and of waiting, or of not getting you at all. Sometimes I can hardly stand it, and I’d come back now and take you away, if I wasn’t so afraid of that blessed old father of yours--but I’m just as big a coward as I was three years ago, when I couldn’t screw up courage enough to go to him and tell him that he’d have to relinquish his pet scheme of sending his daughter to college, for she belonged to me. Whew! what a scene we’d have had! It was best to wait, I suppose.

“After all, only a year and then I can claim you! Have you changed any? I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me now. I always had an uncomfortable suspicion that you were very much my superior, and I have half fancied that perhaps you only loved me because I was so madly--so passionately in love with you. Did I over-persuade you? have you ceased to love me? Sometimes I get half sick with fear. You are all I have! But after all I feel safe enough--I know you too well not to know that you will never break your promise--even one you hate. But you know I’ll never hold you to that marriage--though it was all valid enough--if you don’t want to be held. I can simply blow my good-for-nothing brains out.

“I won’t write any more to-night. There is so much swearing and noise down in the street that I can hardly think; besides I don’t feel just like it, and lately your letters have only irritated me. But I won’t complain, for I know how generously you have acted and what brilliant prospects you have given up for my precious self!

“Devotedly yours and only yours,

“G. G. B.”

A TELEPHONED TELEGRAM

When Miss Eva Hungerford married Stanhope there was one young lady intensely glad of it, although it was whispered that there were also two or three who were quite the contrary. But Mrs. Renford Phillips--once Miss Violet Featherstone--had particular reasons for rejoicing, and she wrote a long letter to Miss Hungerford when she heard of the engagement, and said that she hoped “by-gones would be by-gones now, and that she was sure her friend would be a broader-minded and more perfect woman, if that were possible, now that she was going to have the additional experience of getting married.”

Miss Hungerford wrote her a most cordial reply, and the two girls, for several years slightly estranged, became again the friends they had been during the first three years of their college life.

The blow had fallen very suddenly, and Miss Hungerford had found it hard to forgive what she called, in her heart, her friend’s tacit deceit and culpable silence. But, as she wrote in her reply to Mrs. Phillips’s letter, her opinions had undergone a decided change, and she felt that perhaps she had been a little hard on her friend and had not understood her feelings and the pressure brought to bear upon her, and she acknowledged that circumstances might materially alter one’s views and actions. And Miss Featherstone, who had been the most talked about girl in college during the last semestre of her junior year, and who had suffered acutely under Miss Hungerford’s indifferently concealed displeasure and surprise at her conduct, replied that now she could be truly happy in her husband and her home, and insisted that Mr. and Mrs. Stanhope should visit her in the Berkshire Hills that summer.

This they did, and though, of course, each thought her husband much the handsomer and more distinguished-looking, still they were very affectionate toward each other, and planned to be at Cowes together the next summer for the yachting.

As has been said, their estrangement happened very suddenly and came about by an unfortunate occurrence one morning in the office of the college.

Anyone who has never had the privilege of being in that office on a Monday morning, just after chapel, can have but a faint idea of pandemonium. The whole seven hundred students seem to be revolving about. There are the young women standing around, waiting to take the next train into Boston, not having been able to go on the early express because they had foolishly forgotten to get a leave of absence on the Saturday previous, and who are furtively trying not to see their friends who are not going on at all, so as to keep from having to attend to their commissions; and there is the girl who is telephoning for roses to wear at the concert that night, and those who are booking boats and tennis courts, and others reading bulletins; and when there is an extra commotion and the crowd is forced back a little to let the cords be pulled up around the desk so as to clear a space; and when the carrier comes in and tumbles the big mail-bags into the middle of it with one hand and unlocks them at apparently the same instant with the other; and when about ten young women fall upon the bags and rend their contents from them, and begin to assort and number and tie up the letters, all the time besieged by their excluded friends to give them their mail on the spot as they are going away, the noise and excitement reach a climax.

But it is all very pleasant and enlivening except the telephone bell, which rings constantly and is wearing on the nerves. It rings not only for all telephone messages but for all telegrams, for the college, being a mile or so from the telegraph station, everything is simply telephoned up to save delays, and that a long and continuous procession of small messenger boys may not be forever circulating between the college and the station.

It was this unfortunate custom of telephoning telegrams, unknown of course to the majority of outsiders, that precipitated the affair. On that particular Monday morning, when the confusion in the office was at its worst, the telephone bell suddenly rang unusually loudly and long, and the nervous Freshman on duty jumped toward it with a warning motion to the rest to keep quiet.

“Hush! it’s a telegram,” she said in a moment, and instantly there was silence, for a telegram is always dreaded where there are so many to whom it could bear ill news. She reached for a pad of paper and a pencil to take it down. From the other end came “Important. Repeat slowly as I deliver it.” The nervous Freshman said “All right,” and braced herself against the support to write.

“To Miss Violet Featherstone.” The docile Freshman repeated it and then said “Wait!” and looked around.

“If Miss Featherstone is here,” she remarked, “she can come to the telephone;” but someone volunteered the information that Miss Featherstone had left by the early train for Boston, and the telephoning proceeded.

“My darling--” the Freshman gasped a little and then repeated slowly “My darling.” There was some suppressed commotion for an instant among the crowd around the doors, and the two at the telephone went at it again.

“I have not heard from you for three days.”

“I have not heard from you for three days,” mumbled the Freshman.

“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”

“What is the matter? Renford Phillips.”

* * * * *

When Miss Featherstone reached the college that afternoon she thought she detected a suppressed excitement about the whole place, though she felt rather too tired to think much about it, but when she got to her room she found a telephone message for her which made her sink weakly into a chair.

An appalling vision of the consequences rose before her. She tried to think connectedly, but the effort was too much. Her only thought was of the effect it would have on her friend Eva Hungerford. She would go to her immediately and find out how much she knew.

As she went along the corridors more than one acquaintance smiled knowingly at her, but she only hurried on. When she reached Miss Hungerford’s rooms, she found that young lady looking dejectedly out of the windows. Her melancholy turned to stony haughtiness, however, when Miss Featherstone approached her tremblingly.

“Yes, the whole college knew of it,” she assured her. “The message had been telephoned up when the office was crowded, and by this time everyone was aware of what her best friend had not known.”

Miss Featherstone rebelled a little under Miss Hungerford’s chilling glance and attempted to explain, but her friend was very sad and firm, and said she did not see how any explanation could do away with the fact that Violet Featherstone had broken the solemn vow they had made together never to marry, but to devote themselves to serious study as a life-work. But when Miss Featherstone quite broke down under her friend’s disapprobation, Miss Hungerford relented a little and asked her if she were really so fond of Renford Phillips, and if she thought life with him in Morristown would compensate her for the loss of Oxford and the Bodleian. Miss Featherstone cried a little at that, and said she thought it would, and that she had started a hundred times to tell her dearest friend about her engagement, but she knew how she thought about such things, and how she would lose her respect for allowing anything to interfere with their plans for mental advancement. And Miss Hungerford only sighed and wrote that night to her mother that another of her illusions had been dispelled, but that she was firmer than ever in her determination to make something of herself.

Miss Featherstone did not return for her degree, but had a pretty church wedding that summer at Stockbridge, and Miss Hungerford sent her a very handsome wedding gift, but refused to be present at the marriage. They did not write to each other much the next year, and Miss Hungerford worked so hard that the Faculty had to interfere, and when she left college with a B. S. degree, smiling sadly and saying that she would be a bachelor as well as an old maid, everybody remarked what a superior girl she was to her friend Violet Featherstone.

“MISS ROSE”

She was always called that, and there were very few of the seven hundred students who really knew or cared whether it was her little name or her family name. The uncertainty about it seemed particularly appropriate someway--her whole personality was vague. That is at the beginning; later----

For the first month she passed comparatively unnoticed. In the wild confusion of setting up household gods and arranging schedules, hopeless as Chinese puzzles, of finding out where the Greek instructors can see you professionally, and when the art school is open, and why you cannot take books from the library, and when the elevator runs, anyone less remarkable-looking than an American Indian or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands is apt to be overlooked. But after the preliminary scuffle is over and there is a lull in the storm, and one begins to remember vaguely having seen _that_ dress or face before somewhere, and when one no longer turns up at the history or art rooms instead of the chemical laboratories, and when one ceases to take the assistant professor of physics for the girl who sat next to you in the trigonometry recitation--then the individual comes in for her share of attention.

“Miss Rose” possibly got more than her share. Curious young women soon began to nudge each other, and ask in whispers who she was. And just at first there were covert smiles and a little cruelly good-natured joking, and the inevitable feeble punning on her name and withered looks. There were some who said she could not be more than forty-five, but they were in the minority, and even the more generously inclined could not deny that her face was very old and wrinkled and tired-looking, and that her hair was fast getting gray around the temples, though her eyes still retained a brilliancy quite feverish, and an eager, unsatisfied sort of look that struck some of the more imaginative as pathetic. As a freshman she seemed indeed to be hopelessly out of place--though not so much so, perhaps, as the little Chicago beauty who was so much more interested in her gowns and looks than in her work, that at the beginning of her second semestre she went home with an attack of pneumonia, brought on by having been left out in the cold after an examination in conic sections.

That type, however, is not uncommon, while “Miss Rose” was especially puzzling. They could not quite understand her, and there were even some among the august body of ridiculous freshmen who somewhat resented her entrance into their ranks, and wondered rather discontentedly why she did not join the great body of “T-specs” to which she so evidently belonged.

But it was characteristic of this woman that she preferred to begin at the beginning and work her way up--to take the regular systematic grind and discipline of the freshman’s lot--to matriculating in an elective course where she could get through easily enough if she were so inclined. She saw no incongruity in her position; she rarely seemed to notice the difference between herself and the younger, quicker intellects around her, and she worked with an enthusiasm and persistence that put most of the young women to shame. That she had taught was evident--in what little out-of-the-way Western town, or sleepy Southern one, no one knew; but sometimes there were amusing little scenes between herself and the professor, when the old habit of school-room tyranny which she had once exercised herself was strong upon her, and she lapsed unconsciously into the didactic manner of her former life. And sometimes she became discouraged when the long lack of strict mental discipline irked her, and when she saw in a glimpse how far she was behind the girl of nineteen beside her, and how hopeless was the struggle she was making against youth and training. There were moments when she realized that she had begun too late, that the time she had lost was lost irretrievably. But the reaction would quickly come and she would work away with renewed energy, and they were very patient with her and would lend her a helping hand where a younger student would have been let most severely alone, to sink or swim after the approved method.

But if her mathematics and chemistry and Tacitus left much to be desired, there was one field in which she shone resplendently. “No one could touch her”--as one young woman slangly but enthusiastically remarked--“when it came to the Bible.” There she was in her glory, and her vast knowledge of the wars of Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and her appalling familiarity with Shamgar and the prophets, and the meaning of the Urim and Thummim, and other such things, was the envy and despair of the younger and less biblically inclined. And if at times she was a trifle too prolix and had to be stopped in her flow of information, there was very genuine regret on the part of the less well informed.

And in time she came to make a great many friends. Her peculiar ways no longer struck them as comical, and if anyone had dared make reference to the plainness of her gowns or the strict economies she practised to get through, that person would have very soon discovered her mistake; and they pretended not to know that she would not join any of the societies because of the dues, and that she did her own laundry on Monday afternoons. Indeed, she was so kindly disposed and so cheerful and helpful, and seemed so interested in all the class projects and even in the sports, at which of course she could only look on, that little by little she came to be a great favorite, and the one to whom the rest naturally turned when there was any hitch or especial need for advice. And then, of course, as she was not to be thought of in the light of a possible candidate for president or vice-president or captain of the crew, or any of the other desirable high-places, those misguided young women who did have such literary, social, or athletic aspirations would go to her and confide their hopes and fears, and in some strange way they would all feel very much more comfortable and happy in their minds after such confessions. And so she got to be a sort of class institution in a very short while, and the captains of different stylish but rather un-nautical freshman crews vied with each other in invitations to “come over the lake” with them, and the president of the Tennis Association sent her a special and entirely superfluous invitation to the spring tournament on the club’s finest paper, and the senior editor of the college magazine, whose sister was a freshman, was made to ask her for a short article on the “Study of the Bible,” and at the concerts and receptions many young women, kindly and socially disposed, would introduce her to their brothers and other male relations who had been enticed out, before taking them on to see the lake, or a certain famous walk, or the Art Building, or the Gymnasium.

* * * * *

It was about the middle of the winter semestre that it happened, and of course it was Clara Arnold who knew about it first. Miss Arnold had liked “Miss Rose” from the beginning. She had taken a fancy to the hard-working woman, who had returned it with wondering admiration for the handsome, clever girl. And so Miss Arnold got into the habit of stopping for her occasionally to walk or drive, and it was when she went for her to go on one of those expeditions, that she discovered the trouble. She found “Miss Rose” sitting before her desk with a crumpled newspaper in her hand, and a dazed, hopeless expression on her face which cut the girl to the heart. Her things were scattered about the room, on the bed and chairs, an open trunk half-filled stood in one corner. Miss Arnold stared around in amazement.

“The bank’s broken,” said “Miss Rose” simply, in answer to her questioning glance, and pointed dully to the paper. “I might have known that little bank couldn’t hold out when so many big ones have gone under this year,” she went on, half speaking to herself.

Miss Arnold picked up the paper and read an article on the first page marked around with a blue pencil. She did not understand the technicalities, but she made out that the “City Bank” of a small town in Idaho had been forced to close, and that depositors would not get more than five or ten cents on the dollar.

“Every cent I’ve saved up was in that bank!” The woman turned herself slowly in her chair and laid her face down on the desk with her arms above her head. She spoke in muffled tones into which a strange bitterness had crept.

“I’ve worked all my life--ever since I was twenty--to get enough money to come to college on. I had barely enough to stay here at all--and now--” she stopped suddenly, breathing hard. “I haven’t been here a year yet,” she broke out at last.

“Well, I’ll have to go back to teaching. Great heavens! I thought I’d finished with _that_!”

Miss Arnold seated herself on a clear corner of the bed.

“Look here, ‘Miss Rose,’” she said, excitedly, “of course you aren’t going to stop college now, when you’re doing so well and--and we all like you so much and--and you’re just beginning your course.” She stumbled on--“Has everything gone?--can’t you do something?”

“Miss Rose” looked up slowly--“Everything,” she said grimly, and then, with the pathetically resigned air of one who has been used to misfortunes and has learned to accept them quietly, “I’ve worked all my life, I suppose I can go at it again.” She looked around her. “I’ll be gone this time to-morrow, and then I won’t feel so badly;”--she put her head down on the desk again.

Miss Arnold looked thoughtfully at her for a few minutes and then, with a sudden movement, she got up and went out, closing the door softly behind her.

It was about nine o’clock that evening and “Miss Rose” had almost finished packing. She was feeling particularly disheartened and was taking the books from the cases one by one in a very mournful way, when she heard footsteps and a subdued but very excited whispering outside her door. She got up languidly and threaded her way among the books and cushions and odd articles of clothing heaped up on the floor. As she opened the door, the light from her student-lamp fell upon the very red face of a freshman propelled apparently into the room by the two or three others behind her, who seemed to have a wild desire to efface themselves entirely.

“Miss Rose,” gasped the blushing freshman in the van, “here--here is a letter for you. We’ve just had a class meeting--” she looked nervously at the others who were edging away.

There was an indistinct chorus from them which sounded like “hope you’ll accept,” and then they retreated with as much dignity as possible, but in great haste.

“Miss Rose” opened the letter and gave a little cry as a check for a good round sum drawn on the class treasurer fell to the floor. And then she sat weakly down on the bed and cried a little from pure happiness as she read it all over.

“The class of ’9--have just heard of ‘Miss Rose’s’ financial embarrassment occasioned by the failure of the ---- City Bank, and being most unwilling to lose so valuable and appreciated a member, beg that she will accept the enclosed and continue with the class until the end of the year.”

A SHORT STUDY IN EVOLUTION

A college for women is generally looked upon by the outside world and the visiting preachers as a haven of rest, a sort of oasis in the desert of life, a Paradise with a large and flourishing Tree of Knowledge of which one is commanded to eat, and where one is happily ignorant of the “struggle for life,” and the woes and evils of the world.

Such views have been so often expressed and inculcated that it appears a little ungracious and stubborn to insist that the bishop who comes out and delivers a sermon once a year, or the brilliant young graduate from a neighboring seminary--who is sent because the dean has been suddenly called away and who is quaking with fear at the ordeal--cannot possibly know all about a girl’s college life and its temptations and its trials and its vanities.

When the heterogeneous mass of humanity which makes up a big college is got together and in close relation for ten months at a time, there is bound to be action and reaction. When New York society girls and missionaries’ daughters from India, and Boston Latin-school girls and native Japanese, and Westerners and Georgians and Australians and “Teacher Specials,” and very young preparatory-school girls, are all mixed up together, it inevitably happens that there is some friction and many unexpected and interesting results. One of these is that it not infrequently happens that a young woman leaves college an entirely different person from the girl who took her entrance examinations, and sometimes the change is for the better and sometimes for the worse, or it may be unimportant and relate only to the way she has got to wearing her hair, or the amount of extra money she considers necessary. At any rate, a noticeable change of some sort always operates in a girl during her four or five years’ stay at a college, and when she goes home “for good” her friends will criticise her from their different points of view, and will be sure to tell her whether she is improved or not.

When Miss Eva Hungerford returned for her senior year at college, having been greatly disappointed in one of her friends, she determined to make no new ones, but to work very hard and keep a great deal to herself. She succeeded so well in her efforts that, after she had been there three months, she became aware that she knew absolutely none of the new students. They were an indistinguishable mass to her, with the exception of two or three noticeably pretty, and about the same number of extremely homely young women whose physique rendered them conspicuous. To her uninterested gaze the large majority seemed to be distressingly like all previous freshman classes, and endowed with the same modest amount of good looks and intellectual foreheads.

But in college life it is a strange fact that while upper classes find it rather difficult to become acquainted among the lower ones, owing, of course, to the unwritten code which prevents a senior from appearing interested in any but those of her own class, yet the incoming students are allowed and take every opportunity of ingratiating themselves with upper-class girls, without injury to their dignity. But Miss Hungerford, who had surrounded herself with quite an impenetrable air of seniority, and who was so extremely handsome and distant-looking, by her appearance and bearing had exercised a rather chilling influence on young aspirants for an introduction, and was secretly very much looked up to and feared.

She was not entirely unconscious of the effect she produced, and was therefore decidedly surprised one day to receive a call from a freshman who lived only a few doors from her, but of whose existence she had not been aware. She thought the child--she was very young, not more than sixteen--uninteresting, and that it was an evidence of extremely bad taste, and unconventionality on her part to call in that unprovoked way. But she was very polite to her uninvited guest, and asked her the usual questions, and the girl, who was very naïve, replied with a loquacity quite trying to her hostess.

Miss Hungerford was rather indignant after her visitor had gone, and wondered why she had had to be interrupted in an analytical study of “Prometheus Unbound,” to listen to a child tell her that she had never been out of Iowa before, and that her mother had not wanted her to come to college, but that her father had always said she should have “a higher education,” and so, after presumably much domestic wrangling, she was there. Miss Hungerford could not remember much else of what the young girl had told her, having listened rather absently to her replies, but she had a distinct impression that her visitor was not at all good-looking, with only a fine pair of eyes to redeem her pale face, and that her clothes were atrocious, and that she was

_gauche_ and decidedly of a social class that Miss Hungerford was not in the habit of mingling with away from college. For even in a very democratic college there are social grades, and although it is the thing to meet in a most friendly way at all class functions, still, a narrow line of distinction may be perceived on social occasions.

Altogether Miss Hungerford felt rather aggrieved and hoped she would not be bothered again. But she was. Miss Betty Harmon, of Sioux City, Ia., had had a fearful struggle with her timidity and retiring nature, when she called on Miss Hungerford, and having gained a victory over herself, she had no intention of resigning the benefits. So she would smile first when they met in the corridors, and was not above showing how much she appreciated a few words from Miss Hungerford in praise of her tennis serve, and that young woman was even uncomfortably conscious that her youthful admirer had more than once followed her to the library, where, under pretence of reading, she had stolen furtive glances at her. Later there were notes, and roses, and requests to go boating.

Miss Hungerford strongly objected to such proceedings, not only because she did not wish to be rendered ridiculous by an insignificant freshman from Iowa, but also because she was a very sensible girl, and entirely disapproved of the “eclectic affinity” business, and she had no intention of allowing the young girl’s admiration for herself to develop into that abnormal sort of attraction that exists between girls in so many schools and colleges.

The temptation to exalt some upper-class girl into an ideal and lavish upon her an affection which in society would naturally fall to the lot of some very unideal boy, or man, is one of the greatest ordeals a college girl goes through, and one who successfully resists all inducements to become a “divinity student,” or who gets out of the entanglement without damage to herself, is as successfully “proven” as was Lieutenant Ouless after his little affair with Private Ortheris. Even the least romantic girl is apt to find unexpected possibilities in her nature in the way of romantic devotion, so that it was not surprising that Miss Betty Harmon, unimaginative and unsentimental as she was, should have admired so extravagantly as handsome and interesting a girl as Eva Hungerford. The crude Western girl found something extremely attractive in the senior--grace, a social ease and distinction, and that indefinable magnetism which a wealthy, consciously beautiful girl possesses.

But Miss Hungerford, who had no notion of getting herself talked about, and whose Eastern sensitiveness and prejudices were continually being shocked by the younger girl’s crudities, so persistently frowned down upon and ignored her under-class admirer, that even Miss Harmon’s devotion paled, and the roses and notes and boating excursions ceased. She began to perceive that the faint line of social distinction, so rarely perceptible in the college, had been drawn in her case.

During the last semestre of the year Miss Hungerford, who was very tired and busy, seemed almost oblivious of the young girl’s existence, and even forgot to smile at her when they met on the campus. And when on her Baccalaureate Sunday a box of white roses--the last mute expression of Miss Harmon’s expiring affection--was handed her without any card, she wondered who had sent them and concluded they must have been ordered by a man she knew.

* * * * *

Three years after leaving college Miss Hungerford married, much to her friends’ surprise, and a year after that she and her husband went abroad. Of course they went to Paris, where Mrs. Stanhope, who had spent much time there after leaving college, had a great many friends, and innumerable dinners were given to them and they enjoyed themselves very much, until it got so cold that Mrs. Stanhope said she must go to Cannes. Of course it immediately struck Stanhope, who adored his wife, that it was entirely too cold to stay in Paris, and so they went south, though their friends made a great fuss over their departure.

They stayed away much longer than they had intended, having been enticed into going to Malta by some American acquaintances, and when they got back to Paris hundreds of interesting things seemed to have happened in their absence, and a great many people and events were being talked about of which they knew nothing. But the wife of the American minister, who was an old friend, went to see Mrs. Stanhope immediately to invite her to an informal dinner the next evening, and stayed the entire afternoon, telling her of everything that had happened and who all the new people were--the New American Beauty for instance. She could not believe that her friend had not heard of nor seen _the_ New Beauty.

“Why, haven’t you ever seen her pictures--and the notices of her?”

Mrs. Stanhope was slightly aggrieved. She knew absolutely nothing about her.

“And I am completely astonished that they aren’t talking of her at Cannes.”

Mrs. Stanhope reminded her friend that she had been immured at Malta since leaving the Riviera.

“Oh, well, of course her fame has reached there by this time. Why, all Paris is talking about her--and you know yourself”--observed that astute lady, impressively--“how much it takes to make Paris stop and look at you.” Mrs. Stanhope said “Yes,” and wanted to know who The Beauty’s people were, and where she had come from.

“Oh, I don’t know,” declared her friend. “No one seems to inquire. She is so beautiful and sufficient in herself that one does not care much for the rest. They are immensely rich--recently, I believe--though you would never know it from her manner. She is charming and thoroughly well-bred. Her father, I hear, is a typical American business man--not much _en évidence_, you know. He leaves that to his daughter, and she does it very well. He is a Senator--or something--from the West, and made such a name for himself at Washington that they thought he was too bright to stay there, so they sent him over here to help settle that international treaty affair--you know perhaps--I don’t, I only pretend to.”

“How did she do it?” demanded Mrs. Stanhope, in that simply comprehensive way women have when talking about another woman.

“Oh, she just started right in. Courtelais raved over her, and her father paid him twenty thousand dollars to have her painted. The Colony took her up, and the rest just followed naturally. The portrait is really charming, though she was dressed--well, I don’t think any French girl would have sat in that costume.”

“Is she really so beautiful?”

“Well--not regularly beautiful, perhaps--but charming and fascinating, and awfully clever, they say--so clever that very few people suspect her of it, and--oh! well, you can judge for yourself to-morrow evening. By the way, everyone says she is engaged already--Comte de la Tour. You used to know him, I think.” She rose to go. “He is very much in love with her, that is evident.” She thought it best to let Mrs. Stanhope have that piece of news from herself. She did not wish her friend to be taken at a disadvantage, especially in her own house.

Mrs. Stanhope felt the least bit startled. She had known the Comte de la Tour very well indeed in Paris, several years before, and he had been very much in love with her, and had appeared quite genuinely broken-hearted when she refused him. She had not seen him--he had not been in Paris when she was there during the earlier part of the season--but with the comforting faith of people who have never been in love, she had always believed that he would get over his devotion to her, though she felt a rather curious sensation on hearing that her expectations had been so fully realized, and she felt a pardonable curiosity to see the girl who had made him forget her.

She dressed very carefully for the American Minister’s the next evening, and looked a little more than her usual handsome self, when her carriage turned rapidly into the Avenue Hoche. She was somewhat late, and although the Minister and his wife were old friends, she felt worried with herself, for she had made it a rule to be punctual at all social functions, and when she entered the rooms she could see that the guests wore that rather expectant air which signifies that dinner is already slightly behind time. She hurried forward and denounced herself in polite fashion, but her hostess assured her that several others had not yet arrived, and, much relieved, she turned to speak to a bright newspaper man, an old acquaintance, who had arrived in Paris during her absence.

“I am so glad to find you again,” he murmured in his drawl; “they tell me you have been to Malta. How fortunate for you! I suppose now you have been happy in an idyllic, out-of-the-world way, and have not heard a word about Brice’s accident, nor the newspaper duel, nor the New Beauty----”

“But I am not happy, and shall not be until I see your Beauty,” protested Mrs. Stanhope. “I’ve heard about her until I have an all-devouring curiosity to behold her. I haven’t even seen _the_ portrait, or a photograph!”

He fell away from her in mock surprise and despair, and was about to reply, when the portières were drawn aside and Mrs. Stanhope saw coming into the room a very beautiful young girl, with a rather childish, mobile face, and magnificent eyes. She seemed to know everyone, and bowed and smiled right and left in an easy, bright sort of way. Mrs. Stanhope would have known this was The Beauty, even if her entrance had not been accompanied by that significant hush and rather ridiculous closing up of the men in her wake. There was a special charm about the soft contour of her face, and the heavy white satin of her gown, though rather old for such a young girl, set off her beauty admirably.

“Looks just like one of Goodrich’s girls, doesn’t she?” murmured the man at Mrs. Stanhope’s elbow. But that lady was not paying any attention to his remarks. She was looking in a puzzled fashion at the girl’s face, and wondering what there was about it so familiar.

“Isn’t she deliciously beautiful?” he insisted, “and clever! I found it out quite by accident. She’s very careful about letting people know how well informed she is. She’s been to a college somewhere,” he ran on. Mrs. Stanhope was not listening. She was still looking, in a rather abstracted way, at the young girl who was holding a little court on the other side of the room. Her hostess rustled up.

“I am going to send my husband to bring The Beauty to you,” she said, laughingly, and swept across the room. In a moment Mrs. Stanhope saw the girl take the Minister’s arm, and, followed on the other side by the Comte de la Tour, start toward her. For some inexplicable reason she felt annoyed, and half wished to avoid the introduction. The newspaper man was interested. Mrs. Stanhope had never posed as a professional beauty, and she was too noble a woman to have her head turned by flattery, but that did not alter the fact that she had been considered the handsomest woman in the American colony at Paris, and, of course, she knew it. He thought it would be interesting to see how the acknowledged beauty received the younger one.

When the two women were within a few feet of each other, and before the American Minister could say “Mrs. Stanhope,” they each gave a little cry of recognition, and it was the younger one who first regained her composure and extended her hand. She stood there, flushed and smiling, the lights falling on her dark hair and gleaming shoulders, making of her, as the newspaper man had said, one of “Goodrich’s girls.” The childish look had gone out of her eyes, and a little gleam of conscious triumph was in them. There was just a shade of coldness, almost of condescension, in her manner. While the Comte was looking from one to the other, in a rather mystified way, and the American Minister was saying, “Why, I didn’t know--I thought--” Mrs. Stanhope’s mind was running quickly back to her first meeting with the girl before her, and she could only remember, in a confused sort of way, what this girl had once been like. And so they stood for a moment--it seemed an interminably long time to the men--looking a little constrainedly at each other and smiling vaguely. But the older woman quickly recovered herself. She had no notion of being outdone

by the girl before her, and spoke brightly.

“I did not recognize you! How stupid of me! But you see the ‘Beatrice’ confused me, and then the French way everyone has of pronouncing H-a-r-m-ö-n completely put me off the track!”

She tried to be very friendly, and the young girl smiled and looked easily--the newspaper man thought almost defiantly--at her, but it was plain to the three onlookers that in some inscrutable way the meeting had been unfortunate, and they each felt relieved, in an inexplicable fashion, when dinner was announced and the snowy, gleaming length of damask and silver and wax lights stretched between the two women.

* * * * *

That night the Comte thought a good deal about the reception of his _fiancée_ by the woman he had once loved, and decided that the American woman was a trifle _exigeante_, and wondered whether Mrs. Stanhope had really expected him never to marry.

The American Minister confided to his wife that he was disappointed in Eva Stanhope, and that she had always appeared so free from vanity and so superior to the little meannesses of women that he was very much surprised at the way she had acted.

The newspaper man, being exceedingly wise in his generation, smoked three cigars over it on the way to his hotel, and then--gave it up.

THE GENIUS OF BOWLDER BLUFF

Miss Arnold found him wandering aimlessly, though with a pleased, interested look, around the dimly lit College Library. She had gone there herself to escape for a few moments from the heat and lights and the crowd around the Scotch celebrity to whom the reception was being tendered, and was looking rather desultorily at an article in the latest _Revue des Deux Mondes_, when he emerged from one of the alcoves and stood hesitatingly before her. She saw that he was not a guest. He was not in evening dress--it occurred to her even then how entirely out of his element he would have looked in a conventional dress-suit--but wore new clothes of some rough material which fitted him badly. He was so evidently lost and so painfully aware of it that she hastened to ask him if she could do anything for him.

“I’m lookin’ fur my daughter, Ellen Oldham,” he said, gratefully. “Do you know her?”

He seemed much surprised and a little hurt when Miss Arnold shook her head, smilingly.