Chapter I: I

Nora, following the sidewalk which pierced Knickerbocker University, passed between rows of buildings uniformly red brick, rising storey above storey, all close duplicates, as if designed from the original plan of an architect inspired to construct the largest number of classrooms and the maximum of windows, sunshine, cross-ventilation, with the smallest consumption of New York ground space. It came down to a genius of economy in utilizing the very precious and rocky fragment of Manhattan Island which the University had gobbled up just in time. Accordingly, Knickerbocker University had anticipated the modern factory in its construction, proving that culture does not always lag behind industry.

But to one fresh from the groves of Petersfield, Knickerbocker was dispiriting. Nora must wait to penetrate its inner life. Hidden springs gushed, overflowed from a source having no connection with this barren exterior. She must be patient.

In the September sunshine the people hurrying past her made her feel cheerful, uplifted. It was they who mattered. All of them, one guessed from their brisk, business-like air, had something important to do. They were vital people whose existence mattered. The young men—were they students—would they walk daily the same pavements, read in the library—like her? Only the youngest ones. This was war-time: two officers walking together, with the nervous, alert expression she was sure they had cultivated, reminded her. And the last building before she crossed the street, the windows open, boys in olive-drab uniforms sat looking out. The S.A.T.C.; she had forgotten. If the war lasted long enough, they would be soldiers. Without them the University would be deserted—only professors and a few men physically unfit. These youngsters—doing something to them—hasty plans—but universities must be used some way. A crowd of boys in a window high above the street were throwing down wads of paper to make the girls hurrying for the subway look up at them.

Nora crossed the street. A broad business thoroughfare and a tangle of trolley lines separated the dormitory for graduate women and those in the professional schools from the rest of the University. The same old sex division. Men’s dormitories on one side, a long row of them, the one for women on the other, obeying the scriptural order, ‘male and female created he them.’ The women’s hall, being an architect’s latest dream, was even more gaunt and towering than its prototypes. Its windows in unvarying rows going up and up—one of them hers—all representing some woman huddled behind each glass pane——No, she wouldn’t live there. One decision, at least, was easily made.

In her bag was a list of neighborhood apartments with rooms rented to students. She would try these. She had a long block of the busy street before she made the initial plunge of the first address. A shoe-shining place with rows of hats in the window, its open door, men coming in and out. All New York men looked smart and well-groomed. Nowhere else was there the same correctness of detail. Here men made an art of middle age, the rough tweeds suggesting the brown of early fall, with the sunshine bringing out bright threads interwoven like autumn leaves, the glossy hats in soft tones, the gleam of freshly polished shoes, the socks in a harmony of dull tones. How stupid the clothes of men were elsewhere! How alive here!

The women passed her unobserved. It was the men she saw. Women—she had watched too many women. She was relieved that she had decided not to live in that stuffy women’s hall. Of course it would be stuffy. Places filled with women—only women—always were. All the vitality squeezed out. Respectability and lack of adventure did it.

With her trunk and bags still at the station, Nora had a whole day to look around. No haste—the luxury of it.

In the first apartment house an ebony elevator man, in a new uniform, the collar very stiff and shiny with braid, immediately guessed her errand.

‘Room, Miss? Miss Johnson—I guess she’s filled up. But Miss Walters—eighth floor—she’s got a nice room. Pleasant lady. Take ye up, Miss?’

Miss Walters, dressed in a street costume, opened the door. ‘A room. Oh, yes. Just for yourself?’

She swung back a near-by door, presenting a view of a very small dark room, opening upon a narrow court. She went ahead to turn on a rose-shaded lamp. The lamp, with the yellow walls and white wicker furniture, helped to give an impression of light, but at ten o’clock in the morning the room was naturally full of gloom.

‘The last roomer stayed four years,’ Miss Walters began. ‘She loved this room. So girlish, she said. The light furniture and the cretonne——’

‘But I couldn’t study in such a room.’ Miss Walters was politely non-committal. ‘I thought I’d like a place with morning sun.’

‘Sun is very hard to get in New York and very expensive.’

Sunshine and fresh air a luxury. A new idea. Then she remembered the settlement neighborhood.

In the next apartment the ominous smell of some disinfectant assailed her. Across the court a woman was drying her hair with a fan. It seemed indecent to live so close to people.

The trained nurse, generally away all day, with a room to rent, conducted Nora into the presence of a young man without a collar, who was pounding a typewriter. ‘Don’t mind him,’ Miss Jones said, observing Nora’s hesitation. ‘He’s leaving to-day.’ The floor was strewn with paper, sheets of it thrown loosely everywhere.

‘No. I don’t mind being exhibited,’ he said, pausing. ‘I don’t pay my rent promptly, so I have to leave.’ He gave Miss Jones a meaning glance.

‘He’s an author,’ Miss Jones murmured confidentially as Nora backed out of the room. ‘You didn’t let me show you the closets—two of them.’

The rent was ten dollars a week. Of course it was impossible. If the author had been staying and there had been some kind of hole for her to creep into—living in the same apartment with a man who wrote might give her something.

All the decent rooms she saw were beyond what she could pay. ‘Haven’t you a girl friend who would share the room with you?’ chirped prospective landladies. Twilight was coming on, and she had to find a place for the night. There was nothing but the women’s dormitory. Nora tottered back on aching feet.

The matron assigned her a room whose unrelieved walls, wash-basin, and concrete floor brought weary tears. Once more she was baffled. Herded with hundreds of women. The same old thing all over again. Would there ever be escape from such a life?

In the cafeteria downstairs the clatter of dishes and the voices spinning in circles and dizzy waves around her choked her as she tried to eat some corned-beef hash and tough buttered beets. Women, tired like her, sat at bare tables, their hair falling in limp wisps over their faces. Most of them were not young. The sagged resignation in the sallow faces belonged with airless schoolrooms, high-pitched, nervous voices, blackboards, clouds of chalk dust. Why had they come here?

The trolleys, the trucks, the fire-engines clanging up and down as if bent on mad exercise, the milk carts, kept Nora awake most of the night. Toward dawn she slept. When she opened her eyes, the breeze was blowing out the sash curtain, and from her couch she could look down upon miles and miles of streets, full of golden light, all astir with the activity of a new morning.

Nora learned that the professor Miss Steele had advised her to study with was on some war committee in Washington. Two of the others were not to be found in their offices the first time she called. One very bored young man talked to three or four women waiting in the hall, disposing of them efficiently together to save valuable time.

‘It’s just our money they want,’ said one. ‘I wonder why I came.’

The professors Nora saw were very polite in a formal, almost scared way, but they did not urge her to take their courses or advise her about the offering of their colleagues. Evidently a graduate school was like the cafeteria. The food was spread out, and you could take what looked good to you. But a cafeteria meal was too often an unbalanced array of dishes snatched at in a crowded line. No proper proportion of protein, carbohydrates, and starches one heard about. Not at all what one wanted. The history courses she registered for were probably not much better.

The lectures the first days were discouraging—all facts. Some were a repetition of Petersfield. No new point of view. Nora took down notes in a mad race with the lecturer; then her pen lagged, and she stared around the room. Most of the students were women. The men were the discards of the draft board, or wore wedding rings, sometimes ostentatiously. As Miss Steele had said, this was an inauspicious time to begin graduate work. The University was apologetic, uneasy. The war might last another year. Professors were dispirited. Those who had tried to get over to France champed fretfully over the drudgery of going on with the old sing-song lectures. Those who felt civilization must be kept going raged in secret over the rows of meek female faces before them.

From many of the classroom windows Nora could watch men drilling on the athletic grounds. The papers were full of alarming news about an epidemic of influenza brought from Europe which was spreading in the training camps. In a few days men from the dormitory across the street were being carried out by attendants with handkerchiefs over nose and mouth. The epidemic had come. Women in Nora’s hall were ill. Many were frightened. They were advised to keep outdoors and away from the subways and theatres.

Nora in the airless library began thinking about germs. The library encouraged low prospects. It was huge, unmanageable, slow. One waited hours for books which, at last, were announced as not in.

At last she found a quiet reading-room; and by degrees she adjusted herself to the University. In the basement of the library was a place where tea was served every afternoon. Women, snatching a little refreshment before they returned to their books, talked to Nora. At a corner table every day sat two young men with the curse of feeble health upon them. At least a kind of transparent unsubstantiality characterized their tense frames. They appeared to be engaged in an argument prolonged from day to day. Nora drank two cups of tea in lingering sips and bought a second piece of currant cake. Tea on a dark, rainy day, the moist, comforting warmth of it going down a throat parched by the dust of the library books. The throat muscles relax. The soreness is gone. The pain behind burning eyeballs pounds less, disappears. One sits in a cosy glow enjoying the third cup.

The cell of a room in the dormitory was slowly taking on familiarity. She liked to wake up in the morning with the sunshine on her face. It was a peaceful place to study. Over the tall buildings rosy clouds came at sunset. She could see Jupiter in the twilight from her window. Jupiter—his ‘mild and magnificent eye’—where had she read it? Some poet. Browning. Mars had risen by the time she came up after dinner. By leaning out, she could just see its candle-flame gleam in the sky. Miss Ewing had taught her the stars and the planets. What splendid women there were at Petersfield!

Her neighbors dropped into her room to talk after dinner, determined to keep the conversation away from influenza. They were less cheerless upon acquaintance, often with lovely smiles and unexpected humor. There was beauty in a few faces, so delicate that it was easily overlooked at first. Mental restlessness was commoner than intelligence, but one found both. They had such amusing reasons for coming to the University. Miss Andrews, from Trenton, New Jersey, was threatened with a nervous breakdown and had to give up teaching for a year. She drank hot milk before going to bed at eight o’clock every night. Most of the others wanted a change. Year after year in the same place. In New York everything happened. They had heard of a graduate student who married one of the professors; in anthropology, they thought. The theatre, the opera, the orchestras—everything in New York. Then one had professional ambitions—a better job. Nora was considered a remarkable person to have taught in a college so young. How was it done? And Petersfield. A college job was more than they could expect. Learning for itself—the pleasure of grappling with tough intellectual problems—they did not talk about that. Wasn’t Professor White hard to follow? He was scholarly, but——

II

Armistice Night. Nora was standing near Times Square in a mob of revellers. Horns tooted. Confetti fell everywhere. It was a wild time. Men and women joined hands and danced in the street. Noisy boys, spreading out in a long line, swept little groups of bystanders into a circle with deafening shouts when their prisoners tried to get away. The police on proud-stepping horses curvetted in and out of the crowd. The war was over. More noise. Clacking toys, whistles. Children got lost and howled. Women fainted in the street. Hawkers sold pancakes, coffee, hot dogs. Peace had come.

‘Those with dead—are not here,’ Nora’s companion said.

In the tumult Nora was thrown against her old Petersfield friend Helen Spring.

‘Well, it’s over at last,’ Helen began. ‘Isn’t this wonderful? I heard you were in New York. So you’re living near the University. You don’t like the dormitory? If I’d got hold of you, I’d have begged you to take half of my apartment in the Village. Amelia Donaldson just rented it. Yes, she’s still in the Labor College, and awfully excited about it.’

Helen herself was taking up psycho-analysis with a remarkable man. She intended to do startling things to people, mental cases, when she got going. Helen, plump and easy-going, was not the popular conception of a worker in abnormal psychology. She had been one of the milder members of the Socialist League.

‘Amelia’s as crazy as ever,’ Helen chattered on. ‘She’s a case to begin on. You must come down soon. We’ll both want to see you.’

Upon Nora’s visit she found Helen’s rooms looking out upon a little garden, very charming with their long, low proportions and a wood-burning fireplace. An old-fashioned four-storey house had been converted into a coöperative apartment by some enterprising women who sold each floor to members of their sex engaged in some unusual but approved employment.

‘It’s a fascinating place to be,’ Helen said. ‘The most interesting people.’

‘Maybe Amelia won’t care to see me,’ Nora ventured when Helen suggested rapping on the door connecting with Amelia’s rooms in front.

‘She wants to see you. She said to be sure and call her.’ A man’s voice could be heard. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Helen explained. ‘He’s always there.’

Amelia put on a bubbling show of delight at seeing an old classmate. She was more animated and full of talk than in her college days. Behind her stood a tall, ungainly young man, rather handsome in a swarthy way.

‘Only Tony,’ Amelia laughed by way of introduction.

Tony took a chair in a remote corner of Amelia’s apartment. Its black furniture and deep blue hangings had an intense look like their owner. Nora asked Amelia about the Labor College.

‘And you’re still studying, Helen tells me,’ Amelia remarked next. ‘I’ve given all that up. There isn’t time in my life—at least not now.’

The young man kept his eyes fixed upon Amelia. They had the expression of a faithful dog not always well used.

‘Who is Tony?’ Nora asked when they were back in Helen’s room, seated before a blazing wood fire.

‘Amelia will tell you the next time she sees you. She’s reclaiming him. He’s just out of some school of correction. His gang—they’re all in gangs—those Italian boys south of the Square.’

‘He doesn’t look over eighteen. Is he in love with Amelia?’

‘She lets him hang around. He’s here by eight o’clock some mornings. He cooks her meals—runs errands—polishes her shoes——’

‘So that’s the way she reclaims him?’

‘Well, he was stealing automobiles before. At least his friends were. Poor Tony seems too stupid to get away with much himself. Perhaps having a mistress——’

‘You don’t mean——’

‘My dear, psycho-analysis makes one suspect the purity of human emotions. I trust no one and nothing. And with an over-sexed woman like Amelia, I’d believe anything.’

‘Some one ought to warn him.’

Helen laughed. ‘Amelia’s up to something. She’s no fool, you know. And the poor boy is flattered that an American above him socially——’

The next time Nora visited Helen there was the man’s voice on the other side of the door. Then a terrible sound, like the howling of a dog. A rap on the door, and Amelia asking them to go to a strike meeting with her. It was near by. One of the men from the Labor College was the speaker. Tony did not appear, and the three women walked away together.

The dingy hall rocked with the noise of the crowd. Children ran all over. Babies crawled over the filthy floor or ate sticky messes which got smeared over their faces, even in their hair. The smells. No bathrooms. Nora knew that from the settlement. And the toilets in the dark halls. The oratorical man who took charge of the meeting reminded Nora of the boys who debated in the night-school classes at the settlement. The same glib tongue shooting off eloquence without logic or common sense. The crowd were a flock of sheep taking in everything he said. When he got through, the gabbling tongues threatened a riot. Nora was afraid.

‘Is the speaker a garment-worker?’ Nora asked Amelia. The strike seemed to be involving garment workers.

‘No. He was trained at our school to be a labor-union leader. We need young men who can talk well.’

‘I should think they’d prefer one of their own workers to direct them. If I were an electrician or a plumber——’

‘A man from the ranks has no social sense. He doesn’t understand industrial organization or capitalistic exploitation. He’s too close to the economic struggle. He can’t forget the week’s pay check. We must get Vicky Hamilton, organizer of the lady needleworkers, to explain things to you. She belongs to the old Philadelphia Hamilton family. It’s very useful to have such a name to use in labor ranks.’

When Amelia went back to her quarters, Nora and Helen heard Tony’s voice again.

‘You see,’ laughed Helen.

‘Can’t you do something?’ Nora’s voice was desperate.

‘What can I do? It’s not my affair. I blame Petersfield for people like Amelia. If she hadn’t been bottled up there—brooding for four years—overstimulated mentally—all that feminine atmosphere. I don’t believe in college communities. It’s the soil where Sapphism flourishes.’

‘There wasn’t any at Petersfield. I never saw it.’ She hesitated. The satyr laughter of the gardener’s assistant—a cat twisting its back and purring—‘Well—maybe two cases,’ she admitted.

‘You were too innocent to suspect.’

‘So you question all friendships between women. It’s a dangerous point of view.’

‘I didn’t say all. But too often.’

Helen was looking for mental sickness everywhere. It was the way of psycho-analysts. Freud—exaggerating one theory. Nora had read enough of him to know.

Greenwich Villagers went to meetings, lectures. Their thinking they apparently left to others. Nora was carried off to listen to some new kind of theory nearly every time she came down to sit in front of Helen’s fire. Opportunities in New York—they mustn’t be neglected. Sticking off at a university with the dead ideas in books—Nora must be rescued from all that.

An Irish poet was addressing the Twentieth Century Club to which Helen belonged. This was better than the thought-control crank last week.

Zoe Ryder was going with them. She was a gentle little woman brought up on a large plantation in Virginia. Her childhood had been very lonely. Her people were land-poor. All her education had come from an ignorant governess and an old-fashioned library. She got up North and took nurse’s training to make money in the quickest way. She had great success with mental cases. Helen had met her at one of the clinics.

Zoe had just come off a very bad case. They were trying to cure a young man—it was drink—his mind gone—all kinds of money. She had been shut up alone with him on a country estate with only the servants to call upon. The night nurses had set him off raving crazy, and they had to leave. Only Zoe could manage him. She had a kind of hypnotic influence. But she was so tired. One night he crept out of bed and got away. She followed him in the darkness with a flashlight. She didn’t dare ask for help. It was a hilly country, with marshes not far away. She wasn’t afraid of him or the black night—but if he got into the marshes. That was the terror for her. She got him back. He was too weak now to walk far. But the next morning she saw that she must have a rest. Her patient was turned over to a strong man and put into a strait-jacket.

The Irish speaker had beautiful, beseeching brown eyes. He wanted his countrymen to be reasonable. He reviewed Irish history. There had been mistakes on both sides. He wanted to go back to dear beautiful Ireland and find peace. Then the fairies would return, and he could write his verse.

Zoe sat next to Nora. During the talk Nora had felt a hand pulling at her arm, but she wanted to hear what the poet was saying. She was charmed by his mixture of fancy and shrewd common sense.

When he was done, Zoe whispered to her, ‘You see—that man over there—the tall dark one.’ Nora examined a dignified man filling the opposite corner. ‘He’s been staring at me the whole evening. I’ve been so uncomfortable.’

‘I didn’t notice. He’s been looking at the speaker.’

‘No, no,’ Zoe insisted. ‘Let’s hurry away. He’ll try to speak to me afterward.’

‘I suppose Zoe told you about the man staring at her,’ Helen remarked when the two were alone. ‘She’s got persecution mania. Try to start her on something else. Men are always following her on the street. Of course she wants them to. She’s such a quiet little mouse I’m sure no one really notices her. She’s tired out.’

‘Nursing’s too hard for her.’

‘And she won’t take anything but mental cases. It’s the excitement, I guess. She writes charming verse for children. I want you to see it. Full of humor—a kind of twinkle—and the sadness so close to the surface of a child’s life. But this other thing—it gets stronger all the time. Maybe if she had a little money and time to write—she might get over it.’

Zoe appeared like a little brown bird chirping on a sunny winter morning. This hallucination was terrible. If Helen with her new ideas could only do something. But Helen insisted that not every one could be saved by psycho-analysis. She was progressing far enough to see that.

Amelia introduced Nora to Vicky Hamilton, organizer of the lady needleworkers, at the Dragon, with its memories of Mary Howe, now in France dancing at the Red Cross parties with young officers. Miss Hamilton had her hair cut short like a boy’s, and her handshake was painfully gripping. They continued their discussion of industrial problems in Amelia’s room. Tony for once wasn’t there.

Vicky crossed one leg over the other, lighted a cigarette, which curvetted around one corner of her mouth as she talked. ‘You people up at the University in the dissertation belt,’ she began anew, ‘you’re all theory. There’s theoretical sympathy—emotional sometimes. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to get down here with the crowd and start the machinery going.’

‘That’s what I’ve told Nora,’ Amelia said.

Vicky, it developed, had domestic problems dragging at her industrial efficiency. ‘Mother and brother have come up to New York for the winter. I won’t live with them. I told them so. I refuse to have my comings and goings questioned. I must be free—live my own life.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Amelia.

‘You’ve heard about Bess Leland’s baby?’ Vicky inquired of Amelia.

‘Yes, it’s come. A boy. Bess stayed at the office until six. And the baby was born before nine. Easy—no pain. What motherhood should be.’

Bess was secretary for the Birth Control Association. It was wonderful having a courageous woman like Bess down there—helping the cause by showing that women, even with all the knowledge for preventing conception, had babies. But only when they wanted them. Bess was maternal. She needed children. This was her second child. His father was a free-lance writer for a radical weekly. The father of three-year-old Gloria was an actor, once considered by Bess the great luminary of the theatre. Drink had dimmed his light, and he was now in the movies, supported between jobs by his fifth wife.

Bess, with a photograph of Mary Wollstonecraft on her desk, had long been a foe to marriage. She loved freely, without the constraint of municipal bureau registrations or the fettering mediæval sanctities of the Church. The degeneration of one glorious mate did not vanquish her. For there could always be another. One was never disappointed exactly in the same way a second time.

Both Vicky and Amelia agreed that men were satisfactory only as lovers. As husbands and fathers they sneaked away from what society considered their duty. Only women were parents. They clung to their young, needed them.

This was the Socialist League of Petersfield in its early stages. But these people acted, whereas Petersfield only talked.

Vicky in her unrestrained voice was deep in some pathological aspect of pregnancy when Tony entered the room. He scarcely knocked. Nora hurried away.

III

The women at the dormitory reminded Nora of Cordelia and the Plant girls. The ignorance—especially of the older ones—was almost unbelievable. Petersfield, shut away as it was, had at least heard echoes from a cosmopolitan centre. They trooped in timid little parties of three or four down to Greenwich Village. Every one at home would ask them about it. They tried the Barnyard, the Dragon, and all their facsimiles with an endless variety of names, hoping each time that something would happen. The wild air of Bohemia might at least blow over them. But always the same disappointment. Bad air, dirt, men who looked like automobile salesmen and flirted in a loud, clumsy way with the waitresses, crowded dance floors, with never a chance to dance. One sat almost smothered against the wall, waiting and waiting, and then at last went home. Cheated—cheated.

A crowd from the dormitory went to the Night Court, another New York novelty. Nora went with them. At midnight they sat in a stuffy, dimly lighted room, sickly expectant. Why had they wanted to come? An old woman stood facing the judge. She was a whimpering creature in a rusty black bonnet and cape, a hard-working widow who took lodgers. This girl couldn’t pay her rent. Out of a job and every week the same tale about waiting for the money her husband was going to send her. Yes, she admitted she had threatened to turn the girl out. She had her living to make. And if the young woman started behaving bad with one of the lodgers—this young man who turned out to be a detective and got her into all this trouble—how could she help it?

The detective took the stand. He’d been sent to the house. The old lady’d been carrying on suspicious. He got the goods on her. The young woman was handed over to him by this old customer, who took charge of the whole affair. His language had none of the polysyllabic evasiveness still used by even such modernists as Helen and Amelia. For the primitive relations of human beings he used plain language. ‘I told her to take off her clothes,’ the hard voice said. ‘She had on only——’ The words cut Nora like a knife.

The young woman told her story. It was tragic enough. There was a lingering prettiness in her face. She spoke in a whisper. An abandoned wife, her last cent gone, making a choice between the street on a January night or the bold hints of her landlady. The old woman made the bargain. She was in the clutches of a crone who knew how to work her trade.

The judge made a caustic speech. The accused, who employed the sentimentality of widowhood, children who would do nothing for their poor mother, her own white hair, to plead for her, deserved no pity. A helpless young woman, in her ignorance coming to a cheap lodging-house she thought was respectable, trusting some one who pretended to be her friend, had been used to carry on a profitable business. The accused was sentenced to hard labor in the work-house.

Nora wanted to go. She couldn’t stand any more. But the others shook their heads, and leaned forward in their seats. Two women dressed in fur coats and simple black hats, an air of restrained elegance about them, spoke in quiet tones. But they, too, were guilty of running disorderly houses.

‘They weren’t even painted,’ one of the group commented as they stood huddled together on the snowy street.

Past them reeled a woman very drunk shouting lines from ‘Paradise Lost.’

Returning from the opera a few nights ago several of them had seen with their own eyes women stopping men on the street, choosing dark places away from policemen. Women in flashy clothes with flowers in their hats. That kind always seemed to wear flowers.

On the subway to-night after two o’clock a woman opposite Nora and Mary Whitson attracted their attention. Her hair was too yellow, her brows heavily pencilled, her cheeks and chin flabby and old in spite of the paint.

‘She’s out of luck,’ Mary confided. ‘Getting old. It’s trade on the streets for her now. The others—“kept” women—I meet them in the park. Fattening like geese in a pen. They’re always alone dragging a little white dog behind them.’

‘How do you know?’ Nora insisted.

‘I can tell. It’s in their eyes.’

The party collected in Nora’s room afterward. There was so much they must talk over. Women talking together late at night, sitting about in faded old dressing-gowns, brushing their hair, suddenly become very frank. In the morning they remember that nice women never think about sex. It wasn’t that they wanted to put on any superior airs. A girl who was good because she’d never had a chance to be anything else—what virtue that way? But had the old standards disappeared? Were women like men taking experience, good and bad, as it came?

The plays they went to turned all their ideas upside down. They were preoccupied with sex and the new attitude. The critics, commenting on the downfall of the Puritanic censorship of the stage, prophesied that at last something would happen to the American drama. But the graduate women, so innocent and inexperienced, were bewildered. They went over the whole question once more. All this sentimentality about harlots and the daring irregularity of the new woman—to what was it leading?

‘It’s out of date, then—the old-fashioned virgin purity business?’ inquired an uncompromising little creature from Vermont. ‘What they’ve held over us all these years—it’s a fraud, then?’

They agreed that their lack of experience had not been exciting. But what else was there?

Mary Whitson lingered in Nora’s room after the rest had gone. ‘I’ve never even been kissed,’ she stated boldly. ‘And I’m twenty-nine. Sometimes I think—just to know what it’s like—even if I didn’t care for the man.’

At the beginning of the second term new men suddenly appeared in the history classes, dismissed from the training camps in this country. They wore the desperate earnestness of those who must make up for lost time. Nora wondered what they thought of the droning professors with their lecture notes, yellow sometimes with age. She speculated often about the date of the last new thought. Miss Steele had warned her of the drudgery of graduate study until she began to steer her own boat and commanded the attention of the big men. This must be what she was to expect. But how dead, how dead it was! She remembered the words of Ezekiel which Newman had written on the view of Oxford hung in the Oratory at Birmingham: ‘Son of Man, can these dry bones live?’

For while Nora’s professors were fluttering old lectures, their country was churning with party hatreds, and the American people were running this way and that like a panic-stricken crowd caught in fire. The President had sailed for Europe, and the Peace Conference was in full swing. Nora found that she had to give up reading the morning papers. They upset all her work for the day. Instead she gathered several of the better weeklies representing a divergence of opinion and pondered over them Sunday mornings in her room. The discussions she had started with the women in the dormitory she had been wise enough to discontinue. Those from the South had Miss Ewing’s blind devotion to the Democratic Party which closed their eyes to all but one point of view. New England Republicanism was becoming more and more bitter. And Nora had no illusions about the idealism of her own section of the country, sitting snug in the fertility of its cornfields, wheat lands, and green pastures. All it wanted was to be let alone and continue prosperous. She made secret plans to talk to the men seated near her in the history lectures. But they were too aloof and shy. The professors, on their elevated platforms, were even more remote.

Nothing but the contradictions of the weeklies. The President bewildered, baffled. One couldn’t tell. A chance word caught on a street corner, on subway platforms, the top of a bus. But how futile are the words of the man in the street those know best who dream of real democracy. At last a kind of makeshift Covenant, the League of Nations, which radicals like Amelia and Vicky said was better than nothing. The left wing of the weeklies made no such concessions. The President returned, rode through the streets. It wasn’t a triumphal procession. Nora stood in a vast throng and cheered. One hoped that there would be no more war. Hope was something.

IV

Amelia was beginning to neglect Tony. He wept like a whipped little boy, throwing himself on the floor in Helen’s room, even when Nora was there, and cursing Amelia between his sobs. One day he took a stiletto out of his pocket and threatened to kill himself.

‘Tony, you silly boy,’ Helen said.

Amelia had no time for Tony now. She sent him away—told him not to bother her. Garrison Smith, a lecturer at the Labor College, spent every evening in Amelia’s room talking very late. Now that the war was over, he was free to agitate a scheme for uniting the union-labor forces of England and the United States. He was sailing for Europe soon. He also planned to study schools for working-men abroad.

‘Garrison certainly works his personality overtime,’ Helen said of him. ‘But I admire the way he manages everything. During the war he made mince-meat out of the Draft Board. Amelia and I almost die over his stories of what he told them. But I wonder if she’s a match for him.’

Amelia, however, seemed very happy. She was the kind, Helen repeated to Nora, who needed a man to keep her going. With women she was pale, moaning over her aching back, hysterical in argument. But men brought out a playfulness in her, a lightness close to humor; her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkled.

Garrison Smith was frequently summoned to different cities to confer with those concerned in his British schemes. He wrote lengthy letters to Amelia asking her advice about knotty questions, telling her again and again how much he needed her, how he had grown to depend upon her. These letters she read to Helen, to Nora, even to Tony at the times he slunk back to her for comfort.

One Saturday afternoon Helen, Nora, and Amelia were picking violets on the aqueduct. They sprang out of the green grass in great luxurious patches. The flower-picking was Helen’s idea. Every spring she made a pilgrimage to this violet haunt, and picked and picked. Only darkness put an end to her greedy desire to have every blossom she saw. Amelia had scruples about touching wild flowers. To her it was a kind of murder. Then, too, her back wasn’t equal to the strain of stooping. Nora, after gathering several modest clusters, joined Amelia stretched out full length on a sunny hillside, close to a bank of violets. Amelia’s eyes were half shut. A smile flitted over her face. Then she sighed, a lazy, contented sigh. Nora wondered what made Amelia so happy.

Amelia stirred, but the eyes which looked up at Nora sitting near her had the emptiness of a sleep-walker’s gaze.

‘It was so—so wonderful—our love——’ breathed Amelia, still smiling her lazy, happy smile.

A queer, throaty sound escaped Nora’s lips. Amelia looked around, like a child roused suddenly from peaceful dreams.

‘Well.’ Amelia’s voice lost its sleepy softness. ‘I mean it. You—you don’t know—you don’t know anything about it.’ Again the happy look. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have shocked you. But I’m so—so full of it. He went away early this morning. I may never see him again. That doesn’t trouble me. We had last night together.’

‘And you can tell me this?’

Amelia’s lips curled into something close to a smile. ‘It may do you good.’ She met Nora’s direct, scornful look without lowering her eyes. ‘And those like you. Your stiff little world. I was there once. Tight—tight like a drum—and hard. I wouldn’t go back to it——’

‘And what changed you—got you out of my stiff little world?’

‘Michael Powys. He was the love of my life.’ Amelia’s voice softened. ‘At least that first quickening of love in a girl——But how he made me suffer!’

‘The way you make Tony.’

‘Tony—that baby. He doesn’t suffer. All show. But if he did—is it only women who should suffer?’

‘You’re using Tony for revenge then—revenge for what you——’

‘Perhaps. Poor Tony.’

‘I can’t believe you.’

‘Well—a woman finds it convenient to have some kind of a sighing lover trailing after her.’ This was the old, bitter Amelia. ‘Men are that way. The sight of another man pursuing the woman they’re after—it adds zest to the chase. Garrison saw—and other men will—that I——I’m disgusting you, Nora. But I don’t care.’ Amelia sat upright and fumbled with a knot of hair falling over her neck. ‘If I had your charm, Nora Deming, and your beauty—there is beauty hidden away in you somewhere. You’re a fool wasting it all the way you do. Going on and on—using your brains. As if they mattered in a woman. You’ll put on spectacles in a few more years—that red hair all on fire here in the sun—it’ll be dull—grey. I can see you that way. And you—like ice. You don’t understand. You turn up your nose because I—I with no beauty—no charm—a disgusting weak body—snatch what I can. I have. I will again. No one can make me believe I do wrong. Right and wrong—they don’t exist for me.’

Helen was approaching them. ‘Such richness!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve got flowers to take back to everybody.’

Nora got Helen between her and Amelia on the walk to the subway. She was sickened by the torrent of words Amelia had poured over her. Something burned in her, like a hot coal placed on raw flesh. So this was the defiant new woman insisting upon her place in the world.

Tony was waiting in Amelia’s room. He bounded out of the door when he heard their steps on the stairs, like a lonely child who had waited long for its mother.

Helen in her sitting-room bent over her flowers. She spread out in a row on her couch the little nosegays she had fastened together with tough grass, and got down on her knees before them.

‘The darlings—the darlings. How cool and sweet. Violet time in spring—I live for it, Nora. It’s my Easter every year. We women without religion—we must have something. Woodsy—woodsy sweetlings,’ she crooned to herself.

Nora, stretched out in Helen’s big chair, watched Helen getting bowls for her treasures. At last they were taken care of for the night. In the morning she would distribute her flowers among the friends looking out on bare city streets. She began to murmur the chosen names.

Nora interrupted her in the midst of them. ‘Helen—tell me. Do you think Amelia is—just right?’

‘She told you about her farewells with Garrison, then?’ Helen laughed. ‘I thought maybe she wouldn’t. She thinks you’re so easily shocked, Nora.’

‘Yes, she told me.’

‘Poor girl. She saw him off this morning. That’s why I asked her to go violet-picking with us.’

‘She came right out with it.’

‘Yes, Amelia is very frank. And honest, too.’

‘I don’t see how you can stand having her here—close to you this way.’

‘She doesn’t bother me. And just because I happen to be a born old maid—maybe I’m fortunate. I’m not sure, though. But how can I judge what works best for a girl like Amelia?’

‘I don’t believe she even loves that man.’

‘Garrison? Well, maybe it’s better if she doesn’t. You know what I think about him. He’ll love many times. A generous lover.’

‘How could he? I feel sick all over.’

‘Yes, you would. I’m sorry, Nora. Here, take some of my violets back with you. For those graduate women of yours. They need flowers more than Amelia.’ Helen’s queer little chuckle was over some joke she kept to herself.

In the adjoining room Tony was laughing, a boyish laugh full of joy. Nora went back to the dormitory with a generous portion of Helen’s violets. Helen made her take them, gave her a cool little peck on the cheek at parting, and laughed once more.