Chapter III: I

Nora was unpacking her trunk in her old room in Petersfield. Margaret Abington, looking in at the door, hesitated shyly at the threshold.

‘I kept hoping all the time,’ sighed Margaret, ‘that something better—something would turn up in New York.’

‘You don’t want me here, then?’ Nora looked up from the depths of her trunk.

‘I was trying to eliminate my own choice,’ Margaret said solemnly.

Margaret looked very tired, worn, sucked dry. They had come up to Petersfield on the same train after two busy days in New York spent in arranging Margaret’s fall exhibition, a ceremony which generally left her exhausted but radiant. But as Nora had watched her old friend, silent and gloomy, superintending the hanging of her pictures, she knew that Margaret wasn’t well. And yet, standing in the little gallery taken over by the New Society of Women Artists before Margaret’s last painting—the doorway of a fisherman’s cottage opening out upon a dull sea, in the foreground the gay, old-fashioned flowers which grow best with simple care, their bright colors standing out with a kind of jubilation against the troubled sky and sea—one sensed the joy of creation. Margaret, so sombre herself—all the energy driven out of her.

‘Those fleeting precious summer weeks,’ she murmured, as if she were alone. The brilliance in her eyes burned for an instant, then changed to dull despair. ‘My summer all gone. So little done.’ She crept out of the room.

In returning to her profession, Nora was trying to convince herself that she had no illusions about her future. The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, without the religious exaltation—these were the rules of the order to which she was attached. But if a woman threw herself entirely into her work, she seemed in the end to find something which fed her spirit.

There was Ruth Ewing. Nora had visited her at her scientific station on the Massachusetts coast not far from Margaret’s studio. After a laborious day hunting and studying specimens, Ruth leaped into the sea and followed the path of the moonlight. In the water, beauty, grace, the swiftness of a fish or a mermaid came to this plain little spinster. Her emotions swept over the sky, over birds, butterflies, bugs of the less ethereal kingdoms, flowers, plants, germs, with the same unspoiled joy. Men like John Harper would say that science dried up a woman, but nothing would ever dry up the pools of Ruth Ewing’s fresh spirit. Nora and Margaret had left her in a New York laboratory working beside a man, both of them trying to isolate the influenza germ. Neither one thought of his own glorification. They were the servants of sick humanity. Their sexless coöperation seemed to Nora very fine. Disembodied mind—that was the goal of mankind. As she watched their generosity, each placing the results of his former experiments at the disposal of the other, she felt something of the heights to which science, once so lowly and despised, has climbed. Hearing Ruth talk made one realize what an intellectual outlet meant for women.

But Margaret Abington said Ruth was a pathetic creature. Margaret didn’t appreciate science. Nor did she appreciate Ruth’s strenuous enjoyment of the natural world, without contemplation or real æsthetic appreciation, always darting after something outdoors to name and classify it, to add it to her store of memory. Margaret’s way was so different. She let beauty take her unaware. But the result for her as for Ruth was the same; the same absorption, the same fusion of the individual with his accomplishment.

The problem of women whose entire sex interest has gone into their work belongs to the present. The old painters sentimentalized the virgin with her rapturous gaze upon her young child. But physical creation is the labor of only one class of women. Miss Steele had the uplifted expression of a Raphael Madonna when she started a new book and Ruth Ewing when she was pursuing a new germ. This emotional devotion to some kind of work—this was what Nora must find if Petersfield was to be endurable.

Saying good-bye to Michael and Ellen Powys on the pier, Ellen with her first baby, sure that nothing was important but babies, Nora felt debased—frustrated—wasted in life. Women with intellectual progeny never flaunted their self-satisfaction that way. Nora didn’t care if she never saw Ellen again. Michael’s father had died, leaving a generous fortune to his son with the stipulation that he never step his foot in the factory, reserved to the management of Michael’s conservative older brother. Of course they were disappointed. But with the money they were embarking to London to start a new liberal weekly. At least Michael was. Ellen, as a mother, left the reform of the world to others. Nora waved to her old friend and watched her sail out of her life with no regrets. The women at Petersfield—they meant her future.

A return to the old life. But during the first days Nora felt like a stranger. The war had changed Petersfield. During the house shortage, commuters had discovered the quiet village, had built a row of attractive suburban dwellings on the street leading to the campus, and persuaded the railroad to put on express trains between New York and Petersfield, with excellent service. The journey was now simpler than the subway stretch between Knickerbocker University and Wall Street. For a member of the faculty, returning from graduate study with an indefinite stretch of years divided between teaching and mad plunges into Knickerbocker lectures and seminars, residence within suburban limits had special advantages.

But there were other changes. The girls had changed. Most of them had bobbed hair, wore short skirts, and adopted a costume common over the entire country, one heard, among college women. There were two variations: a smart sweater over a ruffled blouse and a pleated skirt, or the pleated skirt with a blouse in coat effect fastened below the waist with a leather belt. A plain felt hat completed the desired effect. Even the woollen stockings now in vogue kept close to one model. Girls between seventeen and twenty-two all looked alike, and the delicacy and grace which a democracy in fashion did not entirely conceal was hidden as if the owner were ashamed of distinction.

Possibly the college world has always appropriated a homogeneous style to characterize its own order. She may have forgotten. There was the Peter Thompson sailor-suit just waning in Nora’s freshman year. Yet surely there was more individuality then.

Walking alone at the end of her first day of lectures, Nora approached the graveyard where the Suffrage League had kept its night vigils. She laughed aloud at the memory. She wanted to see how the old place looked. She heard voices.

Seated on the tombstones was a group of girls all having an afternoon smoke together. When they saw one of the faculty, they rose, greeted her cordially, and invited her to join them. No traces of embarrassment, even though cigarettes were forbidden by college rules. Conservative mothers from the Middle West still terrorized over the academic authorities.

Everywhere one heard about the new frankness among girls. Frankness was their code. They acted as they thought, Nora soon observed. A distinguished English poet came to lecture, and the girls, expecting to hear him read his verse, crowded the hall. But he happened to be a critic as well, and, in a voice so low it reached only the first ten or twelve rows, read a highly involved study of a Victorian poet. The students in the back rows slid out. Those in the centre began trickling away. Bolder spirits marched out of the hall. At last only those near the platform remained.

Professor Steele was enraged by such rudeness to a guest. But the girls proclaimed their intention of defending themselves against boredom. No good came of it. Let lecturers speak out good and loud, and they would stay to listen.

In the exchange of undergraduate ideas speech was full of psychological tags. Only a friend like Helen enabled Nora to meet this new college generation. A freshman was greeted her first day with a charge of the Œdipus complex, against which she must defend herself. Intimacies between two girls were watched with keen, distrustful eyes. Among one’s classmates, one looked for the bisexual type, the masculine girl searching for a feminine counterpart, and one ridiculed their devotions.

‘But are they really so sophisticated as they seem?’ Nora appealed to Margaret Abington as she finished recounting a student’s avowal of feminine independence, in which adventures of sex loomed dangerously.

‘They’re as innocent as babes,’ Margaret declared. ‘It’s pathetic. All that talk is a protective armor. Those who don’t talk—the old-fashioned, languishing ones—look out for them. It was like that in your day. You’ve forgotten. When you’re young, you like to express yourself.’

A group of girls having dinner with Nora began to argue about the difference between a flirt and a coquette.

‘A flirt,’ ventured a precocious freshman, whose older brother was of the opinion that girls ought to learn to think and had accordingly presented his sister with a set of Shaw, ‘a flirt is a woman who is willing to rouse a man’s passion without being willing to satisfy it.’

The two older girls blushed beyond their rouge.

In this post-war era men flocked to Petersfield from all the colleges for week-end visits. A man with a car speeded over the roads from Boston to Petersfield as a relief from mental fatigue. The campus was like a country fair. The visitors needed no special entertainment. Roller-skating had become a fad among the girls. A youth, therefore, roller-skated, hand in hand with his lady-love, who, if she were a stalwart maiden, could hold him up while he was learning to balance himself. There were bicycle races on the college walks, and Miss Steele was almost run down. Most of the faculty went into retirement during this frightful week-end period. Even the country roads were no longer peacefully secluded. Youth was an athletic generation with tireless legs. The week-enders explored the countryside. A girl, walking with her visitor’s arm tossed carelessly over her shoulder as they trudged along, was a frequent faculty vision of horror. There were picnics in one’s secret haunts—droves of them. Margaret Abington gave up her walks with Nora. But Nora could only be thankful all this hadn’t come in her day. Then, men visited Petersfield for proms or to announce their engagements. Other times one had peace. For the girls without swains to exhibit, this new order necessitated advertising one’s failure to attract men. Nora watched the female squads doing everything together, pretending to be superior to these ruddy boys in knickerbockers, but looking over their shoulders at them just the same.

Ruth Ewing insisted from the first that the new ways were better. Her students told her about the violent arguments they had with their masculine week-enders about the war, which had touched none of them, so they could talk; about the present Administration and its shameful attitude toward the League of Nations. World affairs were vital to the best of these girls. They were arranging debates with the men’s colleges. The Oxford debaters were coming to Petersfield to cross swords with them next year. It was wonderful. In November a conference on social questions was to be held at the college, with delegates from the men’s colleges as well as the women’s.

Through all this revolution, however, the faculty was unchanged. The feeble representation of men had not increased. What men there were seemed more old-maidish than the women, with minds far inferior. Many were there, Nora suspected, because they couldn’t compete with men in the men’s colleges. The curriculum, too, was just the same, even though the President announced that the colleges since the war were attracting a new type of girl, formerly confined to the finishing schools. But courses in household arts, by which this society type might be benefited, had not been provided. When faculty discussions touched upon the necessity, Miss Steele fought against such innovations. Petersfield was a college of arts. Let these frivolous creatures who lowered academic standards go to an institute for domestic science. The number of girls entering teaching had also declined. But the old training for a pedagogical career was still the backbone of the college.

Nora going down to New York twice a week, spending Saturday in the Knickerbocker library, in the moments snatched for contemplation pondered over what she could do. On the train travelling back and forth she went over this huge problem. The old traditions and ideals were gone. What was to take their place?

Her ambition for the students who crowded her courses was to give them an understanding of the impartial mind, how one got it, what results it gained. She tried to show them the confused, wasted world into which their youth had been born; she put before them their special problems and responsibilities. She talked about the international point of view, read them the preface to the new Shaw play which had appeared that summer; ‘The Wicked Half-Century,’ ‘War Delirium,’ ‘The Long Arm of War,’ ‘The Sufferings of the Sane,’ ‘How the Fools Shouted the Wise Men Down.’ But while she read, she was conscious of the daily press in the fall of 1920, with its headlines trumpeting the hunting down of dangerous ‘aliens and radicals,’ terms largely synonymous, the deportation of harmless foreigners, and the madness of Americanization propaganda. What difference did her poor feeble words make?

But she continued to remind the girls that studies in history, unless one first tried to be impartial, were a pure waste of time. Go into something else. The classics or a new language. Mathematics.

The descendants of the Socialist League of Nora’s day were now concentrated upon the Russian Soviets. They looked to the radical history instructor, Miss Deming, as a patroness for the cause of real freedom.

‘But are your Bolshevists really giving Russia freedom?’ she demanded the day she was asked to address a meeting. ‘Isn’t this a new form of tyranny?’

Her audience looked at her, their courtesy fighting against hostility. She was evidently like all the rest of the faculty, blind to the beauty and tragedy of Russia, struggling against her old shackles. She had deceived them with her animated talk.

Miss Steele told Nora she was becoming an excellent teacher. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing with them,’ she said. ‘But they’re interested—stirred up. I hear them talking. You’re waked up yourself, Nora. Your trips to New York—the University—it won’t let you get stale.’

So the winter passed.

II

One night Margaret Abington knocked at Nora’s door. She came in, and lay down on her couch, utterly exhausted.

‘It’s the weather,’ Nora said. ‘The first of spring. I feel tired, too, these days.’

Margaret said nothing.

‘I wonder,’ she murmured half to herself, ‘if it’s worth while going on. One always feels sure the next thing will be better.’

She rose slowly, paused at Nora’s door, her fingers playing with the knob. Her face wore its characteristic twisted, tortured smile.

‘You’re so strong, Nora,’ she said. ‘So—so firm and courageous. If I——’ She stopped, looked back at Nora, and was gone.

Late the next afternoon word got around that Miss Abington was missing. She had not come down to breakfast, but that was not unusual. At luncheon she was still gone. Nora went up to her room. It was empty. A search was begun. Nora was questioned.

‘Did she seem pessimistic?’ they asked her.

‘No more than usual.’

‘You noticed nothing? What she said?’

‘She so often says queer things—when she’s tired.’

Not until the next day did they find her. A farmer three miles beyond the college saw a hat floating down the swollen stream which ran through his property. She had been dead some time when they took her out of the water. Not far away was a basket weighted down with stones holding the bodies of her two cats. She had not been willing to leave them behind her.

In all the sad arrangements Nora and her friends had to make during the next days, they found Margaret Abington’s life singularly solitary. She had provided for no disposal of her possessions, even her paintings. Some wealthy distant cousins near Boston to whom Nora wrote felt outraged that the Abington name had been dragged into the newspapers. They had no suggestions to make about her pictures. They did not care for the kind of thing she did. They had been collecting Gainsboroughs for years and were now started on Romneys. It was clear enough from their letters that they had never given their gifted cousin a penny to help her along with her work nor the blessed boon of a little leisure.

Miss Abington’s canvases became the possession of the college, all but the picture of the flowers growing in the fisherman’s doorway, which went to Nora. And to the fall exhibition, arranged in the art lecture room, fashionable and artistic New York crowded. Miss Abington had made Petersfield famous. The President was very much pleased. He immediately forgot that he had never cared for Miss Abington. He thought of himself now as the guardian of a sacred shrine. For the pictures, which the critics tardily praised, he conceived the idea of a beautiful gallery where the best of contemporary paintings should be gathered. He came out in the New York papers, called on art patrons, and wrote impressive letters to wealthy men. In a few months he announced to the college that the art building was assured.

That the name of one so shrinking and unassuming should be tossed about by the daily press and the college generally was unendurable to Nora. Fame for a talent so delicate must be clean and pure. Nora saw it besmirched by the stupidity of the rabble. In Margaret’s lifetime a select company had appreciated her. She had had no mercy for fools. Now she was defenceless against the enthusiasm of the loquacious dilettante. Nora could not bear it. She kept away from the art lecture room, avoided the sight of Margaret’s successor, a hard, confident young person who talked about pictures as if she were trying to sell them.

Margaret—the dear companion, so tortured by her own fastidious nature, so affectionate with her friends, so fierce against the rest of the world—Nora would keep for herself. She no longer mentioned Margaret’s name.

There was plenty to do. As an ambitious historian of nineteenth-century England, she was now devoting most of her time to the eighteenth century, and had begun her book, ‘England on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution.’ The making of a book after long stretches of teaching, with the frequent trips to New York on stray half-days to use the University library, the painful adjustments of the mind from the classroom to writing and back again, was a tortuous undertaking. Nora thought late at night as she worked of scholars all over the world who have brought forth their ideas with an even greater fight against unfavorable odds. The luxuries of ease and an untroubled mind—they were unknown to the brotherhood of poor scholars. Brotherhood of poor scholars—the phrase running through her weary head brought cool draughts of refreshment. All those who had something within them—like poor Margaret—how they suffered in the pangs of creation! The chips of Nora’s labor she gave to her students. She also took them into her confidence about her speculations, her perplexities, tried to have them see how difficult it was to be honest, intelligent, fair, and at the same time how beautiful were these virtues of learning. Some of them caught her meaning.

III

Five years of toil. There is nothing to say about it. You read for five years, think, write, destroy everything you have done the first, perhaps the second year; and possibly at the end, if you have kept your head and your health, you have written a book which is worth the reading. Just that, Nora estimated, was her history between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.

But the book was done. Nora had spent her thirtieth birthday typing the last of it. Miss Steele went around with a challenging air pronouncing it the best piece of scholarship done by an American woman, or a British woman, she often added. No one dared to contradict her. But Miss Steele at last was beginning to show signs of age. Nora discerned a tendency in her to emotionalize those whom she had once regarded with a chill justice, and the praise of her old teacher had its sting of pain. Professor Nicholson, who was urging the necessity of sending so promising a young scholar to England to get a really big piece of work started, regarded this first book as merely a respectable beginning. It was all his management, of course, that the fellowship from Knickerbocker University came to Nora. She was amused that Petersfield should consider her a remarkable person, and that her students should offer their congratulations with humble awe.

IV

After a tiresome afternoon spent conferring with her publishers, Nora went to Helen Spring’s apartment for a quiet week-end. She and Helen were lounging in front of the fire after dinner, with no other light in the room. A knock at the door.

‘Bother,’ said Helen.

She opened the door, standing there a minute in silence, staring at her visitor. ‘Why, it’s Zoe Ryder!’ she exclaimed. ‘I didn’t recognize you at first.’

Nora turned on the lights. A pale, very thin woman dropped down, breathless, on Helen’s couch. ‘It must be five or six years since I’ve seen you,’ Nora remarked, trying to conceal her shock at the change which had come over Zoe. A kind of decay had settled over the former Southern gentility, as if poor Zoe had been dragged through a miry way in her troubles.

‘You were expecting me?’ Zoe gasped. ‘I followed the marks. I was so relieved when I saw it was your house, Helen.’

‘The marks?’

Zoe pulled off a little black hat and patted her short brown hair, heavily streaked with grey. ‘At first I was scared when I saw them on my doorstep. A big letter _F_ in chalk. It’s that gang following me again, I thought.’ Zoe’s large blue eyes regarded first Helen seated beside her on the couch, then Nora before the fire. Nora observed their restless glitter. ‘Another of their tricks. But something just made me follow them. You know how it is. Something inside pushing you to do things. The arrows at the corner—it was easy—and then following the lines—they brought me right here.’

‘But we don’t know anything about the marks,’ Helen protested.

Zoe paid no attention. She sat, her hands clasping her knees, looking abstractedly at something in front of her. ‘They’ve done enough. Fed on me—ruined a good business.’ The gentle voice became shrill, then subsided, and returned to the old girlish animation Nora remembered. ‘You never came to my tea-room, Helen. It was so cute. Of course I didn’t have any money. I took down the doors and made them into tables, stuck candles in the holes where the knobs had been. I called it the “Devil’s Kitchen”——’

Nora and Helen looked at each other.

‘It was all written up in the newspapers. In two of them. I cooked everything myself—fried the chicken—made the chocolate cake—the first night went off wonderfully. I even had drinks—to advertise the tea-room, you know.’

‘And you’ve made a success of it?’ Helen inquired.

‘The first week I had crowds every night.’ Zoe’s aged face had in flashes the fire of youth. ‘The real people—writers, the theatre crowd, artists. And that gang—they all had titles—foreigners. The Baron was Russian. Pole maybe. I can’t remember. He brought the others. They kept saying they’d pay and then ate off me every night. Imposing on a woman that way! And noisy when they were drunk—it scared off the others. I don’t blame them.’

Zoe’s narrative—broken off with this strange, inconsequential anger against some one—the gang it was, Nora remembered. It sounded like madness. And yet Zoe, perched lightly on the edge of Helen’s couch, was so small and harmless, so much, Nora had always felt, like a fluttering ground bird, with a silly ambition sometimes for the sky. Helen sat regarding Zoe with her kind, amused eyes.

‘Why did you feed those men?’ Nora demanded indignantly.

‘They just ordered things. Nobility—all of them. Just helped themselves to the drinks until they were all gone. And the trouble to get hootch now——’

Zoe, with her soft voice and helpless air, in league with bootleggers and a debauched alien crowd—the word ‘hootch’ crashing into her old-fashioned Virginia speech—was this really Zoe sitting there?

‘My dear,’ drawled Zoe, ‘I never knew there were such people in the world. After I’d trusted them——’ Her innocent round blue eyes with the deep circles looked up at Nora. ‘I know now. It was a gang that feeds off people—off women. They won’t work. Just drinking——’

Zoe wandered in her narrative. But in the end of a long description of the troubled fortunes of the tea-room, she came at last to its sudden end, the doors closed, no more possible credit.

‘Even then the Baron came,’ she went on. ‘Walked right in. “I’m hungry,” he said. “You’ve eaten up all I’ve got,” I told him. “There’s nothing left.” “I’m going to make myself some tea.” And, my dear, he walked right out into the kitchen and got tea for himself.’

‘You ought to’ve called the police,’ Helen said.

But Zoe for some reason had no confidence in the protecting arm of the law. She shrank away from Helen’s suggestion, as if wincing before a blow. With a few sticks of furniture rescued from the tea-room she had sought refuge in the attic of a feather factory as a hiding-place from the gang, of which she lived in daily dread.

‘I didn’t even have a bed,’ Zoe continued plaintively. ‘I told my friends——’ In all of Zoe’s troubles, when she tried to borrow money, she spoke largely of those mysterious devoted beings always ready to come to her aid. ‘They began sending me cots. One after another. I lost count of them. They were just lined up——’ She laughed as she stretched out her hands to indicate an infinity of beds. This light, untroubled laughter as she described that terrible refuge—what—what had come to Zoe to change her like this? Nora’s imagination leaped to a succession of vivid, unmentionable horrors.

Zoe went on. Even in this rude shelter above the feather factory, consisting sometimes of one room, sometimes of four in Zoe’s uncertain recital, the Baron hunted her down. He declared he would freeze on the streets if she didn’t take him.

‘I had such a nice fireplace,’ she boasted. ‘And I picked up wood everywhere. He lay right down on the floor in front of my fire. He had a terrible cough. Honestly, girls, he was very ill. I couldn’t——’

She had made up a bed for the Baron out of her superfluous store of cots, covered him with some old clothes, nursed his cold. But as soon as he was well, he went out and brought back the gang to occupy the rest of the cots stacked up in the attic.

Helen accepted even this last revelation quietly, with all that one could imagine from Zoe’s dark hints, the loft of the feather factory with its disreputable nightly crew presided over by a worn, emaciated Zoe. Did Zoe know what she was saying? Couldn’t Helen stop this mad tale? Surely all this flimsy, impossible horror was the work of a sick mind. But Helen’s calm face seemed to inspire Zoe to go on.

‘Carrying on—stamping up my stairway—there wasn’t even a lock to my door. I’d lie there scared almost to death——’ Zoe’s skinny little shoulders shook. ‘It was terrible—just terrible.’ Her voice had the chirp of an insect trying to announce a tragedy.

Zoe came home one afternoon and found a crowd gathering around the back door leading to her attic. Two policemen stood over something on the stairs. Zoe stepped up beside them. She displayed a dainty pride as she described her important part in the drama.

‘There was the Baron. He’d got some feathers out of one of the factory bags. He was all rolled up in feathers. Just his head sticking out. Like an enormous bird.’ Zoe began to laugh at the memory. Helen and Nora, not knowing what else to do, joined her.

‘Such language. And right before a lady.’ Zoe had a slight lisp in moments of stress. ‘He was so drunk he—they wanted to carry him off. But I couldn’t have that. I told them he was a relative. I’d be responsible for him.’ Again Nora observed Zoe’s unaccountable satisfaction, as if she had performed some glorious deed.

But after Zoe had got the Baron up to the attic, she had herself taken flight. Since then she had lived in a room not far from Helen, in daily dread that the gang would discover her.

‘I’ve found out about them now,’ she said. ‘They collect around the Square. They pick out their victims and then—I don’t dare go out except after dark to get something to eat. I never go to the door. My friends ring three times. Remember, three times. If they found where I was——’

Zoe rambled on a little more, going back over parts of her story, exclaiming at intervals, ‘My dear, I never knew there were such people in the world.’

Suddenly she seemed to remember a pressing engagement, jumped up, and left, saying once more, ‘Ring three times. I’m always home.’

She was gone, and Helen and Nora were looking at each other.

‘It’s all like a hideous nightmare that you can’t shake off,’ Nora said, her voice husky.

‘Something has happened to her. Drugs maybe,’ Helen speculated. ‘But that old obsession of hers——’

How much of this tale of terror was true, how much built up with the aid of Zoe’s sick mind, it was impossible to tell. They compared their impressions, went over the details once more, but there seemed no immediate solution.

Finally they went downstairs. Stooping they made out the letter _F_ in chalk on the outer steps. At the nearest corner, they found a chalk diagram.

The arrows leading from the letter _F_ pointed toward their house. They followed the arrows for a few blocks, found them radiating in all directions, in a perplexing maze.

‘Some new Village game,’ Nora ventured. ‘A party, perhaps—a treasure hunt. These novelty-seekers would hit on something like this.’

Whatever it was, however, it had brought Zoe to Helen’s.

‘And I didn’t even dare offer to help her,’ Helen remembered, when they had returned to Helen’s sitting-room. ‘She’s borrowed money from every one she knew. It’s two years since any one I know has seen her.’

They made inquiries among Zoe’s old circle, but no one had heard of her. At the address she gave even three rings at the door failed to bring Zoe.

‘Well,’ Helen remarked, when Nora was starting back to Petersfield Sunday night, ‘you’ve seen all my menagerie the years you’ve been around New York. I guess Zoe’s the last of them, Nora. Your work’s about finished. I’ve done my best for you—Amelia—Vicky—Zoe—I don’t believe I can give you any more.’

‘You’ve done very well by me, Helen.’

‘Kept you from too dull a diet—the university and the normal academic mind——Well, you’re the only one of us that’s come to anything. And yet we’ve sneered at your sanity behind your back, Nora. I can tell you now.’

V

Nora stood in a long procession of men and women receiving degrees from Knickerbocker University. She marched up to the high platform, heard a few words mumbled over her, and was soon back in her seat. The end, so long delayed by teaching, by her own stumbling in by-paths, by her intellectual insecurity, was reached at last. In the crowded amphitheatre, she sensed what a big American university, so formless and destitute of charm or emotion, had given her. In these striving years, shut off from much of what men experienced in the rubbing together of the best minds, she was carrying away intellectual gains which Petersfield could never have offered her.

After all, it was the universities like Knickerbocker which represented the best American life could deliver, the safest places to breed the ideas which would become the popular possession of the next age. The universities were far from perfect—she was ready to admit, but no institution of learning can be far above the society which supports it. Idealists had laid heavy charges against Knickerbocker University: the creaking machinery, the officers who placed immediate well-being before the ultimate good, the dull professors, the dead scholarship. Many of these evils existed in all the universities. But there was the other side. Where did all the scornful critics who saw no virtue in American learning get their ideals—their first spark? At a university. Some professor. Some other student. Perhaps both. Then they grew up, went away, and belabored the place which prepared them to walk without leading strings.

Crossing the square in front of the library, escaping from the multitude of Commencement Day, Nora experienced a prolonging of her elated mood. She reviewed swiftly the books she knew written by the men of Knickerbocker. In most of them one found honesty, patient toil, the absence of charlatanism. And in the best there was brilliance and a safe start for a new generation of scholars. The great need was more time—more time to think. ‘Ripeness is all,’ wise Shakespeare had said. More time, more leisure, peace, no worry about money—but all this is the heaven of which the tired scholar dreams.

Ruth Ewing was waiting for Nora on the corner. ‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t get in to see your little show for the crowd.’ She kissed Nora. ‘What shall we do now?’

‘I’ve meant to do it for months. I’ve never had the time. I’m going to have my hair cut off,’ Nora said.

‘My dear!’ protested her friend.

‘Come along.’ Nora put a firm hand on Ruth’s arm. ‘My mind’s all made up.’

‘Miss Steele will be furious,’ Ruth persisted, but Nora only laughed and dragged her forward.

Nora gazed at a shorn head in the barber’s mirror. ‘Very nice, Miss,’ a dark little man was saying.

Ruth Ewing was examining her not entirely with disapprobation. ‘I wish Margaret could see you, Nora.’

Nora continued to study the reflection in the mirror. The line of her head in back, the sweep of hair over her forehead, broad and clean-cut—yes, it all went with her slender, boyish figure.

‘They won’t take you seriously at first over there in England,’ laughed Ruth. ‘How you’ll fool them, my dear.’

Years had dropped from Nora, and most of her dignity. At this climax in her academic honors, she had never seemed more lightly touched by time. This was the way to start marching over the stretch between thirty and forty. Thirty-one years old. A woman ready to face the world for the first time. The best of life beginning; of that she felt sure. Intelligence ripens slowly, gives its best only after long and weary waiting. But she was ready, at last, to see what she could do.

‘Ruth,’ Nora called out, ‘let’s take the first train to Petersfield and show Miss Steele. Of course she’ll be furious. I want to hear her rage.’ She slid out of the barber’s chair, her eyes seeking once more the trim, smiling girl in the mirror.