Chapter III: I

Nora was on the train taking her from Maronac to Petersfield. During the week she had spent in Maronac, Mrs. Pancratz, the Bohemian woman who had been Cordelia’s helper in periods of stress, serving her at the end, had protected Nora from every one: from Lizzie Guildford arriving the first day, insisting that Nora would want to see her, even from Della coming to show her little boy. From the front window one morning she had caught a glimpse of Amy Henderson hurrying to Weyhausen’s store, still looking like a girl of twenty, as elaborately fashionable as she had been then. But she could not bring herself to see any of them. She must have a sanctuary, a hiding-place for her bruised body. Every day, as the echoing house became more and more dismantled, she had the desperate sense that it was being torn away from her, one wall after another, one board, another, until there would be no place, nothing behind which she could stifle her mad, quivering passion, her helpless cries. It was over at last. The house, on the edge of the new industrial district which had sprung up since the war, was sold to the Aluminum Company, and the heavy mahogany and walnut furniture made by the old English cabinet worker, the friend of Cordelia’s father, was on its way to Petersfield.

Nora would never see Maronac again. On the last night, before she went to her room in the German hotel across the river, where she and Cordelia had often eaten their Sunday dinners, she had walked down to the beach, and in the beating wind which made her cling to the railing walked out on the pier toward the lighthouse, winking over the lake. She had looked down at the churning water, had hesitated, loosened her hand clutching the iron support, and then turned and gone slowly back toward the town.

In an hour, she would be back in Petersfield, back to the old life. In the night, when she had lain in her berth hour after hour listening to the clicking rails, she had marvelled at the meek obedience of the human spirit. Why was she going back to Petersfield? What could she do there or anywhere?

From the first, that night in the Exeter hotel, the cathedral chimes jangling mad tunes through her head, those other terrible nights in the Bedford Place lodging-house in London, on the boat coming home, she had never had any illusions. What sentimentalists had written, babbled among themselves about living in the spirit, not allowing the dead to depart from one’s life, holding them close to the heart, keeping them, she had never, even in her quieter, exhausted moments, heeded. All of life crowded into a few feverishly happy days, and then wrenched from her. She was only an automaton now, jerked about with no will of her own. She had clutched at Petersfield as the first support which had offered itself, and now she clung to it with feeble desperation.

With only a few minutes left before she must get off the train, see the mob of students gathered at the station, direct her hazy, jaded powers sufficiently to descend and be conveyed to the college, she shut her eyes before the prospect of what she had driven herself to do.

The porter was beside her. ‘Brush ye off, madam?’

The familiar Petersfield hills spun past her. Some strange girls were chattering the familiar college jargon at the opposite end of the car. She put on her hat, stood motionless while the porter worked with his brush, and then fell against the seat, the car whirling round and round in nauseous circles.

The train was slowing up. She looked out. There stood the girls, in their brilliant sport clothes and graceful shorn heads, talking and laughing together, waving toward the train. Youth was beautiful—so full of hope. She, once, like them——The same old station, the steps, the lame porter who always remembered her. She felt something crashing within her, the blood coursing swiftly through her veins. The old life unchanged. Tears dropped unnoticed from her eyes.

This was her life, here in Petersfield. The lame man took her bag, touched his cap. With downcast eyes she passed through the animated, darting crowd on the platform, and her taxi carried her quickly to the college and through its gates. The buildings draped in ivy, the advanced guard of students in white, yellow, lavender, rose, fluttering over the green of the lawns like butterflies, the grey towers rising above old trees—never since she came there as a freshman for the first time had the beauty of Petersfield so touched her, encompassed her. Here, after all, was the place where she must find peace.

Ruth Ewing in Faculty Hall held Nora in her arms and kissed her. ‘I’ve missed you so, my dear. No one else here like you. Why didn’t you tell us when you were coming? We wanted to be down at the station to welcome you, our distinguished member from foreign parts. Miss Steele trotted over twice this morning to see if you had arrived.’

‘I’m glad to be back,’ Nora said quickly, conscious that Ruth’s scientific eye was upon her.

‘You look tired, my dear. You mustn’t be too ambitious right away.’

‘How is Miss Steele?’

‘I must warn you. She’s very changed. It’s high blood pressure and a kind of nervous exhaustion. Of course, she ought to rest.’

‘It would kill her,’ Nora reminded her.

‘Yes, I know. But she’s killing herself this way. She’s so rebellious against her infirmity. A kind of mad rage. She has falling spells. Last year she was brought home twice in a very bad condition. But she won’t stop. We’re hoping you can do something with her.’

‘Never. I’ll never interfere with her.’

Ruth Ewing shook her head.

While Nora was unpacking, one visitor after another came into her room, all of them with hearty congratulations for themselves and for Petersfield that she was to be their Dean. Nora listened to them quietly, trying to respond to what their conception of a dean must be. Judicial and enigmatic, possibly. But how did one look that? On the campus the students she had known, stopped her, told her how glad they were she was back, how much they had missed her.

Before dinner that night Miss Steele plunged into her room.

‘Well,’ she began with a vigorous handshake. ‘I told them to get you here, Nora. I refused to listen, to consider any one else. If we’re to be reformed, I told them, let one of our own who knows us cast the first stone.’

‘I don’t know about stones,’ Nora laughed.

Miss Steele sat down. She now wore two sets of spectacles, one on top of the other, but in spite of them she betrayed the indecisive movements of a person whose sight is fast going. When she was in repose, her face dropped into strange, bewildered lines. Her hands twitched as she tried to hold them tightly together. She scraped back and forth on the bare floor one foot encased in the Congress boot which had inspired campus humor for twenty years.

‘Have they told you?’ she burst out finally. ‘The President will talk to you when you see him in the morning. They tell me I ought to resign—hint at it. Advise me to rest—to give myself a little leisure to write my books. Leisure after all these years! What would I do with it? Without my students, why should I write books? I write to help them. If I—if I resign——’

‘How ridiculous! You to give up. I shan’t listen to such nonsense.’

‘You mean it, Nora? You don’t think for the good of the college——’

‘I’m depending on you to get me started here.’

‘That’s what I hoped. But I—I’m an old woman.’

‘You’re a wise woman also,’ Nora added. ‘I shall tell the President that without you to run the department——’

Miss Steele took out her handkerchief—she always bought the large squares devoted usually to masculine necessity—and blew her nose like a trumpet. According to her old-fashioned ladylike code nothing could have been more degrading than such a public exhibition. But a show of emotion belonged to even lower depths. At times one must choose the lesser of two evils.

‘Well, then,’ she said in her characteristic hurried fashion, ‘I must be off.’ She wrung Nora’s hand. ‘Don’t try to do everything at once, young woman. Our ancient evils will keep a year or two while you’re getting started.’

‘I want to talk over a few of my ideas with you. Some of them you won’t like, Miss Steele.’

‘Of course, I won’t. But are you running this college to please me? Some of them won’t please the President. I know you well enough for that, Nora Deming.’ The door banged behind her retreating figure.

That night, when the footsteps in Faculty Hall and the high, eager voices of the girls outside had ceased, Nora, before she went to bed, looked at herself in her mirror. Ruth Ewing had immediately seen the change in her face with those searching, kind eyes. A few weeks ago the daily reflection which met her was that of an ignorant, careless girl. But already it was beginning to show faint traceries of lines. Not caverns, trenches, only delicate pencillings around the nose and mouth, a kind of veil over the eyes, as if their owner no longer dared to look straight out at the world. This was age, so long delayed, but coming quickly now at thirty-two. Age—she welcomed age. It meant the inevitable end.

Nora took out a photograph in an old-fashioned mahogany frame and looked at the happy-faced young woman wearing puffed sleeves and a festoon of lace around her throat, and a little boy standing beside her, a serious, handsome child of five or six, with a plump hand clutching the silken folds of his mother’s dress. She regarded it steadily for several moments, and then hid it away in the drawer of the table beside her bed.

Work—only work to drive away that cutting, scalding memory. She would work. Never stop. Philosophers down through the ages have praised work. One can work when everything else is torn away. One takes it up first for relief, escape. Then in the end it is life—all of life.

But until then—until one forgets—when what she and Neville in a few summer weeks had known was everything—even in those breathless moments there had been time to measure it. For her, love had been immediate, irretrievable mating, the complete kind which comes only once. She remembered her stumbling experiments in chemistry, those mysterious combinations, reactions which she had watched over in the laboratory, foreign elements bearing no outward resemblance to each other, but coming together with such instantaneous, inevitable force. Love for her and Neville had been like that. Dwellers in far-removed parts of an indifferent planet, living many aimless, weary years before they came together, and then close—close.

But there was no escape from the spinning of her mind. Restless, active, it went on and on. Reaching out into the future—carrying her tired body along with it. It had dragged her back to this old life. Now it stood over her, beating her into plans for action. To-morrow when she saw the President—what was she going to tell him? What she herself had discovered, freedom, escape from fear—that she would try to give to the Petersfield girls.

Even on the boat bringing her home, she already understood herself. She understood Cordelia—all women. She was sure that she saw clearly how she could protect them from some of the taboos, the restrictions, the detachments which had held her down. They must cease being afraid—afraid of themselves, of sex, of truth, of life and death. She no longer feared any of these things. Once more, as on the train, the blood leaped within her, brought fire to her brain, warmth through her whole body. Life—one couldn’t escape it. Even joy.

II

When Nora saw the President in the morning, he began the conversation by lamenting the fact that Professor Steele was no longer what she once was.

Nora drew up her small figure to the most impressively expanded deanly proportions. ‘But even now, there is no one at Petersfield to equal her,’ she said firmly.

‘Perhaps not—perhaps not,’ he admitted, tapping his eyeglasses nervously against the arm of his chair. Professor Steele was a strong-minded, exasperating woman, as Miss Deming well knew. Perhaps all strong-minded women were exasperating. The President had his playful glances at humor. Petersfield had been founded to produce such a race, and it had nobly fulfilled its destiny.

Nora could follow the thoughts of the President as he sat solemnly measuring her capacity for her new job. By the time the Dean was forty-five, she might succeed him. Alumnæ were always clamoring to honor their own sex. But Miss Deming looked so small and innocent sitting there, not easily distinguishable from the undergraduates, whose destinies she held in her thin, nervous fingers.

He repeated the future policy of Petersfield, which he had already outlined in the letter he had sent Nora in London. Hereafter, the college was to be restricted to the best applicants, not to the daughters of alumnæ, those with the most flawless genealogies, or the most eulogistic recommendations from school heads respecting charm, school spirit, and attractive appearance. Mental tests, records of preparatory schools, were to be the decisive factors. With hundreds battering at its doors for admission, Petersfield could, at last, afford to be exclusive. And for the final choice of this superior student body, the young women who respected intelligence and learning and were willing for four years to devote themselves to the exercise of the mind, and for their general guidance, the new office of dean had been created. The President’s voice took on a warm tone as he expanded his theme.

‘I’ve been thinking over many plans,’ Nora told him.

‘Oh, yes,’ agreed the President, determined that Petersfield should march in the vanguard of the college processional.

‘Some of them may be a mistake. But this first year I’d like to make a few experiments.’

‘We must proceed with caution,’ warned the President.

In her opening address in chapel, the new Dean announced to the students of Petersfield that their college was in the future to be a place for responsible women, for women who were capable of deciding their own course of action, not for children in leading strings. But they had for so many years been addressed in public as women and treated afterward as wayward children that they only smiled politely at the eager, red-haired woman, who stood, a small figure in the folds of her academic gown, on the edge of the chapel rostrum.

By degrees Nora explained to the President what she wanted to do.

‘I want women to go to college as men do—completely free. If they make mistakes——’

‘But I can’t see that freedom in men’s colleges has brought about praiseworthy results. Quite the contrary.’

‘Because at the same time with freedom high standards of scholarship have never been insisted upon. If a girl devotes herself to dancing, musical comedies, and a tour of the men’s colleges at Prom time, and her work suffers, she goes home. She can be social there. We criticize women for lack of independent thinking, for shifting around instead of coming directly to the point, for cringing before authority, for lying, for using the feminine weapons of flattery, tears, hysteria. And these are the great sins.’ Nora’s large reddish-brown eyes held the President in their spell. ‘I’d rather see the girls of Petersfield drunk——’

At the Dean’s words the President fell back as if, Nora surmised sitting quietly opposite, she had taken the paper-knife lying on the desk beside him and stabbed him to the heart.

‘Than full of deceit,’ Nora concluded, with the suspicion of a smile flitting over her lips.

‘Drink for women——’ the President said in an awed voice.

‘They won’t drink. They never have in my experience. We generally leave that kind of adventurous escape from reality to men. Of course college girls have experimented. The last class day I was here two delightful graduates of the class of 1872 told me about three girls of their year sitting down after dinner to see how much they could take before they lost consciousness. They were sent home the next morning. They seem to have got rather maudlin and wandered about. And the old ladies themselves used to smoke pipes—corncob pipes I think they said—in their rooms late at night with towels fastened over the keyholes. They were very proud telling it. And girls in those days were watched over faithfully enough, weren’t they?’

The President permitted himself to smile. But he confided to the Dean the difficulties of his position. She was new to administrative responsibilities. If she understood—the worst thing was the newspapers—if reporters got hold of the slightest indiscretion——

‘But we can’t run a college with one eye on the newspapers,’ Nora insisted.

‘That is exactly what we have to do,’ he informed her.

‘I’ll take the responsibility. If we are disgraced before the world, I’ll resign at once. Resign any time you think I have failed to make my policies work out for the good of the college.’

When Nora repeated to Miss Steele what she had outlined for the President, the head of the history department suppressed something close to a groan which rose instinctively from her throat.

‘Well,’ she admitted, ‘we’ve made mistakes enough the old way. I’m willing to try something new. But I warn you, Nora Deming, you’re embarking upon a stony, uphill road.’

‘I know it,’ Nora answered her.

The matrons of the residence halls, in too many cases substitutes for the parental tyranny which some girls came to college to escape, were ready for open rebellion when they were informed that hereafter Petersfield girls should go and come, even to New York, as they pleased, without questionings from them. One after another sat in the Dean’s office, concluding lengthy objections to this dangerous policy with the words, ‘They’re children—mere children.’

‘Of course they’re too young. But while educators are getting the junior colleges established, we must use forcing processes to make these girls grow up.’

Robbing college girls of their infantile charm—their dependence—women grown grey in nursery service at Petersfield often burst into angry tears when they left the Dean’s office.

None of the older professors had suspected the iron will of the quiet young woman they remembered in the history department, with great scholarly promise, Professor Steele and others had said. That she had already converted to her sudden revolutions the President, Professor Steele, Professor Ewing, and others old and responsible enough to know better, seemed incredible. They could only wait for disaster to tumble down upon her, to tumble down upon them all.

There were days when the Dean no longer looked young. One could almost imagine her as an old woman. Those who watched her with hostility were conscious of the grim, settled lines of her mouth, the fixed light in her eyes. Even Professor Steele admitted that her favorite pupil was a changed person. So emotionless, they said among themselves, almost like a man. She seemed indifferent to their concerted attacks, their united antagonism. She showed no resentment, treated them with an unchanged courtesy, deference almost, which was more maddening than blows. At times she smiled at them with the sweetness of a pitying angel.

For her teaching her critics gave her generous praise. They approved of her honesty, her unwillingness to use cheap tricks to win the guileless undergraduate heart, so defenceless against high-sounding words. If students crowded Miss Deming’s brilliant lectures, it was because she had a vivid creative power, a concentration of thought, which Miss Steele admitted she had never equalled even in her best days. The professors who attended her public lectures on contemporary Europe told her that she knew so much more than history. If Miss Deming had had less energy to spread over all of Petersfield, she might have had only friends there.

Two months later, the college had still escaped the newspapers. But daily the President foresaw disaster ahead. To all outward appearance, however, the undergraduates seemed to go on the same way. They may not have had time to measure the extent of new privileges. Already a small weeping procession of the unfit had been reunited to their parents, but not many. The surprisingly meagre number encouraged the promoters of the new entrance requirements. The right kind of students didn’t seem to need police regulation.

At the meetings of the committee on instruction the Dean proposed for the next year a larger faculty. For years it had been inadequate to handle students effectively. New buildings went up, but the teaching staff had had almost no increase in numbers. Miss Deming also wanted more men to teach at Petersfield—not mere men, but the best men. They needn’t live in Petersfield. It would be better for them if they didn’t. Men who had made distinguished contributions to history, science, literature, the arts could be induced to spend part of their time at a college so easily available from New York. Of course such a policy was expensive. But it was time Petersfield spent money on brains as well as on bricks.

‘What about introducing good women into men’s colleges?’ interrupted Professor Steele.

‘I admit they need good women as much as we need good men. But it’s not within our power to reform men’s colleges,’ Nora told her.

‘You have moments of illumination, young woman,’ snorted Miss Steele amidst general laughter.

The introduction of good men was accepted calmly enough by the faculty. Perhaps they were too feminine at Petersfield. But when the Dean one night at dinner in Faculty House expanded another of her theories, that of introducing married women, mothers with children, into their teaching ranks, even Professor Steele, who was a guest that night, thought she also must interfere.

‘Married women getting everything—even the jobs away from us, who depend on them,’ she shouted at Nora.

‘Well,’ Nora smiled, ‘I might compromise on widows.’

‘Widows!’ they chorused.

‘Mothers who have children to support—if they have academic equipment equal to ours—are surely not objectionable. The very best widows,’ she added, looking around the table.

In Ruth Ewing’s room after dinner, Nora was examined further by her old friend. ‘Why are you so keen about widows? Really, my dear, you put on all the airs of a successfully married woman.’

Ruth’s scientific detachment encouraged frankness. ‘Because they wouldn’t idealize the facts of life, sentimentalize them, be timid about what we stigmatize too often as nastiness, the low side of life, what only men can talk about now without blushing.’ In her haste Nora’s words tumbled over one another.

‘Where did you get so much wisdom? In England, my dear?’

Nora blushed. ‘I know I’m right,’ she answered.

One afternoon, following an unusually exhausting session with the old régime, Nora walked rapidly out of town along the Eastchester Pike, with the snowless fields of late November stretching out on all sides a dreary brown. Turning away from the main thoroughfare and going up a little hill, she discovered a road nearly hidden by a clump of cedar trees, which she had never seen before. It appeared so quiet and untravelled, with an atmosphere of such peace and seclusion, that she felt as if she had opened a secret door leading quite out of the world. Perched on a hillock at a twist in the road was a small pumpkin-colored house with green blinds, with the hills sweeping around it. When she approached, she found it untenanted, the front door blowing back and forth on its hinges. It was of the usual Dutch cottage style, consisting of a large room with a fireplace opening off from the narrow hall which divided the house, two rooms on the other side for a dining-room and kitchen, and three low bedrooms upstairs. The plaster had long since dropped from the walls, a few panes of glass were broken, but the floors were solid, the foundations strong.

The poor little place—Nora loved it. She wanted it. If she had a home, it might be safe to drive herself less relentlessly. Already she was tired—very tired, and this quiet, lonely house——

A week later Nora had bought the pumpkin-colored cottage, and an architect was contriving the smallest possible number of renovations. The stream at the foot of the hill, the closeness to Eastchester Pike, made his plans so simple that the contractor prophesied Miss Deming would eat her Christmas dinner in her own home. But Nora, understanding the characteristic optimism of his business, estimated that the joys of her own fireside would be delayed until February or early March.

III

A few days before Christmas, Margaret Campbell entered the Dean’s office. She had been a student of Nora’s two years before, an eccentric but able girl, kept in college by scholarships. Nora, with her memory for detail, remembered that her father was a farmer in Iowa.

The girl took the seat Nora offered her, but stared in front of her without speaking.

‘You wanted to consult me about something?’ Nora began to encourage her.

She gulped, worked her hands nervously together, and then the words shot out after a painful effort. ‘I—I can’t come back to college after Christmas.’

‘The scholarship isn’t enough? I’m sure we can help you a little. You’re a senior, with a good record. I’m sure a loan to tide you over this last year can easily be managed.’

‘It isn’t money. I know how to get along without money.’

‘Tell me, please.’

‘It’s—I—I’m going to have a child. I’ve got to go home, I suppose.’

Margaret Campbell, not pretty or frivolous, with a kind of rigid Scotch Calvinism about her, was the last student who would seem likely to bring such a problem to the Dean’s office.

She looked at Nora with a defiant and tearless despair, adding, ‘An Iowa farm is not the place I want to go to now.’

At first she refused to make any explanations. Finally she began to cry. No one would understand, Dean Deming least of all. She had a job in New York the preceding summer and shared an apartment with a Petersfield girl who had graduated the year before. On the street one day she met the boy she had invited to her Prom. Just a boy. A stranger to her. One of her friends had arranged about his coming. Junior Prom was the first college party she had ever attended. The girls said she must go. One of them lent her a dress, another a light evening wrap. She bought nothing but slippers, not stockings even. She hadn’t seen the boy since. But he was working in New York, too, last summer, knew almost no one. She asked him to the apartment. They went out together a little. Then her friend—the other girl—had her summer vacation. She was gone two weeks. And then——

He was still in college. A junior. Younger than she. And with no money. She hadn’t told him. He wasn’t even in love with her, wrote to her only seldom, was planning to study medicine if he could manage it. And she—if it hadn’t been for this——No, she didn’t love him. He wasn’t the kind she’d want to marry. If all this trouble——She hated him. He ought to have known better. He was so sure that he——Only in the end did she admit that the blame was equally hers.

At first she had desperate thoughts. Now she didn’t care. But she didn’t want to go home. If there were some kind of institution—she would work—do anything—if she could hide what had happened from her parents.

‘It was never having any fun,’ she wept, hiding her face on Nora’s desk. ‘Working every summer—working at anything I could get here at college. Finally hating everything——And I knew I was the kind that wouldn’t get married. When I saw the other girls——’

‘Yes,’ Nora agreed, ‘I can understand that.’

Nora’s interview with the President was long and painful. Even though Margaret Campbell’s disgrace had no connection with the Dean’s reforms, it roused all his fears. Nora saw all that she had worked for threatened with immediate destruction. But she reminded him of similar tragedies in Petersfield history. She assumed the burden of all the arrangements: the place in the country, no other than Amelia’s colony, where Margaret could support herself for three or four months working for the emancipated; she sent the announcement to the college paper that Margaret Campbell because of illness would be unable to return to college until the next fall; and the day before Christmas she settled Margaret under Amelia’s care.

Nora tried to temper Amelia’s enthusiastic championship of this brave girl’s motherhood by reminding her that Margaret didn’t want to be a mother, was sure she disliked children, and that Margaret’s child, conceived so carelessly, had not the most secure future.

‘Of course she’ll want him,’ declared Amelia, who like many feminists thought only in terms of boy babies, ‘when she sees him. It will be delightful to have a baby here at the colony. We’ve never had one before.’

All that Margaret thought of was some escape from her maternal responsibilities.

‘If I never had to see it—if you’d take it away,’ she wept when Nora kissed her good-bye.

‘You don’t need to keep your child,’ Nora promised her, as she had countless times before. ‘We’ll find some way.’

In January the pumpkin-colored cottage was ready for Nora. Her only neighbor was a wealthy landowner, who had a colony of Russian tenant farmers distributed over his expansive acres. Amelia, with her interest in the Russian soul, had discovered them on one of Helen’s and her week-end visits. A young husband and wife occupied the cottage only a few steps from Nora’s front door. The woman, only a girl, always smiling to cover her inability to speak English, was eager to work for Nora. She was preparing for her first baby, and she needed money.

With Mitya’s help Nora placed Cordelia’s furniture in the bright fresh rooms, the walnut bookcases going up to the ceiling, the walnut secretary and high-backed chair, the solid table, the picture of Queen Victoria and her grandchildren, and that of Warwick Castle. Margaret Abington’s painting was between the two south windows. The old mirror hung in the hall. The mahogany card-table and corner cupboard with the Lowestoft china were placed in the dining-room.

‘Be-utiful,’ said Mitya, who was already in these first days beginning to speak English.

But the house, after Mitya had gone home to get Peter’s supper—Peter the Great Nora called the tall blond husband—was, in spite of its venerable, solid beauty and its bright cretonnes, very lonely and quiet. Peter thought Nora ought to have a dog. Mitya inclined toward a kitten.

In the clock-ticking stillness of the living-room one blustering January night, Nora stood in the window watching the snow rise like spray—like the sea—above the fields as the wind swept over them. Reggie had written that people couldn’t live on memory—even perfect memory. He had written her this when he sent Neville’s picture, the only one he had, of a little boy and his mother. She must have something else. He was right. Her duties at the college crowded her time, but she was so lonely, so unutterably lonely. There was a chance that this—this fugitive thought which visited her day and night—was after all what she needed. She would settle it now.

She sat down at the walnut secretary and wrote to Margaret that she would take the baby. If Margaret wanted her own child when he came, she would waive all claim, but otherwise she wanted the baby.

IV

One morning in May Professor Deming did not meet any of her classes. She had been called away, the announcement on the bulletin board read. She was gone three days. In the midst of final examinations the story got around that the Dean had adopted a baby, a very young baby already established in her house off the Eastchester Pike. The girls thought it was a tremendous joke. Dean Deming of all people!

Professor Steele collided with Ruth Ewing a few moments after the astonishing report had reached her. ‘She would never take such a step without consulting me,’ Professor Steele pronounced majestically.

Miss Ewing had to admit that she had seen the baby, a boy, a splendid, healthy child.

‘Ridiculous. A male child at that!’ stormed Miss Steele.

‘But it turned out to be a boy,’ Ruth let out inadvertently.

‘What’s that?’ shouted Miss Steele, who, although she insisted that she was getting deaf, had her periods of amazing audition.

‘She’ll tell you all about it.’

Miss Steele could not find Nora in the Dean’s office. Determined not to be baffled, she started out on the country road. Nora came to the door in answer to the violent clump of the brass knocker.

‘What’s this I hear about you, Nora?’ she demanded from the doorstep.

Nora led her into the house, guided her over the strange rugs, and settled her in the chair near the window.

‘You shouldn’t have walked out here in the heat,’ she protested.

‘You telling me nothing,’ the older woman thundered. ‘It’s madness—madness.’

‘I wanted to tell you. But I know how easily I’m influenced by your opinion, Miss Steele. If you had disapproved——’

‘Of course I’d have disapproved. Old maids adopting babies. They’re all doing it. Couldn’t you think of anything more original?’

‘You see his mother—she was a student once at Petersfield.’

‘So were you. It isn’t your child, Nora?’ Miss Steele’s eyes glittered ironically behind her spectacles.

‘I wish he were. But I had to have him. I was sure of that. I want you to see my baby.’

From the foot of the stairs she called to Mitya, who had just finished giving the baby his bottle. Mitya entered the room carrying him on one arm, and smiling at the erect, severe woman in her stiff dress.

‘Here he is,’ Nora said, taking him from Mitya. ‘Richard Tait—after my father and the guardian who left me the money to bring him up.’ She dangled him before Miss Steele’s disapproving eyes.

Miss Steele’s gaze wandered from the curious pink creature Nora held before her to Mitya with her clumsy, comic figure. Mitya continued to smile and twitter an unintelligible jargon to the baby.

‘Sit down, please. Do see how soft and warm he feels.’

Miss Steele dropped into a low chair and draped her unyielding arms around the baby. Her hold upon him was uncertain, virginal. Nora seated herself on a stool in front of them.

‘Every one says he’s a remarkable infant,’ Nora confided. ‘See how strong his neck is. He’s beautifully made. Just look at his legs.’

A deep flush crept into Miss Steele’s grey cheeks. She looked embarrassed.

‘What’s that woman doing here?’ she demanded, frowning at Mitya’s retreating form.

‘She’s Dicky’s nurse. Mitya. I’m certainly fortunate to have her.’

‘You’ll have another young one on your hands any day, it looks to me,’ prophesied Miss Steele.

‘Yes, Mitya’s baby comes next month. She might just as well have two babies to look after as one.’

‘A pretty mess you’ll have here. You’ll never finish your book, now.’

‘When I’m busy, Mitya will keep the children in her cottage—there at the foot of the hill.’ Nora looked over at Dicky. He was very sleepy. He gave a great yawn and stretched out his arms. She must call Mitya to carry him off to bed. ‘I’ve sent for Clara, the maid I was so fond of at Saint Ethelfreda. She’s promised to stay the rest of her life.’

Miss Steele shifted the baby in her arms and sighed. ‘Why couldn’t you have waited, Nora, to have one of your own? I thought—perhaps at Knickerbocker or in England.’

Cordelia’s words—the same hope.

Nora shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no—never.’ She hid her face against the arm of Miss Steele’s chair. If she could tell her—tell her now. There was no one else she wanted to have know. After the first shock she would understand. But Miss Steele couldn’t be given shocks any more. She had to be spared. Nora must make her lie down, and then have a cup of tea before she drove her back to the college.

‘Why,’ insisted Miss Steele to her dearest pupil, ‘why did you do it, Nora?’

Nora lifted her head and smiled. ‘Why? To counteract the feminine influence at Petersfield, dear Miss Steele.’ Then she reached over and kissed her old teacher on the cheek before she carried the baby to Mitya.

THE END

NOVELS OF DISTINCTION

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES By ESTHER FORBES

A story of Salem in the days of witches and of a mortal girl who
took, as she believed, a fiend to love, daring the wrath of God
and the vengeance of man for her infernal paramour. By the author
of ‘O Genteel Lady!’

THIS WAY OUT By PHILIP LITTELL

A lively, humorous, and brilliantly ironic story of the
adventures of our first parents in the Garden of Eden.

WE SING DIANA By WANDA FRAIKEN NEFF

This story of a woman’s revolt against a woman’s world is a frank
and absorbing study of a modern woman’s inner life.

TALES FROM GREENERY STREET By DENIS MACKAIL

Enchanting stories of London newly-weds that will make new
friends for the author of ‘The Flower Show.’

CHILDREN OF THE WIND By DORIS PEEL

‘It is that rare and humorous thing, the exquisite comedy of
manners.’—Philadelphia Ledger.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Transcriber’s Notes

Duplicate headings have been removed.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

[p. 116]:
... she knew no the slippery surface of the freshman mind. ...
... she knew on the slippery surface of the freshman mind. ...

[p. 117]:
... them, Nora knew, lay the peaks of the Renascence and ...
... them, Nora knew, lay the peaks of the Renaissance and ...