I L 'r 'J ?if^ 14^ ro 35-03 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Cornell University Library PS 3503.A86E4 1921 Elmira College stories. 3 1924 022 249 258 dI dI dI dI dI dI dI dI dI The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022249258 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES BY SYLVIA CHATFIELD BATES flDemorlal leMtlon ELMIRA COLLEGE ELMI RA. NEW YORK 1921 Copyright, 1921, by Sylvia Chatfield Bates 'i*P> f '^'Vf^ -y ^ ^ J*-^ -VJ '1 IN MEMORY OF EUGENIA LEE DIVEN IF we had known there was to be a Great War, then we should have known that this preface would be written, for the highest-hearted ever go to sacri- fice. When the call came to Eugenia Diven, her heart answered it before the way was made ready for her feet. After devoted service at home, she went to France. And with the Seventh Division, A.E.F., in the villages of Minorville and Burey-en-Vaux, in the Toul sector, and Aigne, in the Le Mans area, she gave of her strength to the uttermost. It was a very happy giving. To a regiment of doughboys she was "Gene." She loved them all. She was proud of them, and to be with them. She loved the beauty of France. "There are lilacs everywhere," she wrote, "hedges of yellow honey-locust and of wis- taria, rhododendrons, peonies, fields of poppies — this part of France in the month of May is so beautiful it hurts." The sacrifice was willing. Before sailing she said once : "I don't want to sound 'heroic,' but if anything should happen to me, it really would be all right." When, later, she understood the full meaning of the infection which the lovely villages had given her, she wrote: "Whatever comes of this do not be sorry that I went to France. It was what I wanted to do, and I should do it again." It is a long way from the bright fields of France to the edge of the Arizona desert. The battle that ended there, in victory, she fought with gentle patience, humor, and the unflagging courage of a nature strong with fortitude and tenderness, and a high sense of obligation. Her vivid lovableness was never dimmed. Always self-forgetful, prone to a sweet gratitude, gen- erous, devoted, steadfast in faith — for "Behold I shew you a mystery" — the close of her life was a shining thing. Surely beauty goes to beauty, and "... that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home." FOREWORD There are no exact portraits in this book. Several of the characters were suggested by girls in college with the author, but in most cases the traits of personality were pur- posely mixed in order that no one should have a definite original. After this manner the inspiration for "Virginia Danvers" was that E. L. D. to whom' the first edition was dedicated, and in whose mem- ory this edition stands. Her friends will know that "Virginia" is only a faint reflection of her, smiling out of these pages across the years. CONTENTS PAGE Elmira "Alma Mater" 8 Prologue: Arrival 9 The Party with a Point 14 William, the Conqueror 32 The Thirteenth Prom Man 44 The Table Round 57 An Elmira College Boy 70 "Recollection's Magic Sway" 80 A Freshman's Diary 97 A Senior's Diary no The May Queen in "And I, for Rosalind" 123 The Greatest Thing 137 Commencement 152 Epilogue : Departure 164 L'Envoi : Hymn to the Campus 168 ELMIRA ALMA MATER Elmira's honored history, We sing in songs of praise, And for her faith and loyalty. Our voices proudly raise. Fair Alma Mater, Fondly thy name we sing. Blest Alma Mater, Myriad echoes ring. Together in her halls to-day A loyal pledge we sing. And recollection's magic sway Will future homage bring. Fair Alma Mater, etc. Forever will her daughters stand. Bound through her love and truth. And swell Elmira's chorus band As in glad days of youth. Frances Squike Potter, '87 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES PROLOGUE : ARRIVAL. The Freshman began to twist and turn in her seat, for at Waverly the brakeman had shouted, "Next station Elmi-ra!" and they were far past Waverly now. "Look," said the Senior, in whose care she was ; "see those hills on the right. Those are what Kipling called 'the fat, low hills of Elmira.' Can you see that tiny thing standing straight upon the top of the hill we are passing now? It really is not tiny at all, but very large. It is Sullivan's monument." "The — the Sullivan ?" stammered the Freshman, glad to air her knowledge. "Yes," answered the Senior, a little absently. She had turned to her own window — ^they sat on the left side of the train — and the Freshman saw that her cheek was getting pink and her eyes had a soft light in them. "Yes — you can read up about him if you've forgotten, and use him for a daily theme." She smiled, and kept watch of the fast-gliding landscape. By and by she leaned toward the window eagerly, "This is Southport," she added. The Freshman stared obediently out through the window pane, and hoped the Senior could not hear her heart beat. They were skimming swiftly past shady streets which looked very quiet and pretty in 9 10 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES the afternoon sun ; and in another moment they rolled ponderously on to the river bridge. "The Chemung," murmured the Senior, and the younger girl caught a flash of silver and blue water, with purple hills in the distance — a shallow river edged by a long line of irregular, balconied structures whose window panes caught the shafts of the sun. "How horrid the backs of those buildings look," remarked the Freshman very freshly. But they had left the bridge in a twinkling, and the vision of a busy city street was glimpsed and lost. The train was moving more slowly now, past rows of very small shops, rather dingy in appearance, and inter- sected twice by narrow streets. Then a broader thoroughfare stretched away, opening a distant vista of tall trees, and among them the slim spire of a church. The train rolled past a few more small shops and came to a leisurely, dignified standstill, which brought the Freshman's window opposite the figure of a bronzed and muscular Indian, who stood stolidly in a very small grass plot and seemed to be restraining the ardor of an animal at his side. The Freshman sat still and looked at the Indian, until the Senior, suit- case in hand, pulled her by the arm. "We're here," she said; "aren't you going to get out?" The Freshman stood up and grasped her own shin- ing new suit-case nervously. The laughing crowd of girls, all of whom the Senior seemed to know, was pushing toward the door. Another crowd was on the platform outside watching eagerly for each girl as she appeared at the door of the car and descended the steps, to be triumphantly borne off to the station. These, the Freshman afterwards learned, were "town girls," who, reinforced by some early arrivals at the college, were welcoming their out-of-town friends. Cries of "There's Sally!" "There's Isabel!" "Hullo, ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES ii Peggy!" greeted each newcomer as she stepped from the door of the car, and the Freshman suddenly feh that she would give a very great deal indeed to have her name called out so, and to see welcome for her in so many laughing eyes. When the Senior whom she was with appeared at the top of the car steps, the calls of welcome swelled enthusiastically: "There's Fuzzy Wuzzy!" "There's our Fuzz!" "Step grace- fully down the steps ! You may allow the brakeman to help you with your suit-case, but don't forget to thank him!" "Hello, Fuzz, give me your checks." The Freshman found herself swept down the steps behind the Senior and into the merry crowd, which began to move along the platform in the direction of the street. Some one took her suit-case, and the Senior introduced her to the nearest persons as they walked. "Here's my contribution to the Freshman class, girls — Miss Randon, Susie Randon. This is Miss Car- ter, Susie, with your suit-case ; and Miss Battle, here ; and Miss Danvers (behave, jinny; I heard you try to fuss me when I got off the train) ; and Miss Tre- main. Has Shirley come yet, or Lois?" "Shirley's in town at the Eltons'," some one an- swered, "getting her nerves steady before the awful grind (also getting fed up, we suspect). Lois comes on the late train from the west." "Will Albert go down to meet Lois?" inquired the dark girl introduced as Miss Danvers, and rapidly answered herself: "No, Albert will not meet Lois, yet she will have ample protection. 'A beautiful young man with strong, round arms,' as Mr. Bernard Shaw so aptly describes our friend Mark Antony " "Oh, keep still. Jinny! Don't air your knowledge of the classics on the street." "Really!" exploded Miss Danvers, stopping short in the middle of the cross walk and bringing the whole 12 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES cavalcade to a standstill with much bumping of suit- cases, while she fixed inquiring dark eyes on the objecting one, "do you really consider that Bernard Shaw's plays will become classics? Now, just com- pare his " "Some one stop her!" "Oh, you're standing on my foot!" "Some one make her go on, you mean!" "Come along. Jinny ; don't play to the gallery. We know you're only trying to impress the Freshman with your intellect." But Miss Danvers remained standing still, and in- stead of replying, smiled at the Freshman. "Did you hear her blacken my character?" she asked. "Y-yes," answered Susie Randon. "Then come along with me. I always like to sit in the gallery !" And the Freshman actually found herself walking up the street with this strangely attractive person, who suddenly dropped all signs of nonsense and be- came quiet and polite and kind. They did not walk far, but it seemed a long way to the Freshman. The shady, quiet street began to ascend a gentle slope; and finally widened suddenly into a broad open space. Then it was that the Fresh- man had her first sight of her Alma Mater. On the right the deep green campus stretched away, with its graceful trees — elms, maples, evergreens. In the centre of it, the Freshman could see, was a circle of willows which enclosed a little lake. Beyond that the ground sloped upward and was crowned by the loveliest trees of all. Rising above these were the turrets and many chimneys of a vast building, crowned with an octagonal cupola — a building which reminded the Freshman of the pictures of the towers of Wind- sor Castle nestling amid English verdure. Drawing nearer, the girls could see through the trees the whole ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 13 of the Main Building, venerable, substantial, a time- dulled brownish red, with glossy ivy climbing high about its many windows. It flung its huge wings east and west from a big octagon that formed the heart. Leading to the entrance, west, south and east, were broad gravel walks ; and, as they started up one of these, the Freshman noticed on her left the quaint old Observatory, while beyond, nestling deep among the trees across the wide roadway, was the President's house; and on her right, at the farthest end of the campus, she saw Gillette Memorial Hall, with its deeply shadowed porch. Under the trees the mellow glow of the golden afternoon was softened ; the shad- ows slanted long; there was an impression of rich autumnal luxuriance as if nature had given of her fullness and it yet remained in ripened glory for a little space before the end. The sense of something big, gentle and brooding, waiting to take her in, as- sailed the Freshman with such a compelling force that it suddenly rose in her throat and choked her. The other girls felt it, too, evidently. They stopped before the southern porch and looked about them lovingly. Then one — a little girl with large gray- blue eyes, whom the Freshman already distinguished as "Babbie," laid her hand upon the balustrade and spoke almost passionately. "Our Senior year; just think, girls! The begin- ning of the end!" There was a moment's silence. And then: " 'The bird of time has but a little way to flutter!' " said Virginia Danvers; "let's flutter along with him, and chirp like mad — for — for" — ending weakly — "to- morrow we die!" And they ran up the steps laughing. THE PARTY WITH A POINT. While the trunks were still standing in long lines in the halls and while the sound of hammers driving in forbidden tacks still echoed from room to room, in fact, on the night before the first chapel service of the year, Lois Manning opened the spread season. Lois was a sociable person whose red-brown eyes and endearing dimple twinkled above a chafing dish very charmingly. She liked to give parties, and had, in her time, produced an infinite variety, ranging from the disreputable onion spread held in a trunk-room beyond the confines of civilization and honored only by devotees of the pungent vegetable, to the elegant affair in which Orange Pekoe, Haviland tea cups and wax candles were supposed to serve the double pur- pose of representing the social pinnacle and impress- ing the faculty member, at such times invited to be present. Every one had a good time at Lois' "func- tions," no matter which one of the variety she was giving; and so, when, on Thursday afternoon the day after college opened, after having been on a shopping tour, she announced, "I'm going to give a spread to- night — please come up or over or in at nine o'clock," every one rejoiced. For no matter how glad you may be to be back in college, there is a certain bleak- ness about the first two nights, when the rooms are bare and the dining-room echoes and your clothes are wrinkled as badly as your mother said they would be if you packed them that way. Everybody, of course, said she would come. Although spreads occur throughout the college year 14 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 15 with the casual regularity of a law of nature, the fall is the special time of their flourishing. In the fall it is, naturally enough, that the Freshmen must be made to perceive the harmlessness, as individuals, and the impressiveness, as a body, of the Sophomore Class; as well as the charm of the upper classmen considered in various groups and from as many different points of view. Consequently in having a big spread in the autumn the question of whom to invite is an easy one — you just ask all your friends and a "bunch of Freshmen," and, if you have enough to eat, there's your party all ready made. "Who's coming to-night, Lois?" asked Virginia Danvers, hammering vigorously at a nail intended to support Lois* most important picture. Although a town girl, she spent many of her days and some of her nights at the college, and she always helped Lois settle her room. "Oh, everybody," Lois replied vaguely, gazing with her head on one side at the juxtaposition of a Cornell banner and a plaster cast of a bull dog adorning the space above her bed. "That is — as many as can get into the room — of course a lot of Freshmen. How does that look. Jinny?" "I'd hate to sleep under it myself," said Virginia seriously, "but perhaps you won't mind after the light is out. Come and see if this is straight." "A little to the left — now to the right— you'll stay to the party yourself, won't you. Jinny?" "Well, it has taken a good deal of hinting to get asked," remarked that person with dignity, "but I'm not easily discouraged, you know." "Don't be silly," said Lois, beginning to pound gilt- headed tacks into red denim, not at all disturbed; "I want you on exhibition the first night, of course, for I'm to have two celebrities, or people who'll turn out to be celebrities; it amounts to the same thing. I've i6 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES invited that new 'faculty,' Jinny. Rather bold of me, isn't it? They say she's been here a week and she looks awfully lonesome. I thought she'd like it — j and then there is the stunningest Freshman living across from the Y. W. C. A. room. I've got her first*. Nobody else seems to know her, but you can mark my words, she'll turn out to be a peach." "It takes you to get busy early, my dear. You certainly should marry a member of the House of Commons." And Jinny hung a last year's calendar, beside Lois' "Do It Now" sign admiringly. "Not at all," said Miss Manning modestly; "I just like to have a good time, and then, of course," she added, "I do like to have some point to a party." And so, with her room practically settled, her guests all invited, and her repast set out on the washstand behind the screen, Lois, at nine o'clock, was ready for the spread to begin. She said she had invited "every- body," but that, of course, is a comparative term. And she had modified it to "all that can get into the ■ room." There was to the eyes of bewildered Fresh- men, however, an amazing number of easy, smiling, funny, charming girls, who were all very much at home, and exceedingly contented to be where they were. They came in kimonos of silk, in kimonos of cotton, red kimonos, pink kimonos, blue, green and yellow kimonos, some of them very new. They came laughing over dear old jokes of the previous year, and over summer vacation stories ; they came looking grave over the girls who had not come back, "the Seniors," out in the "wide, wide world." (What vivid impres- sions the Freshmen do get of those brilliant person- ages who have gone before!) But no gravity lasted long; for in college you live in the present. They came with all kinds of greetings for Lois, comments on her new room, its wall paper, the adjustment of her pictures and her furniture, compared with results ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 17 gained by the previous inhabitant; comments on a new ring she was wearing, which by this time nearly every one had seen. They came and sat themselves down in the radiance of Lois' yellow crepe paper light shade and the gleam of her flickering candles, ^rrepared to have a good time. There was dark-eyed, merry Virginia Danvers — 'markedly handsome in a borrowed old rose kimono — 'iSio made every one laugh a good deal. You would have noticed immediately that every one seemed to feel a kind of benevolent ownership in Jinny and to be proud of her, her sayings and doings. Indeed, she had more intimate devoted friends than almost any other girl in college, and was always being elected president of something or other. She was Lois' right- hand man, master of ceremonies at the party. And small Barbara Battle, "Babbie" for short, snuggled in a corner of the divan, smiling upon everybody with huge blue eyes and mouth slightly aslant, chat- tering alertly. She was on the programme of the party, having promised to render her masterpiece (later in the evening) entitled "Little Cat.'' A tall, blonde girl, whom everybody called "William" and seemed to regard as a paragon of grit, for some rea- son or other, had come with Babbie, and amused her- self for ten minutes after their arrival by fastening one of her long, yellow Marguerite braids to Babbie's kinky pig tail, going at it very earnestly in solemn German fashion. Her last name you could have dis- covered was Faust. Then there was Elsa Heath, a darker blonde than William, a boyish-looking girl with golden brown hair, who might have been, as Jinny once said, the Dauphin in disguise ; some one had nick- named her "Monsieur Beaucaire." On entering she had shaken hands in a very gentlemanly manner with several people and then seated herself on the floor. Shirley Brooke, Elsa's room mate, sat beside her, and i8 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES tried to entertain a bashful Freshman, upon whom, as it happened, her quietly humorous gray eyes and droll mouth were utterly wasted. Dark, angular Isa- bel Adams, whose clever, expressive face would have told you she was one of the best actors in college, helped Shirley "draw out" the Freshman — ^who hap- pened to be the Susie Randon that Edith Travis had brought — while Rosalind Morse, Isabel's room_ mate, listened amusedly. Besides these, a few Juniors, a sprinkling of Sophomores, and about ten Freshmen made up the number of Lois' guests. It really was a big party, but in spite of its size everybody, except the Freshmen, seemed to know everybody else very well and to be on terms of excellent good feeling. The guests of honor, or at least the individuals alluded to as "the celebrities," were late in arriving. Indeed, it might be said that the party had begun without them. For some one suggested having "a good old sing" to begin with ; and a Sophomore whom everybody called "Jo," because she was so like Jo March in Little Women, struck up the classical tune "Clementine" on a banjo. "In Elmira is a college," sang everybody lustily, "Situated on a hill. Where young ladies seek for knowledge, In a manner fit to kill !" The Freshmen tried to patch the words, expecting them to be samples of lyric beauty and receiving some- thing of a shock. "Masculines are not admitted These young ladies for to see. Unless they have a reputation 'Simon John' or 'Brother B.' " ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 19 Chorus : "Oh, El-mi-ra, oh, El-mi-ra, oh Elmira, loved and fair. What with spreads and other functions, Happy days have we spent there!" They sang the jiggy tune again and again as long as the words lasted, and afterwards applauded, those who sang loudest having no small share in the clap- ping of hands. Then, "Play 'Where, O Where,' Jo," some one demanded. The Freshmen tried to look unconscious under the urgent and passionate pleas that rose on all sides : "Where, O where are the verdant Freshmen? Where, O where are the verdant Freshmen? Where, O where are the verdant Freshmen?" But the tables were turned : "Safe, now, in the Sophomore Class!" Many glances were exchanged at the stanza, chanted slowly : "Where, O where are the grave old Seniors? Safe now in the wide, wide world; They've gone out from their Alma Mater, Safe, now, in the wide, wide world." And the new Seniors had a pang of frightened con- cern for the time when this song would be sung about them and they would not be there! There was no time to dwell upon anything so far away as that, however, for just at this moment "the stunning- est Freshman" who lived across from the Y. W. C. A. room arrived, and close upon her heels the new "Faculty." 20 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Now the introduction of her celebrities, arriving late as they did, might have proved just a little em- barrassing to Lois if it had not been for a rather funny coincidence that carried everything off lightly. She had heard, of course, that the new "Faculty" was "Miss Stanford," but it was something of a sur- prise to find that the stunning Freshman was "Miss Sanford." "Do tell me your name, quick!" she had whispered at the door; then she introduced them to the half-dozen people nearest — and another song was started. "Because," said Lois in an undertone, "we want to show her we have lots of college spirit." The "her" was certainly ambiguous. Under cover of the song the newcomers were sub- jected to a somewhat severe scrutiny. It must be admitted that the new member of the faculty made less of an impression than the Freshman, who, Lois thought, was destined to "make a hit." Miss Stan- ford was a square person, to whom the term "homely" might have been applied in its correct meaning. She wore spectacles, and between her eyebrows was a deep furrow, as of much frowning over books. Her dress — Lois had been careful to tell her this was an undress party — consisted of a black "heatherbloom" petticoat and a dark-blue cloth dressing sack, edged with dignified black ruffles laid in plaits. She was manifestly a very worthy person. You could easily imagine that she had spent the long vacation at the Harvard summer school, and had come to Elmira a week early to make sure that the courses she was to teach were outlined to the most remote sub-sub-topic. Her manner was diffident and precise, but she re- ceived the courtesy of the girls with dignified com- posure. On the whole she proved as much of a dis- appointment as celebrities are proverbially supposed to prove. But in the case of the unknown Freshman ! Well, ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 21 I can only say that in contrast to the mouse-colored tone of the impression little Miss Stanford made, she so warmly, so flamingly, so wonderfully assailed the senses as, just at first, almost to create an oppression. She was bewildering. Lengths of fluffy black hair were wound around her head, contrasting with the exquisite flush in her cheeks, and seeming to cast its shadow into her beautiful eyes. A deep pink kimono of silk enveloped her, except where, here and there, a lace flounce peeped out or a white arm gleamed. She had about her an air unspeakable — of abundance, of scintillation, so that you were not surprised when she spoke in a rich, many-toned voice whose effect was extremely musical, or when she smiled, often, charm- ingly. She seemed pleased with everything about her and distinctly happy. There were by turns in her manner a reticence that was almost shyness, a touch of surprise, and a touch of amusement. The girls saw immediately that this was no "green" Freshman, but a girl — a trifle older than the average — who had seen something of the world before she entered college. But her superiority only added to her attractiveness. It was easy to fall into conversation with her, and before Lois and Jinny had finished passing around lettuce sandwiches and fruit salad (it was indeed a "grand" party), she had made the hit Lois had an- ticipated. They tried not to question her, but they were wild to know something about her, and in spite of good manners more than a few inquiries slipped out. "How do you like Elmira?" asked Barbara Bat- tle, conscious of being trite, but unable to think of anything else to say. "Oh, immensely!" replied the stunningest Fresh- man melodiously. "I came early, you know, and I've rambled around already by myself. I think it's a dear little city!" This was rather startling, verged indeed on the 22 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES patronizing, but those who heard it reflected that no doubt this remarkable girl v/as familiar with more than one metropolis ; and, besides, she spoke so simply and sweetly that one could not dream of taking offence. "Well, you won't do much more rambling alone, I can swear to that," said Wilhelmina Faust in her blunt way. "You'll have engagements a month ahead to 'ramble' with other people." "Yes?" the Freshman returned, opening her dark eyes rather wide. "And I'd like to be the first to make one," put in Elsa Heath gallantly. "If you'll go with me Saturday morning I'll show you the prettiest walk around here." "Thank you very much indeed," and the color actu- ally deepened in her cheeks. "It would give me great pleasure," she added, making a gay little bow. William, not to be outdone by Elsa, continued : "I was going to say, before Elsa butted in, that I'd like you to go to the matinee with me Saturday after- noon; some others will be going, too." At this the Freshman's color deepened yet another shade; she seemed, in spite of her poise, almost be- wildered. "Why — if you'd like to have me " she mur- mured. Then, recovering, she smiled so beautifully that Isabel Adams, who was watching with her clever remarkable eyes, drew in her breath with sharp appre- ciation. "You are very good," the Freshman brought out strangely. "Not a bit of it," this from Lois, passing sand- wiches and stopping before Miss Sanford to hear the last speech; "we all want to make you like Elmira from the start. We'll show you the ropes. Have you told her about the elevator and the back stairs ?" "The back stairs ?" murmured the Freshman. Lois went on, and Barbara Battle, looking very ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 23 small beside the wonderful young lady in pink, ex- plained : "You can't use the front stairs, you know ; they're reserved for upper classmen. And you must be very careful about going into the elevator. The rule is — • Faculty first, then Seniors, Juniors, Sophomores, Freshmen. You soon get used to it; but you must remember that it's never overstepped." "Oh, once it was," put in Wilhelmina Faust, who was terribly exact ; "don't you remember the time that Ernestine Potter rented her Junior place in the ele- vator at a penny a ride — for the benefit of the Endow- ment Fund?" Now this reminiscence, or something else, seemed to strike the wonderful Freshman as consummately humorous, for she leaned back and laughed so un- restrainedly in her musical contralto tones that every one stopped talking and looked at her. Her eyes were dancing, her pretty teeth gleaming, her face flushed a rosy pink. She was trying to stop, however, and presently succeeded, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief and catching her breath. "Oh! please excuse me," she implored sweetly; "that's s-so funny !" The girls looked at one another; their opinion of Ernestine Potter's humor rose. "We thought it rather smart," said Babbie, "but lots funnier things than that have happened." "I don't doubt it in the least; I don't doubt it," Miss Sanford replied, and showed symptoms of go- ing into another paroxysm. The interest in Miss Sanford increased rather than diminished, somewhat at the expense of any interest in Miss Stanford, who, in a secluded corner, was quietly and a little stolidly devouring what was re- spectfully offered her to eat. She had a large appetite, which the girls were careful to see well satisfied, being 24 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES not devoid of a desire to make a good impression in this quarter also. But their thoughts and their eyes were upon Miss Sanford. "Tell me some more things I must or mustn't do," said the young lady herself, taking the initiative for a change. "I don't want to make any breaks, you know. I've a horror of that," and she rather dramat- ically shuddered. "Well," Babbie said — she seemed to be spokesman — "don't ask any Seniors where the Algebra lesson is; and don't get the names of the Faculty mixed up — they don't like it, somehow; don't stand on one foot and fidget with your collar when you're talking with the Dean ; and don't work Dr. Harrison a dust cloth — he has several. Above all, don't mistake Miss Han- son, the Physical Culture teacher, you know, for one of the girls; she no longer considers it a joke. I think she'd grow a beard, if she could, to make her- self look old." The wonderful Freshman told the items off on her fingers, with solemn lips and inscrutable eyes. "I'll be very careful," she promised. From the moment of her fit of laughter she seemed, somehow, subtly different; at least Isabel Adams thought so. She was perfectly poised before, but underneath the self-control a little puzzled. Her speeches were tentative. Now, strangely enough, she had her bearings — though what "bearings" there would be to have at a spread Isabel for the moment could not imagine. She entered all unguardedly into having a good time, and seemed even to invite further inquiries into her personal experiences. And others slipped out easily enough. "Where is your home?" asked William briefly. "In Richmond, Virginia," answered Miss Sanford; and then they realized that her voice and accent were ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 25 Southern, much modified, probably by residence in the North. "Have you ever been away at school before ?" con- tinued William, thinking of her own acquaintance with foreign boarding schools. "Oh, dear, yes," crooned the lady from Richmond, "I came North to — to school years ago, and I've had two years in a Southern college." "Then may be you can take the course here in three years," some one suggested. "Oh, I shall stay in Elmira as long as they'll keep me," smiled the Freshman. "She's patriotic already," remarked Virginia Dan- vers approvingly. "It certainly doesn't take long to get acclimated here." "Was that your 'Alma Mater' you were singing just before I came in?" inquired Miss Sanford a moment later, changing the subject. "Gracious no !" cried Babbie. "Do you think we'd have old 'Clementine'? We have a grand one all our own." "Let's teach the Freshmen the 'Alma Mater,' " cried several voices. Jo's banjo was brought out again and tuned, during which process Virginia — ^being unanimously appointed for the office — arose and taught the Freshmen the words of the Elmira "Alma Mater" by the simple method of having them repeat it a dozen times like parrots. Our remarkable Miss Sanford, of course, learned it first and helped the others along. When the Freshmen were considered sufficiently educated to risk a trial, Jo struck a few chords — and every one rose to her feet. Two or three purple song books were passed around to help the Freshmen out. Miss Sanford of course had one. The girls sang sweetly and well. The high, pure notes floated out of Lois' room and along the halls 26 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES melodiously. They sang well because they loved what they sang; no one but Freshmen thought of looking at a book. It was a little hard at first for the new- comers to get the air, since it is not exactly an easy one, and no one attempted the lower parts, except Miss Sanford. She, however, after the first few bars, slipped into the second soprano, reading it with ease. Her rich voice upheld the chorus, which otherwise would have sounded rather thin. Truly she was an accomplished young woman! They sang the "Alma Mater" twice, and it was with the repetition of it that somebody — it happened to be Isabel Adams — chanced to remember that little Miss Stanford, who from her corner was listening to the music with an air of withholding her judgment until they had had a fair chance, was to be a member of the Music Faculty as well as assistant in the Elo- cution Department. "She might pitch in and sing herself," Isabel whis- pered to Rosalind Morse. "She probably thinks this is too horrible to join in," replied Rosalind. When the singing was over and the girls felt at liberty to sit down, William, in loud, blunt tones, com- plimented Miss Sanford on her voice. "My dear girl," she said almost solemnly, "while you are learning the 'ropes' — to speak in the vernac- ular — let me advise you seriously to take voice les- sons. You would never regret it." The wonderful Freshman suddenly seemed about to go "off the handle," again to William's surprise. "Your compliment is subtle," she answered, smiling broadly. "Do you really think, then, that I need them so much — the lessons?" Every one roared at William, who stuck to her point valiantly. "I've no doubt you'd be benefited," she said with much dignity. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 27 To change the subject Lois interrupted: "Perhaps Miss Sanford will sing for us; Jo can pick out almost any accompaniment on her banjo — unless," turning to the Freshman, "you strum your- self." Miss Sanford nodded ; she was not at all unwilling to sing. And when, after picking the strings of the banjo with considerable skill, she began, in low, sweet tones, a negro lullaby, no one was surprised at her lack of hesitation. She sang as easily as she breathed, and evidently loved it. They called for another and yet another. She gave them all the familiar plantation songs, then many they had never heard before — weird negro folk lore snatches. Her mastery of the dialect was perfect, and the girls were wild with enthusiasm. In the gen- eral excitement the previous formality was entirely lost, so that they found they were treating this re- markably fascinating personage quite as one of them- selves. They even tried to include stiff little Miss Stanford, to whom all this time they had been scrupu- lously deferential, in the universal thaw, but she re- tained her original stolidity — or was it dignity? She was the only person in the room who made no com- ment on the singing. "Oh, oh," cried Babbie Battle eagerly, when Miss Sanford at last laid the banjo aside, "it's just too charming. How do you ever get the dialect that way ?" "Yes," added Virginia Danvers, foreseeing the ac- quisition of a valuable member to the Fraternity of Thespis, the college dramatic club, "that dialect is a stroke of genius." "You must have negro stories by the bushel," said Lois, and : "Tell some now !" they at once demanded. The Freshman looked slowly about her. Her beau- tiful eyes shone with a humorous glint that, secretly. 28 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES puzzled every one, though you would have found no girl willing to admit it. "Now?" she said. "Please! Please!" She thought a moment, her eyes resting on little Miss Stanford as if for inspiration, then strangely smiling, and with absolute lack of self-consciousness, she began: "When I was a little thing I had a negro mammy who was cram-full of stories of the golden age — before the war. Her name was Lily. She was a weird old creature, versed in spells and charms and even claiming power of communication with the dead. She used to tell me often about an old, old uncle of hers who died long before I was bom, and from whom, she swore terrible oaths, she was in the habit of receiving messages from the other world. It's about the first message she ever got that this story is. "Uncle Wellington — ^that was his grandiloquent name (he was a tremendous lover of rank and sta- tion), had been married twice in his youth, but he was a widower when Lily knew him. His first wife was a little housemaid on the old plantation — a very humble nigger wench, indeed. After she died he was faithful to her memory until, years later — when he had risen in the estimation of his master to the tune of becoming a butler — ^he found favor in the eyes of the proudest person in pomp and circumstance on the whole estate — the housekeeper. But he was not to remain in that glorified condition for long. She died also, and was buried beside the little maid — ^who never rose higher than chief shooer of flies off the master's baby. But Uncle Wellington never recovered from the sense of exalted rank he had attained by espousing the housekeeper. He talked of nothing else, and his chief pleasure — indeed, in later years, his chief occu- pation — was in decorating the graves of the two ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 29 wives in a style befitting their rank. Only the sim- plest flowers were placed upon the sod that covered the first wife, while the most gorgeous bouquets Uncle Wellington could find were daily deposited upon the second wife. No headstones marked the graves, but no one could mistake, after the first glance, the iden- tity of each. As the years went on, however, and the graves sank, visitors used to ask Uncle Wellington how he told them apart himself ; but he professed no difficulty. " 'Doan' yew-all s'pose," he would say, 'dat ah man w'a married de housekeeper of de big house, ud know huh grave ?' "Finally Uncle Wellington came to die. He ex- pressed great exaltation at the thought of joining his aristocratic spouse ; and he promised Mam Lily to send her a message concerning his reception in that high quarter. "After the funeral was over — Mam Lily used to tell me — and they had buried Uncle Wellington at the feet of his unequal wives, she hurried back to her cabin for the promised message. She sat down be- fore her fire and went into a 'trance.' Without the slightest delay. Uncle Wellington, whose black old bones were at that minute out in the plantation bury- ing ground, appeared before her. " 'Lily Veronicah,' he quavered hollowly, 'dere ain't no kind ah use in mah being in Heaven! Lily Veronicah, look yere! Yew-all call up Marse Satan, quick's scat now! Yew-all jes tell him — tell him youah Unc' Wellington — he want toe go toe Hell !' " 'Fo' de Lawd sakes, Uncle Wellington — what fo' yo want to go dat ah place?' "A long wail sounded on the wind and Uncle Wel- lington vanished up the chimney. But Mam Lily caught his last words: 'Oh, Lawd, Lily Veronicah! 30 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES oh, Lawd! Ah done embellisherate de wrong graves!' " The remarkable Freshman took her applause very calmly, her eyes still twinkling as if she were more amused than anyone in her audience. Isabel Adams, watching her, suddenly burst out laughing, and left the room. And that, as is always the case with th^ first de- parture, broke up Lois' party. It was quarter of ten, anyhow — time for Freshmen to be in bed. The next morning, Friday, was the first chapel serv- ice of the year. From all directions the girls swarmed towards the picturesque old octagonal hall, eager to claim their new seats, eager to see the Freshmen all together — you never can tell much about them until you see them in a bunch — eager to see the new clothes and the summer tan of the Faculty, who sit in a very long row at the left of the rostrum, curious to see the new member take her place. As Lois Manning and Jinny Danvers, arm in arm, were sauntering down the corridor, they saw the re- markable Freshman appear in the crowd. She looked truly wonderful in the morning light. She was dressed in white even to the tips of her toes, and her thick braid, in contrast, made her a jet crown. Her cheeks flushed even a deeper .pink when she saw Lois and Jinny, while her eyes sparkled. She was passing them with merely a bow when Lois called out: "Oh, Miss Sanford, won't you sit with me this morn- ing? It's perfectly allowable on the first day, you know." Her refusal was politeness itself. "Not this morning, thank you so much," she said. They entered the chapel together, Lois, Jinny, Elsa, Shirley, Babbie, William, Isabel and the "grand Freshman." And as they entered the denouement of ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 31 the story presented itself with overwhelming swift- ness. That remarkable Freshman, with the slow step of a confident princess, walked brazenly straight towards the long low platform where the Faculty are en- throned, and, while the girls gaped, took her seat with graceful assurance among that august group. While at the same time, across the room, one could see lit- tle Miss Stanford, she of the spectacles and the fur- rowed frown, slipping into the Freshman seats as un- obtrusively as she could. Then — the Gloria started; and there were sixteen separate cases of hysterics in the Senior seats. "Do you observe," wrote Virginia Danvers in her notebook during the reading of the Psalms, "that Lois likes to give a party with a point? Mon Dieu! c'est voila!" WILLIAM, THE CONQUEROR. A Portrait. Her name was Wilhelmina Faust. They called her "William" on ordinary occasions; "Sweet William" when her blond hair seemed unusually golden and her cheeks more than ever pink; and after the event of which I write — the beginning of it was in the fall of her Junior year — they conferred the complimentary title of "William, the Conqueror." If this story were setting out to be a novel, of ro- mantic claims, I should say at once that "our heroine was a Saxon beauty"; but, under the circumstances, it is enough to tell you that she was a tall, strong blond girl, peculiarly sweet-faced, remarkably pretty. She had that gracefulness which goes with strength and perfect proportion, the poise of unselfconscious- ness and naivete ; but there was nothing settled or ma- ture about this self-possession. An appealing girlish- ness lay in her figure, together with a freedom of movement that was boyish. And in the level look of her eyes, meeting yours, as well as in the strong, sweet curve of her chin, was the hint of some subtle reserve force waiting for the call to arms. William was the product of two conquering na- tionalities ; she was half German, half American. Her father, at the time of his death — which occurred in William's second year of existence — was an officer of some rank in the German army. Her mother was an American woman, and an Elmira College girl. By rights William should have had a rich strain of romance in her character, for it was actually her father and mother 32 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 33 who had helped to give to the "Elopement Room" of the College its sentimental name. Her mother, as Margaret Moore, had lived in that room; and her father, big young Herr Wilhelm Faust, had dared to stand beneath its window. But that (to imitate the great R. K.) is another story. It appears, nevertheless, that in spite of the fact that her origin might thus be called remotely romantic, William rather lacked senti- ment than otherwise, for she refused to live in her mother's room on the prosaic grounds that it was "poked up" and that she could have more fun on an- other corridor anyway. Every year Freshmen de- plored this unhappy fact, because of the lost opportun- ity of writing home that there was "a girl in college who lived in the very room from which her mother had eloped !" The temperament of her parents showed, however, in William's make-up in a slightly different way. She could not help looking upon most things that happened to her as adventures, to be carried through either to defeat or to victory. And that is why when the great "adventure" of her college ca- reer suddenly opened out before her, without a back- ward glance or catch of her breath, she stepped for- ward to achieve it. This is how the great adventure came about. (You will see, of course, that only William's mental atti- tude towards the situation makes it new, or, in any particular, interesting.) It was five o'clock on an afternoon late in the fall of the year when William and the girls, who else- where in this book appear as Seniors, were Juniors. The campus, already crisp and rustling with leaves, was glowing with orange light that filtered through a haze of purple. The cool air smelled of smoke. Barbara Battle sniffed it luxuriously as she scuffed her way through the leaves across the campus in the di- rection of the basketball field, crumpling an un- 34 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES opened envelope in the pocket of her red sweater. The voices of the girls as they called to one another in their practice game came up to her. She knew most of them, without seeing the faces, and loved many ; she knew one best and loved it best — ^the voice of Sweet William, ringing out tunefully on the clear air : "Jinny ! here, here Jinny ; quick !" Barbara Battle was wondering what the letter in her pocket, with its direful blue stamp of special delivery, was going to mean for William down there on the field; for it bore her name on the face of it. "I'm awfully silly," said small Barbara aloud to herself, and kicked at the leaves. "It is probably nothing at all ; nothing, nothing at all." And she set her teeth together, because she wished to stop shiv- ering before she reached the basketball ground. A morbid premonition was upon her that the letter in her pocket was bringing bad news for Wilhelmina Faust. She descended the slope at the side of Music Hall, and presently joined the small group of girls in sweaters and heavy coats who were sitting on the benches with their backs to the lake and discussing the probable winning team in the championship games soon to be played off. "Hello, Babbie; your nose is blue!" was her wel- come. And Shirley Brooke absently offered her lap as a warm seat, for everybody made a baby of Bar- bara. "William's been putting up the corkingest game," went on Shirley. "She's the backbone of the team; we couldn't possibly win the championship without her." Barbara brightened, for the indispensableness of William was a theme she enjoyed. "Win without her!" said Edith Travis, turning around, "I should rather think we couldn't win with- out her." ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 35 A Sophomore, Sally Woodward, who sat next them, laughed at this ruefully. "If there were any member of the Junior team," she said "whom I should choose to have leave college just now, it certainly would be Wilhelmina Faust." "For mercy's sake!" exclaimed Rosalind Morse. "Don't mention such a horror as that, Sally, even in fun!" Barbara suddenly began to shiver again, and she glared quite fiercely at the offending Sophomore. In her present mood such a speech as this was positively startling to her. What could it mean ? She told her- self that outside of a novel, surprising events were not prepared for in this neat manner. Therefore, this meant nothing at all. But the note had been sounded, and Isabel Adams, the president of Thespis, took it up. "Do you know, there's scarcely another girl in col- lege," she mused, watching William's strong hands catch the ball above her opponent's head and send it swiftly straight into the basket, "unless it's Jinny. Danvers, whose sudden dropping out of things would make so much difference to everybody, or to so many organizations, as William's would. It's a sure thing that the Juniors can't keep the championship without her, and as for Thespis, she makes an ideal heroine. I'm already counting on her for the June play." "Don't be so analytical, Isabel," said sensible Shirley. "Of course William is a peach; everybody knows it; there's no question about it. Neither is there any question of her dropping out of things. There ! Time's up," and rising, Shirley slid Barbara off her lap. The girls of the two teams ran quickly to the benches and struggled into sweaters and coats; then laughing and talking over the score, everybody moved off toward the Main Building with a prodigious rust- ling of leaves. Everyone's hand found a resting place on somebody's shoulder. The golden light shone 36 ELM IRA COLLEGE STORIES through the trees on faces that needed no brightening. Barbara's alone was solemn, for as she walked between William and Jinny she clutched the letter in her pocket (the letter which might, of course, be per- fectly harmless), and knew that the time was very near when she must give it to its owner. And then fate, in the person of a tactless mortal who had seen the messenger boy arrive with William's letter, has- tened the event which Barbara was striving to feel un- momentous. Georgiana Rider, a girl who always had to tell everything first, threw up her window, on the third floor, and called out in the still air raspingly : "Oh, William!" "Hello !" called back William's clear voice. "Hello, Georgiana !" Miss Rider stretched herself across the window sill with an unctious expression. "Did you get your special delivery letter?" she in- quired innocently. "My what?" said William, stopping short. "I was afraid no one had told you you had a special delivery — of course Miss Parks signed for you in the office. I saw you weren't hurrying any " A silence had fallen, perfectly accountable when you remember that to girls away from home any word by special messenger comes freighted with panic. "Well," said William, never flinching, "I'll just hurry up now, and see what it is. Thanks, Geor- giana !" But Barabara Battle stood in her path. She was laughing a trifle. "Here, my dear," she said. "Here; I've got it." With a faint and yet fainter stirring of leaves most of the girls melted away leaving Barbara, Shirley, Jinny and Lois Manning standing with William near the fountain. They began to talk, gaily, all at once. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 37 "Rip it open, Billy! Maybe your mother has sent ybu a box," said Virginia. "Invite me, if she has." "I'll bet your Australian uncle has died and left you a million !" said Shirley. William sat down on the edge of the fountain, and no one thought of noticing how picturesque she was in her white scarlet-numeraled sweater with the red- brown leaves for a background, not even Barbara. She tore open her letter and read the short missive from beginning to end, read it twice. As she sat there the shadows of the turrets, lying long on the leaves, just reached and covered her. The sun was very low. It was cold. At last she looked up at them and smiled under her level brows. "It's quite like an old-fashioned novel," she said. There was a long pause. "Mother writes — mother writes, that all the money my father invested for us in Berlin has gone — some- where ; she's not very clear about where ; dropped into some hole that's been gaping a long time I gather. . . . It's not quite all we have. There's enough for us two to live on. . . . But, it's the money that has been sending me — here. . . . She says — I've got to come home. I've got to leave college, she says, at once." William stood up. She towered above them all even in her gymnasium shoes. Very slowly and calmly she looked about her — at the great trees bend- ing lovingly over the foster mother's children, at the benign old turreted Main Building with its crimson ivy, at the seasoned red of Music Hall, at the old yel- low Observatory in the distance, at the nestling abode of the president, coming back at the last to the win- dow of her own room that overlooked the lake — and a light was kindled in her eyes. She saw the adventure, and she grasped her sword. 38 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "I'm not," she announced clearly and firmly — "I am not going to leave college for any money-swallowing hole in Berlin ! I am going to stay. You'll see, I'm going to stay ; just watch !" It was distinctly a challenge. William's substantial gauntlet was thrown down before the face of Fate. In an instant the Old Lady had snatched it up. And the fight was on. The girls said that the first thing William did after she made her spectacular announcement was to send a characteristically extravagant telegram to her mother, who, by the way, lived very cosily with a sister, also widowed. It was in German, and ran: "Fear noth- ing, little mother ; I have in my head a thousand plans, in my heart a thousand loves for thee. — ^Wilhelmina." And after that it was all they could do to keep her from going to the President's office in her "gym" suit to lay before him her propositions for making enough money to stay in college. For, in very truth, William did seem to have "a thousand plans," inspirations they must have been, since she had little time to think. "You are just making me waste time," she said to Virginia and Babbie, who stood over her with her white woolen Peter Thompson while she protestingly slipped off her basketball garb. "Dr. MacKenzie has seen me in these togs a dozen times. Don't you see that I've got to hurry, or they may let that Babcock girl, who rings the bell, have the mail to deliver? Mary Peters has given it up." "She 'gave it up' for a good reason," said Jinny; "she used to go oflf down town before she had taken around the afternoon delivery ;" and then Virginia bit her tongue for seeming to remind Sweet William that her liberty would be curtailed. But the girl on the edge of the divan was not touched by that. She was tying her patent leather low shoes; her cheeks were scarlet. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 39 "And I want to see Miss Hanson before dinner, too," she said. "I heard her despairing last night be- cause the dressmaker who was to make the Fresh- men gym suits is sick, and all the others are busy, and the cloth is bought and cut up, so she hates to make the girls buy them ready-made and " "Why— what— " began Babbie. "Are you going to do ?" finished Jinny. "Make them myself!" said William, letting down her blond hair. "Make them — yourself!" they cried together. Certainly," said William, the Conqueror. "And, oh," she added as they laced up her Peter Thompson skirt, "I musn't forget to get an official license, or whatever it is you have to have, to tutor." They followed her down the long corridor and stood by the elevator shaft with her while "the lift" ascended. Then they watched her go down, chatting quite gayly with Willie, her small namesake, just as if nothing had happened, nothing at all. The girls said that late that night after William had talked with Prex, and had been given the privilege of delivering the mail — it is given only to girls who need it — and after she had persuaded the aghast Miss Hanson to engage her to make eighty gymnasium suits, and while she was writing a letter to her mother, Esther Noble knocked on her door and was admitted. (Esther Noble was exactly the kind of girl you would imagine from her name that she would be). She of- fered her sympathy to William, which William ac- cepted politely. And then Esther begged of William that she should be resigned, pointed out to her the virtue of meekness, told her that this trouble would develop her character and that the obvious thing for her to do was to go home at once and try to "do right by" her mother. 40 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES William's answer was brief and to the point. Esther, scandalized, spread it abroad. "I have not/' said William, "any time to be re- signed. You can't expect the daughter of a soldier to be meek. My character will take care of itself. As for my mother, she is perfectly happy at Rose Cottage with Aunt Alice. I'd be a problem if I invaded just now. Good night, Esther; and thank you." Well, you know that William earned her title, so you have guessed already how this story ends. But you do not know, perhaps, what a fight she had. It was a "spirited encounter," such as William loved to read about, from beginning to end. Only a girl with a magnificent brain and perfect bodily health could, of course, have waged it ; but more than that was nec- essary. William met the sordid problem of accumu- lating dollars by the performing of odd jobs with a dash and devil-may-care gallantry and gaiety, withal, that deserve a more vivid term than moral courage. I fail, however, to find one. How she ever managed to do so much and still keep up her college work was a mystery to everyone. But she did it, somehow. She could turn her hand to almost anything. The day after she engaged to make the Freshmen gym- nasium suits, which — so luckily for her and so in- conveniently for Miss Hanson — had been delayed, she marched off laden with rolls of blue cloth to the small store rooms on the corridor east of Senior Hall and there stitched away on a sewing machine she had bor- rowed from Mrs. Kemp, whistling merrily. The Freshmen got their suits, and William — many beauti- ful round dollars. Not long after that she hung a brightly colored sign on her door — it had been painted one rainy afternoon in the midst of much merriment^ and the legend on it ran : ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 41 TUTORING IN ALL BRANCHES AT THE USUAL RATES. Under this hung another sign of whose alliterative qualities the girls were proud : PLACE-CARDS FOR PARTIES PAINTED PUNCTUALLY. The words in these versatile little "shingles" were painted in purple and gold, alternately, so that the effect, from a distance, was most alluring. They brought William all the customers she could attend to. The delivery of the college mail, too, netted her a round sum; but this even was not the end of Wil- liam's earning capacity. She had the knack of tak- ing attractive snap-shots and flash-light pictures, and this she turned into money by selling the prints, some of them on postal cards as souvenirs. She copied notes for scatter-brained wealthy mortals who could not read their own handwriting. She even — when the wolf began to yelp — swept the girls' rooms, washed their hair, and manicured their finger-nails. But the greatest of her achievements was, however, a surprise to herself as well as to everybody else. One day Babbie, "walking over" an engaged sign on William's door, found the Conqueror, wild-eyed, disheveled and spotted with ink. "Goodness gracious ! What are you up to now, my dear?" she inquired, sitting down on the floor by William's desk and looking up at her. (Barbara thought it was no wonder she had had a premonition of evil that day when William's special delivery letter came, for since then there were very many long hours when the girl she cared most for was too busy to be interrupted. "I'm sorry, Bab, but I'm a working- woman, you know," was a speech often on William's lips.) "I don't exactly know," the Conqueror replied, run- 42 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES ning her hands through her hair, "what I've been up to. I've been trying to write a story; and it's done, anyhow, whatever it is. Do you suppose," her tone dropped unconsciously to an awed note ; "have you any idea that I could get it — published?" "We can try," responded truthful Babbie, who would not for the world have been guilty of holding out a false hope. "'We' is good," laughed William. "What shall you do about it?" "I'll peddle it around from one den of editors to another, if necessary," Barbara the valiant answered. Such an act of heroism on the part of the smallest girl in the class of 19 — was not, however, called for. William and Barbara mailed the precious manuscript with much solemnity one day, and, oh mirabile dictu, it was accepted! William was so astonished that she declared any other ideas she might have had were shaken out of her head. It was true that she never had another story printed, but from that time on, so strengthening is encouragement, her success was se- cured; and she became, more than ever before, a celebrity. By the end of her Junior year Wilhelmina Faust had paid all her debts to the College, and besides that had promised to her, in one way or another, work which would (together with what she could earn in the summer) carry her through her Senior year. The great adventure was achieved. She had not thrown down her glove in vain. And do you think that she dropped basket-ball and resigned from Thespis and never went to spreads? Not at all 1 The Junior team won the class champion- ship, and it was a clever play of William's that, at a breathless moment before the whistle blew, decided the score. And more than this even — ^that June, Wil- liam was the heroine of the Shakespeare play. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 43 Out on the campus on such a moonlight night as would lure a midsummer dream, under the tall trees, by the fountain, Barbara Battle heard — ^with a pang of what might have been but was not bitter memory — William's clear voice inquire with its brave pathos: "Oh, me ! What news, my love !" "Only good news, now. Sweet William, the Con- queror," whispered Babbie. THE THIRTEENTH PROM MAN. One morning in November, when there were five more days left before the Thanksgiving Prom, Shirley Brooke sat down at the breakfast-table with a very solemn face. She ate an apple, refused cereal, and sugared her coffee without a word beyond an absent- minded "Good-morning" to the professor who presided at the head of the table. Then she fell to eating Johnny-bread in a desperate sort of manner, as though whatever happened it was one's duty to nourish the body. After Dr. Wells had finished her breakfast and left the dining-room Barbara Battle spoke up. "Have you decided what to leave me, Shirley? If it's just the same to you, I'll take the coral necklace." Shirley set down her coffee cup. "What ?" she said, baldly. "I judge from the look of you that you're making your will." "It's much worse than that." "Shirley — Brooke ! There hasn't anything hap- pened to Dick Fulton !" Shirley inclined her head gravely, and the girls — Lois Manning, Elsa Heath, Edith Travis and Susie Randon, a Freshman — fell back in their chairs in dismay. "I think," continued Shirley, "that I am becoming a menace to public safety. It is positively dangerous for me to ask a man to a Prom. You all know what a fearful time I have had, but allow me to — er — 're- capitulate.' " 44 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 45 "Please do, Shirley," said Edith Travis, known as Fuzzy Wuzzy; "there's such a Hne of them. They're worse than the Holy Roman Emperors to keep straight." "First I asked a man from home, Robert King," began Shirley, counting on her fingers, "and last month, the fourteenth of October, he was thrown from his horse while hunting, and broke his leg. You need- n't laugh! He might have been killed. I'm fond of Robert — . Well, that started things ofif nicely. Then I invited Fred Armour, who's in the General Electric Works in Schenectady ; and the firm immedi- ately sent him to South America ! After that I wrote to Harry Sargent in Cornell. He answered that he is booked for a house party on Staten Island for Thanks- giving week, but asked permission to send a substi- tute in his place. That was nice of Harry ; he knows us of old. It was decided I was to go with one Curtis Hubbs, as you know, but I never told you what happened to him. About then I began to get sensitive on the subject." "That makes four !" prompted Elsa cheerfully. "Go on, Shirley. There were Ned Fairweather and Bud Hopkins and Lewis Hale and Rufe Clinton." "They all declined with excellent reasons," said Shirley. "I've forgotten which excuse went with which man. Then I asked Henry Carr, and you all know their house burned down, and they are going to leave Elmira to-morrow. Babbie asked Edward Pea- body, of Auburn, for me — perfectly innocently — and he wrote back that he has given up dancing and is going into the ministry. Bob Kimball had been in- vited — ^bad break on my part. Then, then — I pinned my faith on nice plump Dickie Fulton from home; I knew he would swallow his golf balls to come." Shir- ley stopped dramatically, and drew forth a yellow paper. "As I was coming to breakfast just now a 46 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES maid handed me this — read it aloud, Elsa! It's an atrocious anti-climax !" Elsa seized the telegram and read: "Awfully sorry — ^got the mumps — agoing to hang myself. Richard Mooney Fulton." "Oh, Shirley!" said Elsa, in real distress. "What- ever shall you do?" "I'd better be the one to hang myself, unless," darkly, "I fall back on the faculty !" "I wouldn't do that," said Lois; "it might be in- jurious to the faculty." "Girls," broke in Elsa, "something's got to be done, and I'm going to do it ! Let me think !" She put her elbows impolitely upon the table and rested her square boyish chin in her hands. She frowned deeply. "I'm just wondering," she explained, "how much influence I have in a certain quarter." Then her face cleared. "As you know," she said, looking around upon the other girls, "I own a twin. 'A poor thing, sir; but mine own!' He usually does what I tell him to but he has always, as you also know, refused to come here. I have had sympathy enough not to urge it, but in an emergency like this his delicate feelings must be sacrificed. He must come to the Prom and take Shir- ley ! It's all settled — I'll send a telegram to him this morning. Three cheers for me and my twin !" And strangely enough Elsa leaned back in her chair and laughed, rather immoderately. By the time this serious question was settled it had become very late and the girls who had classes hurried away; but Shirley and Elsa mounted leisurely up to Senior Hall, by way of the elevator, so engrossed in a murmured consultation that they forgot to inquire of Willie regarding the condition of "the lift." They retired to Elsa's room and hung out an engaged sign. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 47 Later, just as the second-hour class was over, they emerged convulsed with laughter and looking very im- portant. Two days after this, Elsa said that she had received a telegram from her twin, and that he was coming to the rescue of Shirley. When asked to show the tele- gram, she replied, opening her eyes, that she had thrown it away. At last Thanksgiving Day arrived. Everyone who lived anywhere near Elmira went home, and every- one who was fortunate enough to have friends with an elastic Thanksgiving dinner-table put on her best dress and took the down-town car in time for the American dinner hour on the last Thursday in No- vember. Elsa and Shirley went together to the El- tons', as they Had gone every year since they had been in college. But this time the celebration seemed to be rather a failure for them, for Elsa returned to the College early, saying that she had a severe headache. On the next day, Friday, Junior Prom day, she was reported unimproved — and cut all classes. A "Posi- tively Engaged Do Not Knock" sign appeared on her door, to the consternation of Senior Hall, which in a body walked by on tip-toe and subdued its tones to piercing whispers ; and the alarming news — that Elsa might be, probably would be, unable to go to the Prom — spread and penetrated to the farthest frontier. Even Willie inquired of every Senior whom he ele- vated to the serene height of the fifth floor octagon: "Ain't Miss Heath no better?" Shirley Brooke was seen hurrying about with a medicine bottle and spoon, which, however, somehow struck Virginia Danvers as incongruous with a peculiarly merry look in her eyes. But the rumor seemed, in spite of friendly ministra- tions, about to prove itself true. It became known later in the day that Shirley telephoned to Mr. Adam Dangerfield, Elsa's Prom man whom the whole col- 48 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES lege envied her, an Elmira man of sufficient attractive- ness, telling him that Elsa would probably be unable to go to the dance. Now under ordinary circum- stances, it was later remembered, Shirley would have been inconsolable; but, somehow she did not seem very much downcast. Evening arrived and Elsa was no better; she was to miss her last Thanksgiving Prom. The Chapel, where, to the scandalizing of religious Freshmen, the Proms are usually held, had never looked more beautiful than it did that night, for this story happened in the days when we could decorate the quaint old octagonal hall as much as we pleased and turn it into a bower of loveliness. The Juniors had indeed not worked all day in vain. The effect striven after was Japanese. A red light glimmered through crepe paper shades from the pillars which were wound in red — ^the Junior color. Oriental hang- ings, sometimes glittering with gold thread or enamel, sometimes lending a rich subdued tone to the scheme of things, were on the walls. From the ceiling was suspended a myriad of long gently swaying cobweb- like threads, which, ending here in an Oriental flower, there in a Japanese lantern, gave to the whole room an effect of unreality as if one saw through a veil. On the north side of the chapel, completely covering the organ and so taking away from the room the last sign of what it really was, hung a mammoth banner of the Junior class, with its numerals 19 — looking down benignly upon the scene. More than one girl that night turned to look at it through the mist of threads with a throb of loyalty and love. Clustered under this, on the rostrum amid palms and flowers, were divans, forming one of many cozy corners which had sprung into being all over the southwestern part of the Main Building. Just beyond this the orchestra was stationed. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 49 The Chapel was, of course, the centre of attraction even before the Prom began, for everybody was anxious to exhibit its glories; but the corridors and parlors were brilliant also. In the west corridor which leads to the front entrance the girls assembled in their dainty evening gowns to rescue the Prom men as they emerged from the dressing-room improvised for them out of faculty offices just inside the door. After these greetings, more or less enthusiastic, more or less de- mure, were over, the men were led into the college parlors on the right, and piloted down the line of the President's reception, escaping by a farther door. Then the couples walked or sat — ^talking unceasingly in a confused merry hum' — in the halls or chapel or society rooms, until it was time for the orchestra to strike up the first dance and for the Prom at last actually to begin. Rather early in the evening Shirley had floated down the western staircase in a billowy white dress that made the Freshmen gape with admiration. With her were Jinny Danvers — very handsome indeed in a red gown, her soft eyes, her hair, and her white shoulders set oflf by the contrast — and Lois Manning, also in white. It seemed very strange not to see Elsa with them. In the hallway they awaited the arrival of Elsa's twin in a twofold excitement; it would be amazingly entertaining to see the much-heard-of twin, Elsa's double ; it would be somewhat thrilling to see Shirley's thirteenth Prom man actually proving himself tangi- ble. The interest was general. And at last he came ! First we caught a side view of Elsa's nose vanish- ing into the dressing-room. Its owner stayed there a remarkably long time; but finally he emerged and approached Shirley, Jinny and Lois, rather slowly but so ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES without hesitation. And as he came — we gasped for breath. We had of course known that he resembled Elsa very remarkably ; that when they were little only their mother could tell them apart as they sat side by side in their baby carriage ; but — ^this was amazing ! This was the very duplicate of Elsa. This might even be taken for Elsa herself. He was a pattern of elegance and politeness. He met Shirley half-way in her self-introduction, and shook hands with Jinny and Lois — who could not help staring — without a quiver of an eyelash. On closer inspection the wonderful likeness was not at all decreased. He was not large — ^but just Elsa's size. He had Elsa's golden brown hair, thick but short of course; and Lois noticed that it even grew like Elsa's around his face. If Elsa should cut off her hair, as she had threatened to do, how it would help her in playing the men's parts in which she was nearly per- fect! He had Elsa's smooth, firm pink cheek, Elsa's square chin, Elsa's straight nose, and Elsa's voice, very slightly deepened. In fact, it began to be said during the evening that whereas Elsa herself was a rather boyish girl, it had to be confessed that her brother was a somewhat girlish young man. For in- stance, Elsa's hands were shapely and beautiful, but large for a girl. Her brother's hands were their exact counterpart, and so seemed small for a man. But, nevertheless, slight and almost delicate as he seemed, he proved himself a most fascinating fellow. He was, as Virginia Danvers said, a real Monsieur Beaucaire. From the first moment when he came from the dressing-room and walked straight to her, Shirley and he got on famously together. Although they had never met before they chattered and laughed as amic- ably as old friends. Of course, they must have heard ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 51 a great deal about one another, and he knew that Shirley was Elsa's closest friend. After the first introductions were over he was rap- idly steered through the President's reception, where he very nearly produced a stampede among the Fac- ulty, who, unprepared for the shock, must have thought they were having an hallucination. But Shir- ley, equal to the occasion, introduced him in high, firm tones as "Mr. Heath, Miss Heath's twin brother, you know." Then they went of? to lose themselves in the increasing throng. There never had been such a Prom; at least that is what a good many people said, but the Seniors looked wise. However, Seniors, you know, are al- ready beginning to have memories, and that is a dan- gerous thing. From the moment that the orchestra began to play the "Campus Dreams" waltz for the first dance, everyone was in a kind of a pleasant dream of enjoyment where sweet music, soft lights, rhythmic motion combined to make an impression of light-heart- ed content spiced with a little excitement. Every girl seemed to be sure that she looked her best, and was therefore unself-conscious ; and, too, every girl seemed convinced that she had brought exactly the right man to the Prom, which added to the harmony of the event. Everybody missed Elsa Heath. It was a shame that she should lose such a wonderful Prom, but after all we were not missing it, and we tried to forget Elsa's disappointment that our own pleasure should not be marred. If everyone thought she was looking well, it cer- tainly was not a mistaken impression. From the most important Senior down to the humblest Freshman — who looked upon the task of hunting up the next girl on her partner's card, and introducing him to her, as an ever-recurring terror — all seemed on that night to be well dressed and pretty. And what a rainbow of 52 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES colors they made, to be sure ! Babbie Battle was in a filmy little lavender gown and carried a bouquet of lavender sweet peas given to her by a man who evi- dently had discrimination. Fuzz Foster wore light green and carried several dozens of white carnations. Janis Carter's funny Puck-like pretty face nodded above baby-blue. Then there was stately Saxon Wil- helmina Faust, whose yards of thick blond braid were wound around her head to form a coronal. William, as we called her, had a new pink gown, the varied for- tunes of which had tested its owner's steady Teutonic nerves; for it had not arrived from the dressmaker until half-past eight of that very evening. Of course, there was a whole prism of other pinks and blues and greens, with a ground-work of white, but there was only one red — and where that was there Jinny Dan- vers's laughing dark eyes "rained influence," and mer- riment swelled accordingly. And if you will believe it, from the very beginning most of the conversation turned upon Elsa's twin. The girls who had not known that he was expected stared at him in startled astonishment. The word went back and forth: "That's Elsa's twin brother" — "My dear, who would have to be told ?" and "Gracious, I thought it actually was Elsa !" or "Do I look as if anything were wrong with me? — ^then tell me is that a duplicate of Elsa Heath over there under the banner, or am I crazy ?" And among the girls who had known of the plan the amazement was hardly less. "Have you danced with him yet?" "No, mine is the second extra." "I positively had the creeps ; couldn't tell if I were coming or going." "Talk about the multiplicity of the ego," said Vir- ginia Danvers; "this is a multiplicity of the ea, I should say. I didn't think Elsa would be so inex- ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 53 elusive as not to get a copyright. I am disappointed in her." "But it's original at least," Lois replied, as the twin glided by with Babbie; "the famous Never-Failing Heath Charm is evidently a syndicate." "Yes, not the Beef Trust but the Heath Trust !" 'That's a pretty poor one, Jinny," laughed Lois, waltzing off with John Sanderson, "the beautiful young man with strong round arms" previously re- ferred to. Lois was, of all the girls, the one perfectly positive that she had brought the right man to the Prom, as a solitaire diamond shining on her left hand evidenced. So here and there the talk went round. The men who knew Elsa thought the affair a beautiful joke and proclaimed the twin a "nice boy, but rather girlish, you know." And here and there the twin himself flitted, with his pretty sayings and his pretty face and his eyes that made us turn away for the creepy feeling that Elsa was looking at us. Once, in a pause, we all heard Lisa's laugh suddenly burst forth from a corner, and turned in quick surprise, but it was only — the Twin. Then, it must have been with one accord, there de- scended upon us all a fearful suspicion. Could it be — it could not ! She never would dare ! It would be a real disgrace this time, more than an ordinary prank. But, Elsa was the gamest girl in college. If Shirley wanted a Prom man, Elsa would see that she had one, even at the risk of her own neck. And as the sus- picion grew among us, assuming as it enlarged even more appalling proportions, so the conviction in- creased. Elsa would dare anything! And now, as we looked at the Twin — ^nobody could call him anything else — ^we saw things that had not been apparent to us before. Why did he wear such a large dress suit? And, Heaven help us, there was a 54 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES wrinkle across the back! Why did he look at us, sometimes, with such an amused, such a knowing twinkle? Why did he speak so often of Elsa with such a preternaturally solemn look, and dwell upon the fact that her symptoms had begun the day before ? And what was the subject of those long earnest con- versations with Shirley during which they stole strange glances at the Dean, and, yes, at Marion Hard- ing, the President of the Student Government, and then burst out into laughter that was quickly subdued ? Elsa herself was a senator. Horrors! If this were true what would happen? The suspicion soon had pervaded the Chapel even to the farthest corners, and was omnipresent in the at- mosphere of the parlors and the halls. We met each others eyes and dropped them. We looked anxiously at the faculty, searching their expressions for signs of sinister knowledge; and we were perfectly delightful to Marion Harding. We began to surround the Twin protectingly and to keep strict guard as to the people with whom he talked. The more we did so the more strangely he began to act, and once he said in an odd voice: "I didn't know Elsa was so popular!" Elsa's friends were near nervous prostration. "It's absurd," whispered Lois to Jinny. "I'm afraid it is so, and yet I can't be sure. It does seem as if no mortal could look so exactly like her." "She's perfectly mad — mad!" Virginia whispered back distractedly. "We must bluff it through; Shirley knows more than she'll tell. They're both raving crazy." "Oh, dear! oh, dear! it all looks as if it must be true," wailed Babbie in an undertone to Wilhelmina Faust. "Elsa's acted strangely the whole week. I must say she is doing it like a genius, the headache starting yesterday and all. But if anybody finds ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 55 out — " And Babbie shuddered over her wilted lav- enders. At last, I cannot tell how, but in the mysterious way we have all seen some examples of, the idea which was uppermost in the minds of all of us did communicate itself to the minds of the Powers. We saw the Dean look grave; Marion Harding looked frightened and angry. And a sudden solemnity set- tled down, exactly as if in a brilliantly illuminated room the lights had all at once been lowered. For we all loved Elsa. Then conversation began again here and there, high-pitched and strained. The music struck up and we danced desperately until the last strain sank, giving the orchestra such an enthusiastic encore that the leader beamed with delight and bowed gracefully to right and left. But the longest encore finally comes to an end. At the close of this one there was a pause before the Chapel emptied and the throng sought the parlors. And in the pause we saw Marion Harding, large, com- manding, responsible, her good-looking face pale and red by turns, walk slowly over to the Twin who had been dancing with Shirley, and lay her hand upon his arm. We gasped and turned away. And at the same moment "the thing that couldn't," happened. There was all at once a stir on the stairs, a commotion in the hallway, and before our bewildered eyes and opened mouths — Elsa walked into the room on the arm of Mr. Adam Dangerfield ! As one body we wheeled around the other way and looked for the Twin. There he was, standing, rather puzzled himself, between Marion Harding and Shir- ley, who seemed in a concealed way to be contending for the possession of him. Elsa, smiling and pale, pretty as a painting on ivory in her blue dress that set off her golden brown hair (piled in masses on her head, thank goodness !) walked 56 ELMIRA' COLLEGE STORIES with all her usual self-possession up to the Dean, close- ly followed by the delighted Mr. Dangerfield; and shook hands in her gentlemanly manner we all tried to copy. Then she turned and we heard her say : "Now I must speak to my brother. I haven't seen him yet. Come along and meet my Twin, Mr. Dangerfield." And Mr. Dangerfield rose to the occasion gallantly, replying in a low tone which Babbie overheard, "You can't show me too many of this pattern, Elsa." She walked across the Chapel floor and took the Twin by the hand. Then, all at once, there burst forth a general, re- sounding laugh. There was no doubt about it — ^the joke was on us. The gale of merriment spread and rose and fell, in the true Olympian style; and rose again, until the orchestra cut it short by striking up -^of all tunes— "Old Thirteen." At that the laughter broke into applause, and we clapped with a will for Elsa, and for Shirley's thirteenth Prom man, until the leader of the orchestra evidently decided that we were the most appreciative patriotic young people he had ever met, and in a slight pause in his labors debon- airely flourished his hand, nodding and smiling at us delightedly. Elsa had the next dance with her brother, who seemed somewhat cheered up after she arrived, and when they were together we saw a dozen differences of which we had been unconscious before. He was the taller, his hair was lighter, and of course his features were larger than hers. But you see we were looking for differences now. There is indeed such a thing — so we learned Junior year in Psychology — as an "error of expectation." "And, moreover, die bigger the expectation, the big- ger the error," says Virginia Danvers. THE TABLE ROUND. " 'Is all our company here ?' " inquired Jinny, look- ing around Lois's room one afternoon in February. And Elsa's drawl came promptly from the far cor- ner of the divan where she was reading the Cornell Widow, " 'You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.' " Jinny first looked surprised, then grinned apprecia- tively : " 'Here is the scrowl of every man's name' — hum — er " Sitting up, Elsa dropped the Widow on the floor. " 'First, good Peter Quince, say what the play treats on,' " she demanded earnestly, " 'then read the names of the actors ; and so grow to a point.' " " 'Marry, our play is' — ah " " 'A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry' — Hum, 'Masters — spread yourselves I'" A burst of applause and laughter from Lois Man- ning, Shirley Brooke, Babbie Battle and Wilhelmina Faust interrupted the impromptu dramatics, and Jin- ny and Elsa paused out of breath, looking at each other with delight. "Who would have thought we could remember all that from last June?" said Elsa. "Don't tell me a poUege education doesn't pay!" "That's because Isabel Adams made us learn our parts so well," said Jinny. "We didn't dare be caught with a book after April twenty-fifth, do you remem- ber?" "Well," spoke up Lois, as hostess, "all our com- pany is here. Let's get on to the point and then we 57 S8 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES can spread ourselves. I'm dying to work my new tea kettle." "Isn't it a beauty!" went around the murmur for the fiftieth time. "I didn't know," said Babbie, "that tea-kettles grew at Cornell." "Here's the book," responded Jinny to Lois. "I've heard it is charming, and just suited to us." "What is it that we decided to call ourselves?" in- quired William. "The Society Devoted to Mental Recreation," Shir- ley answered, "but I don't like the name. Let's think up a new one." "Let's wait until after we have read anyhow," Lois urged. "Maybe the book will suggest a name. What is it. Jinny?" "The title is Tom Beauling," and Jinny held up a small blue volume for inspection. "It's short and reads fast, I think, for the print is large. I dipped into it in Bib. Lit. and found out that Tom is big and young and rides a huge horse and sings." "That'll do very nicely," said William. "Fire away, Virginia." So the Society devoted to Mental Recreation settled itself comfortably on Lois's wide divan, and chairs and window seats. Virginia opened the little book, and in her clear voice began. They listened in silence to the delightful story of Harmony and her little son who grew to be such a very big son after her death. They lived, for the moment, in Judge Tyler's house and joined in the fun that he and Tom Beauling had. They reveled in the spirit of chivalry in the little blue book ; in Tom's love of knights, and tourneys, fair ladies and the "faultless king." And when the Judge came to die they wept for Tom as he sang "Loch Lomond" in his "rumbling bass." But it was when the two men, the old one ELMIRA . COLLEGE STORIES 59 who was dying and the very young one who was going to stay, repeated those words out of the ancient book they both loved, taking up the description of Launce- lot, each in turn like a litany, that their enthusiasm found voice. Virginia read that "litany" very slowly. " 'Ah ! Sir Launcelot, there thou liest ; thou wert never matched by none earthly knight's hand, " ' — And thou were the courtliest knight that ever bare shield,' — the Judge took it up there; and then Tom. " ' — And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse. " ' — And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman, " ' — And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword, " ' — And thou were the meekest man and the gen- tlest that ever ate in hall among ladies, " ' — And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in rest. "Then the Judge, who was dying, added — 'Be like that. Tommy.' " Virginia put down the book. " That is the end of the first part," she said. And nobody spoke immedi- ately. Finally Babbie, who was leaning forward, her chin on her hands, looked around at the others with her slanting smile, and said softly, "Be like that Tom- my," but no one answered her. Virginia's face was remote. She was looking over the heads of the girls out of the arched window at a far-sailing cloud that was proceeding on its stately way across the sky like a huge galleon. For another long moment they gave the little blue book the tribute of silence; and then Virginia spoke, full seriously. "I like the vow those old knights took. 'The court- 6o ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES liest knight,' 'the truest friend/ 'the kindest and the gentlest man !' He had taken the triple oath ; to fight for God and the king and to defend the weak. He sinned but he suffered, and he never forgot 'noblesse oblige.' " "I like it, too," spoke up Elsa with a thoughtful line between her eyes. "I wish I had lived in those old glorious days, and had been a man. I might have had a blazoned shield and a sword, instead of— -of an embroidery hoop and a fountain pen!" "Think of riding away on a quest through the deep, cool forest," Babbie murmured, "stopping here and there to — to right a wrong, fighting with your own lusty arm " "I wonder," said Lois, "what the girls were like whose favors those knights wore." "They must have had much the same ideals as the men," responded Virginia, "for they loved and mar- ried them. . . . Girls — " she broke oil — "I have a scheme. Shirley didn't like the name we chose for the six of us. Why not — why not be the Knights of the Table Round? There is Lois's tea-table — ^it's round ; there is our excuse. We can each be our favor- ite knight ; we can take the vows ; and — ^and — it won't hurt us any to live up to them. Let us form the order of the Round Table now!" "Let me be Launcelot!" exclaimed Wilhelmina, standing up big and tall. "Is it selfish of me to choose Launcelot? I have always loved him." "I'll be Gareth," said Shirley, "and perhaps I'll win my Castle Perilous some day." "And I'll be Sir Percivale," Elsa added. "I think," said Babbie, dreamily, "that if it isn't too presumptuous, I should like to be — Galahad." "Nobody could be fitter for it, dear," William whis- pered. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 6i "Well, Pelleas always appealed to me," said Lois. "My name will be Pelleas. What shall you be, Jinny ?" "I don't know," smiled Virginia. "I was thinking of something else. Has someone taken Launcelot?" "Where were your wits, Jinny? That cloud will take care of itself. I'm Launcelot," affirmed William. "Oh, Jinny," Lois cried, "I know ! You thought of this, it's all your idea. You must be — the king 1 You must be — Arthur!" "Yes! oh, yes. Jinny!" everyone cried; "you must be Arthur." Virginia drew back, her dark eyes exquisite with a strange shyness. "I— the king?" "You — the king. Why, don't you know that there is no one else but you who could be the king?" asked Lois. "You must'nt say such things ! But, if you have all chosen someone else, I'll play the part — if I can." Lois, suddenly bending to the lowest shelf of her book-case, drew forth a volume of Tennyson, and, opening it, handed it to Virginia, saying: "There's the vow, Jinny ; administer the oath." Virginia read, blushing a little, where Lois pointed : " 'Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the king ' " "Yes," answered Elsa ; "I, for one, mean every word of it. Jinny dear : 'Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow— the king.' " "And I," cried Wilhelmina, who already seemed a stalwart Launcelot; and she repeated the words. So the vow went around, each one in turn saying the beautiful line, until Virginia's face shone in a tender, misty way that with her took the place of tears. As the last oath was taken and the Order of the 62 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Table Round was incorporated, a knock came on Lois's door. "Ah," cried the king, "the first quest goes to Gareth!" "Come," Lois called. The door opened and revealed Delia, the maid then on duty in the telephone room, who said, with her inevitable pleasant smile; "Miss Manning, Mrs. Mulligan is in the basement, please, and would like to see you." "Who? Oh, my washwoman! All right, Delia; thank you." And as the door closed: "From the sublime to the ridiculous, girls! Did it hurt when you came down?" Everybody laughed, and the atmosphere was cleared of the tension of unusual solemnity. "What's the matter, Lois," asked Babbie, "don't you pay your laundry bills ?" "Yes, of course I do ; I can't imagine what is wrong. I never have seen Mrs. Mulligan yet as long as she has done my laundry work; I suppose she is fat and red and jovial like them all. She does my work beautifully. Hope she hasn't torn something to shreds, and isn't here to confess !" The Round Table strolled out to the elevator, rang up Willie, and descended in a body to the lower re- gions — ^the servants' quarters — where they were told that Mrs. Mulligan was waiting for Lois in Marie's (the head cook's) room — "resting," so a maid said. "Now I am sure she is fat," said Lois. "If she has torn your new shadow work waist," remarked Shirley, as they proceeded down the rather dark passageway, "I'd be kind, but firm ; very firm." "Maybe you girls would like to manage this huge and important affair yourselves," replied Miss Man- ning, who, had you asked her, would willingly have dispensed with her escort. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 63 Finally, after knocking on a door at the end of the hall (which always seemed a mysterious door to Shir- ley) they were ushered into the elaborate domain of Marie. "Come right in, girls," said that important person, cheerful and cordial as ever. "Come right in and sit down. Here is Mrs. Mulligan to see you, Miss Manning." The Round Table blinked its eyes rapidly a moment, for instead of the stalwart loquacious washwoman they had been prepared to see, there in the "patent rocker" beside Marie's geraniums sat a thin sick-looking girl- ish woman, whose face, all lined and purple-shadowed, had once been pretty. She had thrown aside a shawl evidently worn over her head and it lay about her frail body in folds that were unintentionally graceful. That figure, though the February day was bitter, was clothed in a coarse calico wrapper, which was open at the neck ; and there one claw-hand clutched nervously, wandering now and then over the cheek, and even passing over the big Irish gray eyes. Mrs. Mulligan had been crying. She got to her feet at the mention of her name, tak- ing one step towards Lois. "Pleased to meet y'u, Miss Mannin', I'm sure," she said, diffidently. "How do you do, Mrs. Mulligan?" replied Lois, holding out her hand, which Mrs. Mulligan, after a preliminary glance at her own, took, still more awk- wardly. Then, as silence set in, "Is there something you wanted to see me about?" Lois added. "Jest this. Miss," and the hand went back to the throat of the wrapper, fumbling, wandering; "I can't do yer wash no more, Miss Mannin'." "Oh, dear!" exclaimed Lois, with sudden dismal- ness. "You do it so beautifully! Whatever is the matter, Mrs. Mulligan?" 64 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "I'm scairt to give it up; I can't be affordin' to, but — I ain't at all well at all. Miss. If I should be after gettin' sick — who'd wash for Timmy and Molly ? I've been thinkin' that, all night an' all day an' agin all night, Miss Mannin', so — so I'm Come to tell you — that I can't do yer wash." The Irish gray eyes, that, large with fright, had been raised to Lois's face, now were veiled again by the discolored lids; and again there was silence. The Round Table stood by awkwardly, looking with hor- ror at Mrs. Mulligan's thin chest, her red hands, her red eyes. They felt (as Shirley said afterwards) dis- gustingly plump, smooth and well-fed. "Oh, Mrs. Mulligan, I'm so sorry," murmured Lois. "Is Mr. Mulligan out of work ?" The eyelids fluttered, but did not lift "Tim's dead," said Mrs. Mulligan. Lois blushed scarlet and bit her tongue for punish- ment. "Please forgive me!" Elsa rushed to the rescue. "You have a little boy. Is he big enough to help you some ?" The eyes were raised to Elsa this time. "Yes, ma'am; Timmy was always a great help, sellin' of papers and carryin' washes home, but last month, whin he was slidin' down hill, just to have a bit of fun like, he slid into a automobile, not thinkin' they would be out with the snow an' all. It's his hip, ma'am." "I read about it in the paper," said William, almost gruffly. "Did you now?" exclaimed Timmy's mother. "Think of that!" "Didn't the people who ran over him— er — take care of Timmy ?" inquired Elsa. "Oh, Timmy ran into them. Miss! He was always makin' for automobiles all his life. He'd 'muse hisself for hours summer times athrowin' of his cap under ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 65 them.^ The party was goin' through the city, and — they jes' went on." "And Molly?" again Elsa changed the subject. "Molly irons the towels," said Mrs. Mulligan, wear- ily. "Yes, ma'am. She's seven an' a half." Mrs. Mulligan gathered up her shawl which had fallen around her flat hips, and put it over her head. (It was dull gray like her eyes — like her life, Shirley thought.) Her brief mission accomplished, she must depart. She looked around Marie's bright room for a moment as if loth to leave it. It did look gay and pretty, with its red geraniums and the glimpse of sparkling white campus on the level with its windows. From the east end came faintly but cheerfully the intermingled, jangled sounds from Music Hall. "I must go home," said Mrs. Mulligan, indifferently. "I'm so sorry," murmured Lois again, her brown eyes big with pity. But Virginia stepped forward and turned to the girls, including them all in a vigorous gesture. Her face was beautiful — at least to Lois and to Mrs. Mulligan it was beautiful. "The quest," she said in a low voice. "We have taken the vow. The quest — is here 1" "Mrs. Mulligan," she added softly, "go home and take care of Timmy; I think he's missing you. And don't worry. You shan't feel the loss of Miss Man- ning's washing. I promise it." The Irish eyes struggled out of indifference to be- wilderment, but Timmy's mother did not speak. Just at that moment Marie, who had been quietly occupied with a matronly tea-pot, appeared at the woman's elbow with a steaming fragrant cup in her hand. Mrs. Mulligan was again established by the window, a long hot drink was administered to her, and at last she was allowed to depart, grasping in her hand three peppermint candies for Timmy, which 66 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Vii^nia had discovered in the pocket of her Peter Thompson. They waved their hands after her as she hurried down the snowy east driveway and disappeared in the direction of the railroad bridge. The Table Round retraced its steps in silence, as- cending to upper, more luxurious, parts. With their arms flung around one another's shoulders they strolled to the Chapel, which was becoming shadowy in the late afternoon so that the pure white pillars stood out against the twilight. They loitered through it, stopping only to peer for a moment from one of the tall narrow windows out to the pampus where the elms lifted naked arms to the sky, and where, down by the lake, the willows were a circled guard about the fountain now frozen into "the iceberg," which reared like a spectre in the centre of the lake. Leav- ing the Chapel, in mute consent they traversed the western corridor to the Lambda Omega room, more shadowy even than the Chapel; and here they sat down before the fireplace, which Lois soon set into a blaze. The room became cheery with the flickering light ; and then Elsa broke the silence. "I think that she is hardly any older than we." No one asked of whom Elsa was speaking. "Yes," said Shirley, "so do I. She didn't look young, but one could see that she is young." "She isn't strong enough to do the only thing she knows how to do," said Babbie, "and she has Molly and Timmy, and — no Tim !" "Did you see her hands?" said Lois. "Why," cried William, who was walking back and forth with a very Launcelot-like stride, "why — I think it is — ^horrible!" "And I think," added Lois, "that, in the vernacular, it is 'up to us.' Jinny has expressed it more poetically, 'The quest — is here.' " ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 67 She turned to Virginia, who sat upon the floor, the fireHght flushing her cheeks, her hands clasping her knees. "What did you mean, Virginia D., by your promise to Mrs. MuUigan ? Have you a plan ? Here are your faithful knights ready to follow where you lead." " 'Lead and I follow,' " repeated Shirley, recalling the fact that she was Gareth. "I didn't have a plan when I promised her," Virginia answered, staring at the fire, "but I have one now. You accuse me of being poetical, Lois ; you'll think this is prosaic enough." "It came to me that the chief thing that is 'up to us' is, not to support Mrs. Mulligan and her family, but put her in the way of supporting herself. Of course that is a theory familiar enough to be a truism to everybody. Suppose, though, we put it in practice this way. You say that Mrs. Mulligan does your laundry beautifully; she says that she has too much hard work to do. Why couldn't you all give her your fine work — which would be about the right amount not to overburden her — and pay her a good price for it (what it's worth to you to have it carefully done) ; then put the rest of your things together and send them en famille to a laundry, dividing the cost. If the dem total comes to a little more than you pay now, why it's the price of belonging to the privileged classes." Virginia paused. "Does that part of the plan find favor?" she asked. "It sounds very sensible," remarked William. "I agree, if Mrs. Mulligan does." "She will," said Lois, knowingly. "My shirt-waists look as if she did not despise the art of ironing by any means. This is the age of specialization. We'll give Timmy's mother the chance to specialize." 68 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "Think of that little Molly's ironing towels—" Wil- liam said, sternly. "And I sent six and seven a week," groaned Lois. "Well," spoke up Virginia, cheerfully, "she won't iron any more; and if you'll listen I'll tell you the rest of my plan." "We're Hstening!" So by the light of the Lambda Omega fire these practical, idealistic, enthusiastic, fun-loving college girls schemed for the welfare of the washerwoman and her children. The rest of Virginia Danvers' plan must have found favor in the eyes of the Round Table, for later in the week it bore fruit in the strange shape of signs which appeared in every corridor of the Main Building, on the bulletin board, and even in the confines of Music Hall, announcing in Virginia's dashing hand : "Mrs. Mulligan's Benefit Dance! Come in Country Costume! Come ! And trip it lightly for Timothy Mulligan ! Salute your partners for Molly Mulligan ! For full History of the Mulligan Family, Past, Present and Future, inquire Room 14. Benefit Dance, Feb. 2^. In the Gym. Admission, 15 cents, Ladies only! ! ! " The members of the Table Round were kept busy relating the "history of the Mulligans' past, present and future"; and it must be recorded of them that they did it in the spirit of true artists. They were faithfully realistic, yet they infused the tone of ideal- ism, and showed a feeling for the hidden meaning which alone raises the commonplace to the realm of art. All this resulted in the most successful country dance which Elmira — ^the scene of many such an oc- ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 69 casion — had ever known. Everybody had a good time. The Freshman Orchestra played all the old-fashioned tunes it knew, and to its music countless farmer lads and country maids figured in the Virginia Reel and the Saratoga Lancers. Pop-corn and peanuts were sold at all times, and during the intermission lemonade and gingerbread were passed. As the result of this rollicking festivity the knights of the Table Round carried to Mrs. Mulligan, Molly and Timmy the sum of $35.60, together with a warm flannel waist that had shrunken too small for Elsa, a black skirt upon which Lois had spilled a chemical, and a box of children's clothes from Virginia's mother. Shirley presented the bundle (forgetting entirely the neat speech she had prepared), for it was remembered, just before it was too late, that the first quest had been promised to Gareth. And when they were walking back to the College through the biting February dusk, Elsa exclaimed, re- membering the day it had all started in Lois's room : " 'A very good piece of work, Peter Quince, and a merry one !' " AN ELMIRA COLLEGE BOY. The Editor lived in tlie fifth floor back. That is, her room was just beyond the elevator shaft en route from the Octagon to the Library. It had one dormer window which looked out over a rectangle of lawn and a patch of ivied wall at right angles with the window. It was a very pretty room. The Editor called it The Bird House, the Cub Reporter called it The Office, and the Printer's Devil spoke of it, in subdued tones, as the Sanctum Sanctorum. Many conferences were held here, both solemn and hilarious, the former when the Student Body flatly refused to write for The Sibyl, the latter when for the moment the grind was over and the last number was triumph- antly out. And sometimes unexpectedly, mysterious colloquies took place when the Editor shared with privileged persons the latest coup de plume. One day the Printer's Devil and the Cub Reporter met in the elevator on their way to the fifth floor back. This was not an unusual occurrence. "She sent for me," said the Cub. "She said to be sure to come up after Gym." The Printer's Devil claimed a similar honor. "There's something she's going to show us, I know. Do you remember that time she read us the prize poem before it came out?" "I do," said the Cub, "but the time isn't ripe for prizes yet." "Wait and see," said the Printer's Devil. The Editor received them in unofficial style. When they entered in answer to her "Come," they found 70 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 71 her in an old red kimono curled into a Morris chair within the dormer window. Books were piled about her on the floor, and in her lap were many sheets of careful notes. On top of these, however, opened at the last chapter, lay "The Master of Ballantrae." The Editor was evidently working hard! She waved her hand in greeting. "Hello, little folks 1" she said. "Sit down and play with your blocks until I finish this book. It's kept me from getting up my Philosophy test, and now I'm going to finish it out of spite." They sat down on the divan obediently. They never took offence at her references to their lowly state. To them it was sufficient honor to be part of the Board, even though, as the Cub said, they were nothing but splinters. That their Editor was more than their chief, a well-loved friend, was all the more reason for being proud of their place in the rank and file of the workers for the college paper. At last the Editor closed her book with a satisfied air. "Now," she said, giving the papers a shove, "let's talk." She passed her guests a box of caramels with the manner of a person going deliberately from one fascin- ating thing to another, intent on not losing any part of either. The Editor gloated over the interestingness of the world. "You know, my dears, I'm fond of surprises ?" They nodded. "I've got one now, for you — and the hoi polloi — that's a peach! It's my own scheme; I haven't told a soul yet — I wrote to him ! and to-day I got a letter —Well, I'll begin at the front end, I guess !" She drew her knees up to her chin and clasped them with her arms. Her eyes shone. She was as deep now in her "scheme" as a moment before she had been 72 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES in her book. Note, please, that the Editor was an enthusiast. "You wrote to him—" said the P. D.; "to whom?" "My dear Devil, if you'll be patient " "Give her a chance for her prelude," said the Cub. "She and it are never parted." "Once upon a time," continued the Editor, while the Cub Reporter and the Printer's Devil settled them- selves for a story, "in the early days, a boy came to this icollege." She paused, and the girls stared at her blankly. "What of it?" said the P. D. "Lots have come since." "You don't understand," said the Editor. "He came here to college. He was a student. He went to classes and to chapel and he recited with the girls!" "For heaven's sake !" gasped the P. D. "That isn't a surprise," said the Cub Reporter, su- periorily, "because I knew it before." "The P. D. didn't," said the Editor. "Look at her mouth! — But anyhow, that isn't what I mean as my surprise. Listen ; you know how wrought up we've all been lately about old times and traditions and Founder's Day and all that. Well, it struck me Pd like to give 'em something actual, something human, not just intangible ghosts of stories of the past. And as soon as I thought that, 'Charlie Shepard' popped into my head! That was the boy's name, you know. I knew he came here first with his sister as a private pupil in the family of one of the professors. So I looked up his sister in the Alumnas Register, and I sent a letter to him through her. I asked him to write something about himself for The Sibyl, to give us an article about the only Elmira College boy. And he's actually done it ! The letter came to-day just in time for the next number. Think of the sensation of having a letter in The Sibyl from the hitherto mythological ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 73 Charlie Shepard! Why it's equal to a 'scoop' on a New York daily." The Editor fairly sparkled her triumph. "Do I understand you to say," said the Cub, leaning forward, "that you have a real, true, flesh and blood, perfectly authentic letter from Charlie Shepard ? Why, he's famous! And I always loved the idea of his coming here when he was a youngster ! It's absolutely unique, you know." "I have not only a letter," said the Editor, with an air, "but the half promise of a possibility of a visit from him. You know," she turned to the Printer's Devil, whose eyes were wide, "he's a regular personage in more ways than one. He ran away from college at the time of the Civil War and entered the army. He became a colonel, and after the war, a diplomat. He has been American consul, if you please, to several foreign ports." "The letter !" demanded the Cub. "Aren't you go- ing to show us his letter ?" "I am," the Editor replied, "and I hope you ap- preciate the honor. No one else, even on the Board, will see it before it comes out. Surprises are lots more fun when they are complete." "If he should come," murmured the Printer's Devil, speaking for the first time — "how absolutely perfect !" "Yes, it would be perfect," said the Editor, un- locking the most important drawer in her desk. "I think we should love him if we knew him. In his little personal note to me he signs himself, 'With a reflection to the New Girls of my affection for the Old Girls.' Now isn't that graceful and courtly ? We must pray the gods he will come ! There is his letter." They all three sat down together in the big chair in the dormer window, the Cub and the P. D. upon its arms, while the Editor unfolded the closely written 74 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES pages of the letter from the only Elmira College "boy." Their heads drew together in respectful eagerness as they read: *"You dear girls of 19 — : "You want a 'personal item' from the only boy graduate of Elmira Female College ! Humph ! That's rather vague. Well, let us see. How will a sort of autobiography do? Here goes. "I was a mischievous boy — not vicious — and by 1859 had been allowed to retire from several Institutions of Learning — without honors and without a 'charac- ter' — all because of my 'inventive genius.' What to do with that 'inventive genius' my father did not know. Now my only sister was in the class of '60 at Elmira College, and she proposed to my paternal ancestor that I go to Elmira, with her, and live as a private pupil with dear Professor Farrar. My father consented, Professor Farrar consented, and in September of 1859 I went to Elmira. "I lived in Professor Farrar's family. I studied ( ?) at the observatory. That building was on the college grounds and therefore to it the girls could come and go as they liked. / was entirely suited. "I was at first known as 'Mary Shepard's brother.' Slowly I got to be 'Charles Shepard' on my own ac- count, and finally 'Charlie.' Oh, but the girls were good to me! They braced me up. They put me on my mettle, and I studied and behaved as never before. "One day, after three or four months. Professor *"Charlie Shepard" is a real person and his story is true. He is Colonel Charles O. Shepard, of San Diego, California, former American consul at Tokio, Japan, and Charge d'Affaires for U. S. in Japan. He wrote the above letter for the Elmira College paper in 1904. His name and letter are used with his consent. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 75 Farrar said to me: 'Charlie, the Junior Class is this morning just where you are. Go up and listen.' And I went up and sat beside him on the rostrum. It was a week or two before he again said to me — 'Go up.' Soon, however, it got to be a regular thing, and in place of sitting on the rostrum I sat on the forms with the girls, and I soon became a part of the estab- lishment. "The Junior Class — God bless them everyone — adopted me for their own and unofficially I was there- after known as of that class. I was elected to the 'O. B.' society, too. The dear girls ! They don't know what they did for me. I went on my honor, you see. They were all so dear that I didn't know which was the dearest. I never made even tentative love to one of them. I couldn't unless I went to Utah. "They saved me from being a hoodlum. Bless them ! Bless them ! Whatever little I have done since is because of them. Just think of them : Martha, Han- nah, Flora, Sara, Lottie, Tonita, Sarah, Nellie, Mary, Nettie, Libbie, Lucy, Nellie, Em. Do the old girls remember dear Lib's 'Charlie and the rest of us girls?' The inimitable Lib! Bless them all! They are the sweetest memory that can come into a human being's life. "Do they remember, I wonder, how I carried notes to the fellows down town and how I brought 'fodder' back? No! Upon second thought, the notes were mostly from the Senior Class. Do they remember how the 'fodder' was drawn up in a basket, after dark, to the tower, the windows of which were already darkened with blankets ? Do they remember how they came down and wheedled Mrs. Farrar into letting them go to my room where they sewed up everything? Nell R , you were the head devil in that business, with Mary K a good second, and you and I twins — at least, born the same day ! 76 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "Do they remember how I got even? They wanted a feast. I was called in as usual. I got the oysters and things and some little round cakes. I dissolved aloes and dipped the bottom of every cake into the solution. Then I turned the whole lot up to the sun to dry. They got 'em in the basket and they ate 'em — at least they tried to, but, ough! Yes, they chased me off the college limits, but there I stood and laughed at them. "Em 'Wick,' what about the major portion of the anatomy of that mouse, the tail of which you found in the buckwheat cake batter? No one would eat buck- wheat cakes for a month afterward. And what about hiding me behind the sofa upon which the professor sat the night my sister gave, in my clothes, the lec- ture on 'Saw and See Saw.' Poor Miss Bronson! I was her hete noire. She didn't know I was within eighteen inches of her, good soul. "'And that trip of the geology class to Tamaqua, Mauchunk and Philadelphia ! How the girls did spoil me under the pretense that I was overworked on ac- count of the baggage and the rooms. 'The dear boy is tired out.' Ha! Ha! I must rest on a sofa while half the lot of them hovered about me. You may well believe it was the time of my life. "I don't think they knew, though, of what I am now about to tell you. One day Dr. Cowles — erudite Dr. Cowles — sent for me just when I was at the apex of my happiness. I was scair't blue, for I believed it meant my dismissal. I was sure the Doctor would say that the presence of a boy in a girl's college was in- congruous and that I must not be! With fear and trembling I repaired to his study. He received me kindly and invited me to sit. He asked about my studies and spoke a little German with me. He showed me his paintings — for he is an artist — and was most pleasant. He led me along for an hour or so. Final- ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES ^7 ly he squared himself and I felt sure that my execution was at hand. What he really said was : " 'Charlie, you know that the principal trains of the twenty-four hours — North, East, South and West, meet here at 12 o'clock midday and midnight. In so large an institution as this it is frequently necessary for the girls to go to their homes on account of sick- ness or death. Mr. Benjamin is getting old, and while he can go to the midday trains well enough it is a hardship for him to go at midnight. Would you mind taking Dobbin and the democrat and carrying and fetching the girls to and from the midnight trains ? You have behaved with decorum and I trust you.' "Heavens and Earth! Moon and Stars! Samson in the persimmon tree ! Would I ! Did I ! Well, yes ; for six months, and just as faithfully as the hands go round a clock. "And then the war came on. I was their 'bould sojer boy.' When I came to camp on the Elmira Fair Grounds how they did flock to see me ! They brought me everything — except what was good for my di- gestion. They so distinguished me that I was known to every officer and private in the regiment, and that same helped me much in my advancement. Whenever, in the war, I got a scratch, what a row they did kick up! One would have thought that the life of the Commander-in-Chief was in danger. It was pleasant but — excuse me — ^it was silly. Why was their kind- ness so great to me ? Was it because I was 'lady-Hke,' I wonder? "And then that 'Sheepskin' " 'Gone to the front' as I was, they did not consent that I be neglected. Naturally the Faculty didn't sign it, but I got my diploma all the same. A real 'sheep- skin,' with the 'woolly side out and the skinny side in.' What a diploma it was ! It wasn't all in Latin but it got there just the same. 78 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "Well, girls, old and young, I have done and seen nearly everything — ^that was not dangerous — since those days. I have been in A — rup, E — rup, I — rup, O — rup, Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America. I have commanded bodies of men, but I met my Waterloo when I married. I was a colonel, and after sixteen years in the foreign service I enlisted a young woman as a wife. I enlisted her as a private, under my command, but, bless your hearts, we hadn't been in the matrimonial camp a month before she pro- moted herself to be Commander-in-Chief — a rank she still holds — while I remain a simple colonel. Such is fate, and what is more, I like it. "Girls of ig — , I wonder what you know of the girls of '6i ? Nothing really ; but I have tried to tell you something. Dr. MacKensie once asked me to come and enlighten you about them, but — well, I haven't. He said there were legends and traditions of a boy having once been in the College. How I would like to see you youngsters graduate next June ! I wonder if I can! Will you dance with me? You will be obliged to ask me. It may be a three-step that strikes up, but I warn you that you will be far happier with a one-step or no step at all. That is enough ! "I shall always be 'yours,' and I shall sign myself simply by the name known to the 'old girls.' "Charlie Shepaiu), '6i." The light within the dormer window had become dim. The Cub Reporter leaned back with her head against the wall and stared into the past. Sixty-one! Was it possible that the girls of sixty-one lived in this very building, loved the same campus, venerated her Dr. Cowles? They seemed a part of another world. And yet here was a letter, slightly travel- stained and crumpled by its journey out of the past, from their own "Charlie Shepard," come to bridge the ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 79 distance that lay between the "new" girls and the "old." " 'With a reflection to the new girls of my affec- tion for the old.' We're might lucky to get the re- flection, aren't we, Devil dear?" she said aloud. The P. D. nodded. "Oh, Cub," she breathed, "if he'll only come!" "RECOLLECTION'S MAGIC SWAY." "Together in her halls to-day A loyal pledge we sing, a pledge we sing; And recollection's magic sway r Will future homage bring." — Elmira Alma Mater. Charlie Shepard's letter stirred up exactly the sen- sation that the Editor had prophesied for it. For where is the girl who would not be interested, enter- tained, or thrilled — according to the nature of her — by the news that a young man, and evidently an at- tractive one, had once been received as a student among the ultra-feminine classic shades of her Alma Mater? To be sure, the fact had been known in an indefinite way before, known and appreciated. But it was part of an unreal past, which is very dim and imageless to most of us. The coming of the letter projected the picture of Charlie Shepard clearly upon the screen of the present, where even the most unim- aginative could see him, projected him in the very act of saluting them with his original gaiety across the years. There he stood in his old-time clothes — the surprisingly full and long trousers, the funny little coat, and round cap — his pockets stuffed with notes and sugar plums, whatever those may be, his eyes laughing into theirs. One look at him left no doubt that he and no other was the "head devil" in many little affairs sub rosa. They caught the spirit of his comradeship with those girls of the past. It would not have been necessary for him to explain that he 80 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 8i never made love to one of them, so the "new girls" thought. There was too much fun going on ! Ah, one could be sure that things were not slow in sixty-one ! They could liken his companionship with the girls of his class only to that of the ever-lovable though fictitious Laurie with the March sisters ; and as Laurie lost none of his masculine traits by associating for a time with girls of the Alcott type.neither did "Charlie." In fact, by his own confession, he gained from it. He must Irave had a dash of chivalry, they thought, along with his comradery, for only such a youngster would hold with just his tenderness the memory of the girl- friends of fifty years ago. With the printing of his letter in The Sibyl came the announcement that he might pay a visit to his Alma Mater, and the College was thrown into the ex- citement of expectation. (As a minor result, the Editor was extravagantly praised by everybody for her inspiration.) Letters were immediately reported to be passing between him and the Powers, in which was mutually expressed the pleasure that a visit from this unique alumnus would give all concerned. He had promised to come, it seemed, upon the twenty- second of February unless "an order from the White House" took him far away. (Dear me! It was much more exciting to think that he was a real diplomat, a result of course of his early training in both intrigue and grave responsibility.) Everyone was sure that neither the President of the United States nor the Secretary of State would dream of interfering in such a meeting as would take place between "Charlie" — they would have to get over that habit — and his "new girls." So preparations proceeded with gusto. It was planned that there would be a wonderful re- ception for him on the evening of his arrival. He should stand in line, with the President, the President's wife, and the Dean, not far from the very spot where 82 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES he hid under the sofa when his sister held forth upon Saw and See Saw, dressed in his clothes. Apparent- ly, by the way, to dress as a man has always seemed alluring to the feminine mind. He should be given the best things that could be found in America to eat, and then he should be made to talk. But, best of all, he would be greeted, if it were within the power of possibility, by as many of his "old girls" as could be found. This, too, was the Editor's inspiration, and called forth a second chorus of praise. Upon this, letters were again sent forth, with the result that a few old grads replied that it would give them unusual pleasure to meet again at the projected reception their old friend, Charlie Shepard, 6i. And merrily forward went the plans for the great event. On the evening of the twenty-second of February the Cub Reporter, knocking at the door of the "Office," was admitted into the presence of the Editor who was struggling with the hooks of her best evening gown. The Cub shut the door and leaned against it. "Well?" she said, tensely. "Well?" "What are you saying that for?" snapped the Edi- tor crossly, fumbling at the middle of her back. "Have — ^haven't you heard?" "Heard what?" the Editor rejoined with sarcasm. "As if I hadn't been up every hour to see if he had wired ! Never mind answering. But I do think you needn't be so cross !" "If he had wired," replied the Editor with emphasis, "wouldn't I have shouted the news at you before you asked? Oh, hang it, I've bent my finger-nail back! Ugh! Can't you hook this crazy dress for me? What are you for ?" "No," continued the Editor a moment later, slightly pacified after sucking her finger, "he hasn't wired, Cubbie. And he isn't going to ! That means he's com- ing. I feel it in my bones, only in spite of my bones ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 83 my nerves have got the jumps. Supposing you had set this whole thing going! You'd be as calm as Buddha, wouldn't you, you cold-blooded little thing !" "Calm ! Cold-blooded ! I'm wild. What'll we ever say to those ladies if he doesn't) show up to re-une with 'em?" "He will, I tell you!" The Editor stamped her foot. There was another knock on the door and the Printer's Devil put her head in. "Nobody's heard," she said sweetly. "Three old grads are here. They're taking their things off in the guest room. The Dean has gone down." Then she shut the door as quickly and silently as she had opened it. The two girls within the room looked at each other. "That was wisely done," said the Editor grimly, referring to the sudden disappearance of the P. D. "Three," whispered the Cub Reporter in awestruck tones, as if she were giving a mystic signal. "Three old grads !" In this manner the Editor's latest inspiration ap- peared to be about to prove her undoing. The coming of "Charlie" — we apologize for thus naming him, but how, pray, could we think of himi as anything else until he became visible as a dignified diplomat? — had been left indefinite until the proverbial last man was about to be hung. The "order from the White House" apparently still held off, and if it continued to do so for a few more hours all would go well. The girls knew that Charlie would not disappoint them if he could help it, and although a few rebelled at the un- certainty the faithful believed it meant that in the midst of newly arisen difficulties he was not willing to give up his visit until all possibility of it had gone. The Editor was as a rock in this faith, to the public, but inwardly on the rack of anxiety. 84 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES At the announcement that the Dean had gone down to the parlors and that three ladies were removing their sober "things" in a guest room, it did seem as if the worst had at last descended. The Editor and the Cub Reporter taking their courage firmly in both hands — for what is more awful than a lion party minus the lion? — went out into the corridor of Senior Hall. They were immediately joined by the Printer's Devil who must have been lurking in the shadow by the elevator shaft. No greetings were interchanged, but all three waited to see who might be coming up in the elevator which was making its deliberate way sky- ward. And as it creakingly arrived and the iron gate clanged back they saw Virginia Danvers evidently bent on being early at the party. She was dressed in a soft pink gown which peeped out from the folds of her evening coat. Everyone apparently considered the occasion worthy of her best clothes. "Good evening, Miss Inkslinger," — ^that was Vir- ginia's name for the Editor, "how are the little Ink- slingers ?" pretending not to see the Cub and the Devil. "Hello Jinny," said the Editor. They were not in- timate friends but they liked each other immensely. "Why are you up here to-night in those clothes ?" "I've come to the party!" For a moment Virginia looked astonished while the Editor's reserve gave way and she admitted Miss Dan- vers into her anxiety. "There isn't going to be any party," she said, dis- mally. There's just going to be a flat reception where nobody knows what to say and everybody wishes they were home!" The Cub offered an explanation. "We haven't heard from Charlie Shepard yet, and so he probably won't be here. The Dean's gone down, and three " ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 85 "Oh, don't say that again !" said the Editor in pep- pery tones. "For Heaven's sake!" Virginia leaned against the wall of the corridor and stared at the three before her in consternation. "You haven't heard! What a situation! Of course it would be flat as a door mat and those old ladies would be awfully disappoint- ed " "And it's all my fault," began the Editor. "Nonsense ! Don't run yourself down," commanded Miss Danvers severely. "That's as bad as being con- ceited. It isn't your fault ; it's your particular inspira- tion, and it's got to go through." She paused and the three looked at her appealingly, for somehow her vigorous presence seemed to emanate rescue. She slipped her arm through the Editor's. "It's early yet ; let's go into Senior Parlors and talk it over," she added. The four sat down in the middle room of Senior Parlors upon the broad red window-seat under the hanging red-shaded light. Virginia Danvers threw off her cloak, revealing to the admiring eyes of the Printer's Devil, who had never been as near her as this before, the pink gown and a Cairene scarf over her bare shoulders. Indeed, the P. D. almost lost her sense of the seriousness of the situation in observing how that scarf set off the dark eyes and hair. "I understand," began Jinny, "that these estimable ladies have come considerable distance to see their old friend Charlie?" "One is from Sandusky, Ohio," replied the Editor, gloomily ; "and one is from Saco, Maine. The others live near here." "How many in all?" "Six said they'd come." "That's too many to wish they hadn't." "But," put in the Cub, "maybe he'll wire!" 86 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "We've got to act," said Virginia, "as if he wouldn't." She leaned back against the pillows and stared hard at the red light, while the others looked at her and strained their ears for the sound of Willie bringing a message. No Willie came, but presently Virginia sat up and smiled. "What do you think of this ?" she said, and unfolded a plan. Half an hour later, still not having heard from the absent lion, the Editor, the Cub and the Printer's Devil, joined by three other Seniors, went down to the reception, while Virginia Danvers stopped for Lois Manning and explained why she was late. To tell the truth, the reception was flat. Everyone, especially the Editor's friends, struggled to avert the calamity. But with six disappointed old grads, half a hundred equally chagrined but considerably younger alumnse, and a student body who seemed to feel it had been basely deceived, what are you going to do? As Elsa Heath said, you simply can't manufacture a good time out of those conditions. Of course, every- one expected momentarily that either Charlie Shepard or a telegram from him would arrive; but, although everyone was sure it couldn't be his fault, neither the gentleman himself nor a message from him did come. And the evening dragged through, all empty smiles and speeches. Until, finally, hope was abandoned, people began to go home, and the six old grads who had^ longed for one evening to be young again seemed very weary. Their eyes looked heavy, and their mouths sagged at the corners. They said good-bye to the President and his wife and the Dean and toiled up- stairs to put on their things in the guest room. "It's a crime," said Lois Manning, "that they can't have a good time out of it, somehow." "Come on," Virginia Danvers seized Lois's arm ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 87 and motioned to the Editor who was close behind on the stairs, "let's see what we can do about it. What- ever I say, Lois, take your cue." And she hurried them down the corridor on the trail of the ladies. She knocked, with apparent timidity, upon the guest room door; and when a bored and tired voice said, "Come in," entered and drew the girls in after her with a mysterious air. The six elderly ladies looked surprised, but Virginia didn't give them a chance to speak. "We girls want to have some fun out of this," she said in a low tone, including them all under the term in a friendly way that didn't for a minute startle them. "It's been the limit! Come on up in Senior Hall and have a real party" — she lowered her voice to a whis- per — "after hours! We'll lock the door and darken the windows. The Dean won't know. Charlie isn't here to tie a basket on our rope, but two of us can skip down and steal some of the ice-cream that's left. And this girl has some pickles. What do you say? Answer low! The Dean's room is across the hall." The six old grads looked at each other. And the years slipped away from them. One of them giggled. "Girls," said another, a faint pink in her cheeks, "lets!" They were game. They two-facedly put on their outdoor things and walked down the corridor with demure footsteps ; then they hurried flutteringly up-stairs, the Editor leading the way, Virginia and Lois a rear-guard. "Jinny," whispered Lois in Virginia's ear, "why for the mystery ?" "Hush ! Not one of 'em knows there's no light rule for Seniors. It's more fun for them this way. That's your cue." Lois beamed and took it. When they reached the Editor's room, the fifth floor back, everybody hurried in and shut the door. A 88 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES batfi-robe was hung over the transom and a blanket over the window. Pillows were laid along the crack under the door. The Editor and Jinny helped the somewhat breathless ladies again to take off their out- door "wraps" while Lois was despatched to the hedges, not to mention the highways, for the rest of the party who also must have their cue. They came readily enough, stumbling over the sofa pillows on the floor, remembering to speak in whispers, meeting again with respectful delight the smiling ladies, Charlie Shepard's beloved "old girls," who somehow were so different up here from what they had been at the blighted reception below. "And now," said Virginia, when the room held about twenty people, "let's flip up a cent to see who'll go with me to steal the ice-cream." The lot fell to the stout white-haired motherly wo- man who looked like an Episcopal bishop, according to Barbara Battle. She tiptoed out, holding a huge spoon and a candle. "You needn't show me the way," she whispered to Virginia who carried two chafing- dish pans. And they were gone. "Oh, do you: remember — " exclaimed the little wo- man in gray, who had giggled when Virginia pro- posed the spread. And that was the beginning ! When the culprits re- turned with two heaping dishes of ice-cream, the re- miniscences were well under way; while the Editor and the Cub, hindered by the Printer's Devil, made chocolate sauce — a new concoction to the old grads — they went round. And the sway of recollection worked its magic. "This reminds me of that supper in your room, Maria," said the thin, sad-eyed woman from Saco, Maine, "the time the matron caught us. Who was it that ran right at her with her head down and bumped straight into her? She was very fat. And ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 89 by the time she had recovered her breath the oysters were under the sofa." "I did that," said the ■woman who looked like a bishop, chuckling. "I've never forgotten how funny and soft she felt!" Everybody laughed. "And I've never forgotten how you looked when you did it?" gasped "Maria," wiping her eyes. "I haven't thought of that in forty years," said the little woman in gray. "Do you remember our serenades?" A grand- mother of six boys (so she had just been confiding to Virginia Danvers) spoke for the first time. "The young gentlemen were allowed to serenade us," she explained. "And one thing we could do with- out breaking the rules was to listen. They used to stand under the windows and sing, 'Believe me if all those endearing young charms,' and 'Annie Lisle.' One of my admirers could play a guitar. I got croup one night hanging out of the window to listen to him. It rained, but that didn't seem to dampen his spirits. It spoiled his instrument, though." "Wasn't that Henry Hogarth?" inquired the lady from Maine. "Yes," said the grandmother, nodding over at the lady in gray, "it was." "He's my husband, you know," the latter explained to the Printer's Devil who had been giving her the receipt for chocolate sauce. "I was Maria's room- mate and he has always pretended that he serenaded Maria to make an impression on me. No, I've never believed him, my dear." And she nodded back at Maria. "Our room has always had a sentimental repu- tation, I've heard. A good many years later a girl named Margaret Moore eloped from it with a foreign gentleman." "Oh, oh!" cried out Babbie Battle, excitedly. "I 90 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES should rather think so. Here's her daughter !" And Wilhelmina Faust was dragged from a corner blushing deeply. "Well I never!" said all the old grads together, looking at William with interest. Virginia Danvers said she had a confused sense of WilUam's being newly born, and felt as if some one should inquire her weight. When William's name and age had been settled, the woman with white hair, who had stolen the ice- cream, asked, as she accepted a large dish of it cov- ered with chocolate sauce, "Speaking of such trans- gressions as elopements, do you all remember confes- sion days?" "Horrors !" said the woman from Sandusky, "I do 1" "What were they ?" inquired William, willing to en- courage a change of subject. "Why, every Friday at Chapel the name of every- body in college was called by turn, and when yours came you were supposed to get up and tell what you had done during the week that was against the rules. For newcomers it was a dreadful ordeal, but upper- classmen didn't mind it very much. It was the thing always to have something to confess, for perfectness was looked upon with suspicion. I remember one girl who confessed regularly, 'I have had my window open several nights this week.' She must have been a pro- gressive soul. Who was it, Maria?" "I can't recall her name," that lady answered, "but I remember just how she looked." "But for mercy's sake 1" cried Virginia. "Was that against the rules, to have your window open ?" "Yes, you'll find it in the first catalogue now : 'Dur- ing the cold months of the year young ladies shall not open the windows of their rooms, but ventilate by means of the transom.' " "The rules were very strict," "Maria" took up the ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 91 story, "but the interpretation of them by the teachers was even stricter. We couldn't communicate in any way during study hours. One day — do you remember, Luella," turning to the grandmother of six, "how Miss Wilson passed us just as I slipped a note into your hand ? She never said a word then, but as much as a week later, at a reception, mind you, she told what I'd done and said, 'A girl who will do such a thing will steal a pin and a girl who will steal a pin will steal money and a girl who will steal money will go to prison.' Oh my, oh my!" "Maria" laughed heartily. "How I hated that woman ! She went to China as a missionary later, and I pitied the heathen." By this time it was apparent that everybody was having a good time. The girls whom Lois had col- lected sat on the floor, some in kimonos and some still in their reception dresses, while the visiting ladies were on the couch, in the Editor's comfortable Morris chair, and, one of them, on a hassock. They ate the ice-cream and chocolate sauce in evident forgetfulness of the fact that it might not be good for the digestion. Their eyes were bright with the glow of memory, while the mellowness of the Editor's candles — burned to help the illusion of secrecy — ^brought back youth to their faces. All the conversation was in a low tone. If a laugh broke the bounds of "safety," Virginia held up a warning finger, and the dear women hushed and nudged each other in doubled enjoyment. They told the girls at their feet everything that rose in their memory about their day. It did not mat- ter much of how little importance it was, as long as it came out of the past. They seemed to remember viv- idly the way in which the domestic work was partly done by the girls. There were "circles" for this, with a president for each. The knife circle was very un- popular, because the knives were steel and the girls hated to scour them. But then, the bread circle made 92 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES one mathematical. Eight loaves of bread must be cut with precision, each into sixteen equal slices. Another circle assisted the cooks in the kitchen; girls waited on the front door ; one young lady took entire charge of the butter, another of the water pitchers, etc. In and after war time this domestic work was so objected to by the Southern girls that it was finally given up. It was nothing, however, to the difficulties met by the first class. At the opening of the doors of the college for the first time, in 1855, the entering class was confronted by a pile of straw in the middle of the chapel floor, dumped there by the steward. From this the girls filled their own bed-ticks. At first the beds were laid on the slats, but the second year they had springs. There was other real manual labor, too; at each meal every girl carried her own chair from the chapel to the basement dining-room and back again. Meals ! The old grads even remembered what they had for them. "Do you remember Sunday dinners?" demanded "Maria." "Always salt mackerel with potatoes!" said the woman from Saco, Maine. "And crackers and milk for lunch," added the grandmother of six boys. "Spring breakfasts — ^boiled eggs and biscuits, good, too," put in the "bishop." "But, oh, girls," cried "Maria," "the mock duck!" This seemed to be a joke, for there was much laughter, and the little lady in gray hopped upon her hassock, and to the astonishment of all began to sing a strange rhyme. It was promptly taken up, everyone coming in strong on the chorus. "We have mock duck, hash and toast. And everything else accordin'. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 93 And the butter is so strong It will draw us right along Clear over to the other side of Jordan. We have apple and pumpkin pies With cinnamon spice and — flies — And the butter is so strong It will draw us right along Clear over to the other side of Jordan!" Much applause and cries of "Encore!" forced the ladies to give their song a second time. They did so with relish. "My, my!" added the lady in gray, slightly out of breath. "I haven't thought of that in forty years !" "That's no joke about the butter," said the lady from Maine, when the laughter and clapping had subsided. "It was awful, until " The "bishop" chuckled. "Tell 'the butter story!' Tell 'the butter story!'" the new girls demanded, for rumors of this had come down the years. "The butter story isn't so very wonderful," she said "The butter was very, very bad and we — that is, some of the girls decided it couldn't be borne any longer. So one dark night, late, when there was no moon, the big tub of butter went rolling down the hill into the lake. It has never been really known who did it. But after that we had better butter." "The butter reminds me ," began the lady in gray, meditatively. "Wasn't it shortly after we had better butter, Luella, that your Uncle Giles visited you?" The benign grandmother shook with comfortable laughter, nodding her head. "Please tell about your Uncle Giles!" begged the girls. 94 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES "He was a missionary," began Uncle Giles's niece, "and a very particular man as we used to say. When he returned to America he wished to see me here. He came, and was to be entertained at the President's house. It happened that the day when he came had been extremely hot in the forenoon, and the Presi- dent's wife had planned a very cooling luncheon. Everything was to be served cold, and with iced drinks. But, just at the time of his arrival, when the meal was all ready, a terrible thunderstorm came up with cold winds, and Uncle Giles appeared at the President's house, drenched to the skin. I was there and I'll never forget how he looked when he said: 'G-glad to greet you once more, Niece Luella!' His teeth were chattering. He was used to a warm cli- mate, you see. The President's wife took him up- stairs and gave him some of her husband's clothes. She laid them out in the guest room and left him. She heard him lock the door, and came down to the library to wait with me, and worry over her cold luncheon ! Well, we waited. It seemed to me I never waited for anything as long as we did for my Uncle Giles. Half a dozen times the President's wife went up to look at the guest room door and came back because she hated to hurry him. Finally, we got des- perate. I was sure he had fainted away and that we ought to break in the door when — the bell of the front door rang. The President's wife hurried to it herself. And — ^there on the steps stood my Uncle Giles, dressed in the President's clothes, and soaked through again! "He had been unable to unlock the guest room door — 'the rusty lock was seldom used — and not knowing what else to do, he had climbed out of a window on to the shed roof and let himself down among the thick rain-drenched bushes. He had floundered around there until he was soaked again, and then, ashamed to ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 95 be seen by the servant, had come to the front door for admission." "Luella" stopped and wiped her eyes. "He cer- tainly was a sight," she said. "Finally we got him into a second set of clothes and gave him his luncheon. But his hands and thin legs shook, and he never smiled once." Soon after the Uncle Giles story, memories of the war began, and then Virginia Danvers knew they were on dangerous ground. They had all avoided the name of Charlie Shepard, as if instinctively trying to forget their disappointment. But the war and Charlie were inseparable. Hadn't he run away to go to it ? Hadn't he returned in triumph to camp with his regiment in Elmira? If they once renewed the blank disappoint- ment they had had in missing Charlie, Virginia's scheme would be spoiled. "And do you remember, girls," the small lady in gray was saying, "that the officers of the regiment used to call the college grounds the Dear Park?" And there came a knock at the door. A low, pe- culiar knock! The voices died down. The faces of the old grads were a study. They looked oh, so guilty! "The Dean;" whispered the grandmother of six boys. Carrying one of the candles Virginia Danvers went to the door. It opened, and disclosed Mr. Locker with his lantern. He held a yellow envelope in his hand. This Virginia took, and passed over to the Editor. She tore it open and read aloud. "You dear old girls ! Here's my love ! Am on the ocean as you read. The President of the United States is not as considerate as the President of El- mira College. Yours for the democrat! "Obediently, "Charlie." 96 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES After the reading of this expensive communication there was dead silence. Then Maria spoke. "Bless his heart! How would he feel if he knew that for half an hour we forgot to miss him?" "Dear," said the lady in gray to Virginia, as, a little later, they were going out, "I haven't had such a good time in forty years !" And the best of it is that they never knew they were not breaking rules ! A FRESHMAN'S DIARY. For a month the entries in my Diary have been very short, since I am far too busy to write at length every night. But I have decided, now, to do a long one at least once a week. It is twenty-one times in all that Dr. Morse has written "Good" at the end of my daily theme, and this has revived an old hope I used to have — that some day I may become a novelist ! Of course I know that the road to success in Letters is long and difficult, but I will work! And I think perhaps the practice I shall get in writing out my impressions of College Life will benefit my style. This is Friday night again. I am sitting on the floor in my closet writing by candle light, for it is after half past ten and I haven't permission to keep my light on. The closet door is open a crack — one must breathe — ^but I don't believe Mr. Locker (what a perfect name for a night watchman) can see the gleam of my small taper. What a sense of almost mysterious seclusion it gives one to be hidden away like this ! I am not at all sleepy — I shall not get up to breakfast to-morrow morning. I am going to give a complete account of the day's experiences. Not that they have — all of them — ^been unusual, but because if I am a novelist I shall belong to the realistic school, and so I must get_ used to writing about everyday things. Then, too, it will be fun to read this over when I am old. It seems as if I could never, in the future, forget the stampedes we have for breakfast. I am already so used to "that awful, awful bell" that I don't hear 97 98 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES it every morning. To-day I slept until five minutes of eight and of course had an exciting time getting dressed and into the dining room by quarter past. I pretended that the building was on fire, and that made me quicker. Just as I got out to the elevator at fourteen minutes past eight, it went down past my floor with three Seniors. I didn't dare risk walking down, so rang the bell in hopes that the maid who closes the dining-room doors would hear it and mercifully wait for "the lift" to make one more trip. She did. Just as I finished tying my necktie by the elevator mirror, I saw her waiting by a two-foot space between the folding doors; and just as she was drawing them together / squeezed through! It was such a relief that I didn't at all mind everybody's laughing. One of the Seniors, Elsa Heath, who sits at my table, always laughs at everything I do anyway. And she always calls me "Susan," because she says "Susie" is too childish for me. (Surely I agree with her!) She is the one who has a twin brother. (He came to the Junior Prom.) This morning she and the other two Seniors, who came down ahead of me in the elevator, were talking about to-night's play, and when I sat down they stopped. Of course the Society plays are always kept a secret until the very minute when the curtain goes up on the first act. It is fun ; for everybody is wondering what they can be, and when they come nearly everybody is surprised. They are given in honor of the other society and all the College is invited. I really felt very important with the great secret at my very elbow, as it were. I felt sure that Barbara Battle and Elsa had parts in the play, and of course I know now that they did have. After breakfast there wasn't much time before Geometry class. Polly and Bell :came into my room and we went over the propositions. I always dread ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 99 that period. Miss Bryce is lovely, but if she ever said to me : "Miss Randon, the wallpaper in this room is yellow, therefore the room is square!" — I should simply expire. She said it once to Bell. As it hap- pened this morning I merely had to put a figure on the board. It was that fearful one that looks like several cracker boxes fastened together with strings, and when I sat down Miss Bryce laughed without making any noise and said : "Miss Randon, your fig- ure looks like a train of cars rolling down an embank- ment!" I merely smiled so as to show her I knew how to take criticism. My next class was Latin, and as I had forgotten my book I had to hurry up to the fourth floor to get it. As I was running up the last staircase (the elevator was full) I met Her coming down. She is wearing a white shirtwaist suit to-day and it looks perfectly lovely with the black gown and black cap with a tas- sel. She smiled at me (!) and just then in my hurry I stubbed my toe and fell down on my knees right be- fore Her. Oh, I could have died! She said, "Hello, Susie; did you hurt yourself?" without laughing at all, but Her eyes sparkled and danced. She picked up my Geometry for me. "You ought not to run up stairs," she added ; "it's bad for your heart." I walked the rest of the way up. I wish that it wouldn't be silly to buy Her some flowers sometime and send them to Her, just because I think She is the grandest finest girl I've ever seen. But I suppose it would be, and the girls would think I had a crush ! Of course I haven't, but I have cared for Her very much ever since that first day last fall when Edith Travis brought me to Elmira and I walked up to the College with a bunch of Seniors and She made me walk with her. I should like, above all, to send Her some flowers for the play to-night, for I know She is in it ; but of course She will have plenty loo ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES without mine, from people whose giving wouldn't be criticised. Well, I was nearly late for Latin, but then the pro- fessor was too, so it didn't matter. He and I came in together. As usual he couldn't find the stick with which to lower the window, so he just hopped up on the window sill and stood there nicely framed like a saint in stained glass — only he had his back to the congregation — while he wrestled with the lock. Then he jumped down and said so quickly: "Reading on, please. Miss Randon," that I had to scramble for my Horace and plunge at "sweet-smiling Lalage," feeling that I had hardly got my breath after my fall on the stairs. I like to recite first because then you are safe for the rest of the hour. I didn't follow Horace very closely after that, nor — ^the next hour — Dr. Cowles's lecture in Bib. Lit. I sit on the back row there and I made up the following poem, which is intended to be in Horace's style. *"To Her." "I fear me, as I raise the glass, That thou wilt scorn, O brown-eyed lass. The toast I drink To thee, "I pledge thee now in Massic wine. That bonds of love will ever twine About my heart For thee. "E'en though thou dost not deign to give A single hope to make it live. This love will grow In me. * Written by Martha Smith and reprinted by per- mission from the 1907 Iris. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES loi "And though all golden seems the day To thee when we are far away The sun is gone For me. "But as I raise the sparkling glass, Is that a smile I see, alas? And thou'lt not drink With me?" I wonder if they would take that if I should drop it into the Sibyl MS. box ! Lit. next, and I paid strict attention there. Words- worth made me so ashamed of the above rhyme that I tore it in two. But I couldn't quite tear it up. Then we all went down to Chapel. I like having it at half past twelve. The morning of work is over and everybody strolls towards the Chapel, laughing and talking and feeling g'lad, very glad, to be in college. It seems to me that the girls here care a great deal for each other, and we do have the best times ! With Polly's hand on one shoulder and Bell's on the other I joined the crowd Chapelward. We stood back every little while for groups of Seniors — for that is part of a Freshman's training — and it came over me that if Polly and Bell and I care for each other so much now, how we shall care when we are Seniors — like them ! No wonder they look sober when they remember that this is the spring term, the last one — for them. I am glad that this is a small enough college so that even we Freshmen can know the Seniors. It seems to me that you would miss a good deal not to know any Seniors when you were a Freshman, because I have an idea that never again do they seem quite so wonderful and wise. The Seniors of Sophomore I02 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES year will be nothing but last-year- Juniors, and Junior year — why they'll be "the Sophomores." But I was talking about Chapel. Dr. Cowles was there. Surely there never was a man, anywhere, more deeply venerated and loved! After the Gloria and the Lord's Prayer, Dr. Mac- Kenzie cleared his throat several times and announced, "We shall sing praise in the use of hymn number one." It wouldn't seem like college without that little for- mula, preceded by "H-h-h~hem." I always wait for it. And I nearly always expect hymn number one when Mr. MacCleod plays ; or else "Onward Christian Soldiers," or "O Paradise." And everybody sings. This noon in the middle of the third stanza of "When morning gilds the skies" the organ gave a long sigh and stopped. Mr. MacCleod looked preternaturally vir- tuous to cover his disgust and strode to the piano. With a few very energetic preliminary chords the hymn proceeded. After the psalms and the prayer and the other hymn Dr. MacKenzie pleaded with us to bear in mind that we were not ecclesiastical gypsies, and the Dean said we must put more on when the fire drills came after we were in bed, and that since this is not a tenement house it is not the thing to keep milk pitchers on the window sills. After that there was a short student government meeting, and then, getting hun- grier and hungrier. Bell, Polly and I had to rush with the other Freshmen to a class meeting at which a committee was hastily appointed to buy our Patron Saint a birthday present. Somebody had just dis- covered her birthday comes on Monday. At last we were free to go to lunch, and it was a terrible blow to find we had mashed potato patties ! Well, well, I must skip something. There is but an inch and a half of my candle left. When that goes I must stop scribbling. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 103 After lunch and the afternoon recitation periods, which I spent — since it was Friday and I had no more classes — curled up on Polly's divan; and after Gym, a crowd of us went down-town. We get a good deal of fun out of sauntering along these shady streets on one errand or another. Bell, who is in the next Thes- pis play — we all three (they call us the Trio) belong to Thespis — ^had to go to Lockwood's to try on her costume that the property manager had chosen for her. The play they are getting ready now is a little sketch, translated from the French, that was given before Marie Antoinette at Versailles, and Bell is a lackey. In the last Thespis play she was Roderigo languishing in a dungeon cell in that fifteen-act trag- edy written by the Alcott sisters when they were girls. She clanked her chains so beautifully that I think they have her in mind for a small part in the June Shakes- peare play. We toiled up two long dark flights to Lockwood's. It is always worth it. If Dickens had ever been there the place would have been immortalized. A huge high-ceilinged room is full to the top of every kind of costume the ingenuity of man and the skill of wom- en can manufacture, and Mr. Lockwood has but to reach out his hand to get what he wants. Towers of eighteenth century furbelows flank the giddy re- galia of bandits, or Indian war costumes; while the cast-off attire of Roman emperors lies peaceably next to robes of priests, monks and nuns. Such fascinating, shiny boots and glittering swords as come out of the trunks you never saw ! And the long curling wigs of cavaliers, the piratical black beards, the shock pates of Quince or of Bottom ! I like to go to Lock- wood's. (I tried to make that description according to rules even if it is off-hand. I think it is rather good.) Miss Lockwood showed Bell the yellow satin coat 104 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES and knee breeches that she is to wear. We all admired them, and Miss Lockwood agreed they were hand- some. "That's no hurrah costume," she said. So Bell went into the next room to try it on. We sat around on the tree trunks, "marble" benches, and balustrades, while Bell, hanging her clothes across a picket fence, got into the costume. It fitted fairly well, and she made us a flourishing bow that would have been successful (she accompanied it with her first speech: "Madame, the Count of Bois is at the door") if she hadn't knocked over a stack of guns with a thundering noise that brought Miss Lockwood to see what the matter was. She found me rescuing a garden hedge from beneath an army tent, and Polly steadying the walls of the Roman capitol, which were rocking threateningly. Bell was helpless with laugh- ter, and besides she couldn't bend over to pick up the guns! After order was restored and we had completed our business, we started back up-town, stopping, of course, at Pettit's for a "College Pond." (A "College Pond" is a little like a chocolate sundae except that the syrup is put in a nice compact little hollow.) If you stayed long enough at Pettit's you would finally, first or last, see every girl in college. When we went in, the counter was full of Sophomores, so we Freshmen sat on a box at the back of the shop. At the tables were two groups of Seniors. Edith Travis was there, and she called out to me, "Don't be late for the party to-night." Late! I was not likely to be late. I have not men- tioned it before, but I was invited to a guest table party that Edith was giving to-night for her sister who is here visiting, and for some of the town girls who were in the Society play. I was the only Fresh- man asked, and of course I shouldn't have been if I didn't live in Edith's home town. I am, as she said ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 105 last fall, her "contribution to the Freshman Class." But there was another reason why I was not likely to be late. She was to be at the party ! She was in Pettit's with the others just then, sitting between Lois Manning and Shirley Brooke — She is al- ways with Lois Manning. I had seen Her before we were inside the door, and when we passed the tables She was saying: "Heavens, I ought to be home this minute, dressing and going over my part ! Elsa, don't you dare forget to look me in the eye when you give me my cue for that long speech in the second act; I never get the beginning straight and your cue helps." "All right," said Elsa Heath, leaning across the table and glaring into Her face, " 'I have been bitterly de- ceived in you !' Is that marked enough ?" " 'Bitterly ! What about the bitterness of a life ' " , "Sh-sh-sh ! Hush, Jinny ! Everybody will hear you !" By that time we Freshmen were in the back of the shop, out of earshot. But I couldn't help watching the group at the tables. They laughed all the time at the things She said, and one of the girls at the counter choked alarmingly. (I adore funny people! I never said a funny thing in my life myself.) I hurried up with my College Pond so as to be through by the time they were, for I wanted to walk up Main Street behind them. Polly and Bell always eat fast, so that we had finished by the time they had, and we left Pettit's just after Her and Lois Manning and Elsa Heath and Shirley Brooke. It was ten min- utes of five. I wondered how she expected to get home, dress, and get up to the College by six, and still have time to go over her part; but I reflected that college girls seem able to do more in a given time than any other people I ever heard of. At the second comer the group ahead of us sud- io6 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES denly stopped, and although twenty feet in the rear I heard Her exclaim : "Um Gottes Willen ! I forgot ! There's nobody at home, not even the cook, and I can't hook up my white dress alone to save me!" "Wear your red one," said Shirley Brooke, prompt- ly. "It's at the cleaner's." "Well, wear the pink one." "I've put my heel through the ruffle and it isn't mended yet." "Leave the white one unhooked until you get up to dinner!" "It would positively flap in the breeze. Can't one of you come and help me? Come on, Lois, won't you?" They all said they "simply couldn't" for some reason or other, and She turned away saying, "Well, I can't waste time." I don't know how I ever dared. I ran after Her, leaving Polly and Bell gaping on the curb. Breathless, I said when I caught her, "I'll — I'll help you if you'll let me. Miss Danvers; I'll hook your dress." She wheeled around, surprised and smiling. "Why, you nice little girl — do you mean it?" "Of course," I said, "let's hurry." As we walked rapidly up the street I wondered if She remembered how stupid I had been to tumble down on the stairs this morning. That incident seemed much more real than the one that was now occurring. I remembered how I had longed to give Her flowers, and blushed at the thought of the "poem" to Her burning in the pocket of my Peter Thompson. This was better than roses, for now I was doing some- thing to help Her. It was, indeed, a proud moment! When we reached Her home we hurried to Her room and there I helped Her dress. She rapidly piled ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 107 up Her dark hair on top of Her head ; then I dropped over it the wonderful filmy white gown and fastened it. It was a fearful puzzle to know which little hook went where. "You're a pretty nice little girl, aren't you, Susie ?" She said, looking at my reflection in the mirror, with that smile that barely touches Her lips but is just in Her eyes. I was rewarded. "Now," she said, looking at the clock as She slipped on Her rings and into Her cloak, "we're off ! Walking is safer. Susie, will you take the book and read me those cues on the way up?" And on the swift walk to the College (we dared not trust to transferring on the street car) I read Her Her cues in the dreaded second act. She was letter perfect, of course. At the elevator shaft we met Edith Travis who had been into the dining-room to put flowers and place- cards on the guest table. She opened her eyes at me. "Aren't you going to do us the honor of dressing, Susie?" she said. Virginia seized my arm. "Good heavens! Are you invited to the party?" "Y-yes; I guess I can manage it," I stammered. (It was five minutes of six.) "And you wasted all that time on me ?" "It wasn't wasted." At my floor She got out with me and raced me along the corridor as if we were after a basketball. Dragging me pell-mell into my room She commanded : "Take your dress off," and diving into the closet brought out the first light dress She found. Luckily it was the one I meant to wear, for I shouldn't have had breath enough to protest if it hadn't been. While I washed my hands and face she ran a comb through my hair (it curls naturally) and buttoned my dress as the dinner bell began to ring. io8 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Well, we were the last people in the dining-room; the Dean was just pulling out her chair. Virginia Dan- vers walked in, composed and dignified, as if She always dressed Freshmen just at the last minute; but I was scarlet and "fussed." I saw the Seniors look amused, the Juniors appreciative, the Sophomores puz- zled, and the Freshmen envious. Then I ducked my head for grace. I can't tell about the play. Before it came the reception in the C3iapel, when I walked up and solemnly said: "Good evening. Miss Danvers." ( She is president of Her society, and so re- ceived its guests.) She had just been "doing the society act" to a professor's wife, but when She saw me Her eyes twinkled. "Hello, Lamb Pie," she whispered ; " T have been bitterly deceived in you !' " I gurgled right out, and she turned solemnly to welcome a grave post-graduate, in the process of get- ting an A.M. Twenty minutes later she walked on to the stage as hero of the play. Such a play! We Freshmen gaped, for it was the first Society play we had seen. We shall soon see another just as good, I suppose. One of the girls dramatized a book for the occasion. Lockwood's stage settings, helped out with the So- ciety parlor furniture, made every scene attractive, and the best clothes owned in college had been loaned for the costumes. Through it all, in brilliant military uniform, walked and laughed the handsome leading "man," charming everybody. That was the end of the day. Congratulations and refreshments were soon over. The cast had its photographs taken, and everybody started for bed. I lingered at the Octagon for a while, pretending to ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 109 set my clock by the big one there. As I turned away the clank of a sword came from above, from Senior Hall. I leaned over the railing and looked up. The "hero of the occasion" had not yet undressed. She stood looking down into the circular well that is in the middle of the Octagon, and when She saw me She waved the gay foreign cap and called in a low tone. "I haven't yet thanked you, Miss Susan Randon. You are a brick. Good-night !" . . . The candle is sputtering, and I am yawning. . . . My ! But I'm glad I'm in college ! A SENIOR'S DIARY. Saturday night — April 25. Terribly sleepy ! But if I win my bet I must write a line or two. Strenuous day. Sibyl board meeting in morning. Finished German essay this p.m. at 5.30. Due at 6. Good work ! Senior stunt in the evening — a minstrel show. Was one of the end men. A great time and a financial success. Here's to the day of rest — church in the morning and a letter-writing de- bauch in afternoon. "For Heaven's sake turn out the light!" says Room- mate Sally. Darling little Sally ! Two months from to-night — where shall we two be ? ! ! ! ! TIG THE MAY QUEEN. Surely, one must think, Pan himself presided over the naming of Diana Sherwood. Taken alone, either word in her name stood for a phase of her; taken together, they were the most fortunate combination in the world to express her charm. "Diana;" doesn't that smack of woodlands and slim dryad-like creatures following the chase? "Sherwood;" behold the won- derful forest where Robin Hood merrily killed the king's deer and simple ladies sometimes lost them- selves. Diana Sherwood ; a slip of a girl, half wood- fairy, half village maiden of merriest England, ac- complished in the pastimes of the green — a shy, simple little girl of no beauty, with eyes the color of a pool with dead leaves at the bottom of it, hair that would be invisible against the bark of a tree, and a little leaf- green gown that never seemed to wear out. If it ever did, it always was replaced by another one of the same color. If Diana Sherwood was all this, however, and I as- sure you she was, there were very few people who knew it. Her shyness made her retiring; her simple- ness and plainness eluded attention. She was clever enough, but in an erratic little way of her own; so that one would really have to know what she was thinking about, when, in Logic class, her eyes gazed out at the tree tops instead of at the syllogism an- nouncing that all horses are quadrupeds, to be con- vinced that she was not a little stupidly oblivious of her surroundings. And no one ever did know what she was thinking about. Naturally enough, then, her III 112 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES life in college had been as uneventful as it is possible for the life of a girl stamped as hopelessly mediocre to be. It was neither distinctly successful nor mark- edly unsuccessful. It just went on from day to day, filled with routine duties, with pleasant acquaintances, and dreams. It went on in this way until the spring of her Sophomore year. After that it was different. I have said that no one knew what she thought about, or that she was as I have described her. There was, however, one person who understood Diana ; and she was on the Faculty. Miss Sanford, who had come newly to Elmira the year of these events, and con- cerning whom Lois Manning and her friends had made such a ludicrous blunder — Miss Chloe Sanford, of Richmond, Virginia, had caught the overtone of Diana's little pastoral, and having heard it recognized its beauty. They had first met, alone, one hot Saturday after- noon in early October when Miss Sanford, tramping over the fields in her wide straw hat and dazzling white gown, had come upon Diana stretched out in the tall grass under a tree. About her were heaped late golden-rod and purple wild asters. Her hat was cast aside, and she was pillowing one cheek on her hand while her eyes were looking, looking — ^up through the green tree-roof to the infinite spaces of blue. She was singing to herself. Without any greeting at all Miss Sanford sank down in the grass beside her, and flinging her hat away, stretched herself out too, merely smiling. Diana was not at all abashed. Here she was at home and at ease. She returned the smile, and made no effort to rise. After a moment she spoke softly and very slowly as if she were afraid she might disturb some sensa- tion about to come to her. "I guess you most perfectly think 'universe' from right here on the ground 1 You're part of it. — Can't t - W >~ ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 113 you almost feel how we're rushing — ^headlong — around the gigantic curve — away from the sun?" "I believe I can, if I try !" Miss Sanf ord caught the mood. "I think it's the most thrilling kind of ride, just lying 'stiir like this. There's so much to see!" "Ah! I've got it — ^the sensation. Why, we're plunging along." "Yes," breathed Diana, "through space." They lay very still staring at the limitless sky with its pale moon. Around them on every side the meadow rolled to the hills and the horizon. A soft wind stirred the trees. It was not hard, with your cheek to the very heart of the primeval earth, to feel that you were one with it — ^to strain your mind to conceive its im- mensity, or to set free your fancy. Miss Sanford, however, watched the little creature in the waving grass more than she did the clouds or the hills. Final- ly she spoke to Diana again. "Do you do much of this sort of thing?" "This sort of thing?" "Seeing and feeling what others don't see and feel ?" "I don't know what other girls think about, but I like to get away — as far as I can into the fields. I — I 'make up' things a good deal to myself." "Things?" "Sometimes things like that, but mostly — ^mostly about — what it would have been like to live deep in the forests ages ago. To follow the deer, to bathe in shady pools, to dance under great trees ! To wrap one's self in skins when it was cold and lie down under the stars. Oh — mustn't it have been beautiful ?" "Very beautiful," said Miss Sanford, "very beauti- ful, I think. What else do you 'make up' — Diana ?" "Oh, sometimes I think I should like to have lived in some tiny village in England, centuries back, where 114 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES not even the stage coach came. There would be a broad green common in the centre of the village with great oak trees ; and there, summer evenings and holi- days, all the folks would come from the cunning little cottages. There would be 'merry sports' and laughing and singing and dancing, too — ^the Sir Roger de Cover- ley probably. And on May day there'd be a May pole and a festival and a queen — That would be, in a way, rather beautiful, too." "Yes, it would be, too." "That's about all. I think about those things be- cause I can't help it. And sometimes," she added, shamefacedly, "when I'm out of doors, I just lie down in the shade and — and go to sleep!" It was this meeting and this strange talk that gave Miss Sanford her glimpse into the sweet fancifulness of Diana Sherwood's mind and that was the origin of her inspiration, later in the year, concerning a choice, which, if it could be made, would be most ex- quisitely and subtly appropriate. As soon as her idea had formed itself she communicated it. To her as- tonishment it was received with what she thought almost a miracle of appreciative perception. The girls took it up with enthusiasm and — we shall see what the result was. On the morning of the first of May, a wonderful morning of soft scented air and brilliant colors, Diana sat at her open window, looking out at the campus. She was alone, but that was not surprising; she was often alone. It was not that anyone was unkind to her; frequently she preferred to sit in her room with its open, tree-shaded window, or down by the lake among the lilac bushes, to walking on dusty city streets with the girls who asked her to go down-town with them. And she said so. Then they stopped ask- ing her. She had never learned to play tennis or basketball. She had, as has been said, few friends. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 115 She was not only alone but she was doing nothing ; and that also was not an unusual thing. Diana's creed was Robert Louis Stevenson's "Apology for Idlers." She was doing "nothing," in one sense, for periods of time alarming to one or two "Mr. Worldly Wisemen." How she longed sometimes to answer boldly in the words of R. L. S.: "Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of de- ficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal iden- tity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. . . . And if a man reads very hard, he will have little time for thought." But she never had the courage to an- swer, and, except to Miss Sanford, she never revealed her dreams. They came upon her with renewed force in the spring. She had that strange emotion which comes to stir the pulses of the lover of nature — the yearning over simple out-door things, running water, climbing flowers; the longing for the abandon of some sort of woodland pageantry that would give expression to the thrilling joy of renewed life. There was to be at the College that first day of May a festival that ought, in part at least, to have satisfied that longing of Diana's. The May Day fete at Elmira is as attractive as a beautiful campus, graceful girls, pretty costumes and infinite pains on the part of those in charge of the plans can make it. Diana had, of course, seen one May Day celebration, and had been part of it. When she was a Freshman she had learned the pretty May Pole dance and, with the others chosen, had woven the colored streamers in the intricate mesh about the pole before the queen. No one had known then the joy she had taken in the simple old custom. It had been the happiest day of the year for her. But Ii6 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES now that she was a Sophomore everything was differ- ent. May Day is the Freshmen's special festival — except, of course, that a Sophomore is always chosen queen of the May ; therefore Diana had no part. But, though this was different from the last May Day, it was just like all other college functions for Diana. They always went on without her; and she had be- come so used to being audience that, if she had tried, she could not have imagined herself a performer in any of them. So, although she would have joy in the general effect of the festival that afternoon, now, seated close to the shaded window, she watched with indifference the details of the preparations for it that were being carried forward. Far down across the lake she could see Albert and his assistants laboring to set up the May Pole. An- other group of men, directed by girls, were preparing the throne for the queen, who was to be elected that afternoon on the campus by the votes of everybody present, according to the old-fashioned custom. The throne was draped in white, and about it were banked boughs of apple blossoms and white lilacs. Diana thought it looked very pretty. How sweet it would smell to the girl who would sit there, before whom the heralds would bow [ceremoniously and the quaint dance would be performed ! Up from the windows of the Gymnasium came the music of the May Pole dance. The Freshmen were having their last rehearsal. Diana wondered idly if anyone would make any blunders. Conflicting with the dance tune came from Music Hall the notes of an old English Maying song which a chorus of twenty girls was to sing after the long winding march to the lower campus and the farther side of Sie lake. To make the dissonance complete a robin alighted on Diana's window sill and sang a spring song of his ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 117 own. It was the sweetest of them, all, and it put Diana to sleep. She was awakened by the luncheon bell and by voices in the corridor. "It will be the most delicately appropriate thing I ever heard of," said the first voice. "And the best of it is she doesn't dream of such a thing," said the second voice. "Is it sure to go through ?" "Sure? Of course it's sure, if Miss Sanford wants it." Diana wondered what it was that was so sure. Then she went down to lunch. In the afternoon the girls who lived across the cor- ridor — they were Sophomores too, and Diana won- dered if one of them would possibly be elected queen — called to her: "When you're ready, go down with us, will you, Diana?" "All right," she answered, and frowned a little. She thought them rather dull and would have immensely preferred to go with Miss Sanford. But that lady had said nothing whatever about it to her. Indeed, Diana had seen very little of her lately; she had had scarcely more than a nod in the halls or a pat on the shoulder in the elevator. Miss Sanford had been so very busy about something ; Diana did not know what. When she was dressed in her soft little white gown, embroidered simply in a pattern of maiden-hair fern, and when the girls across the hall were arrayed in their starched white pique skirts and tailored shirt- waists, the three of them descended in the elevator to the first floor, and emerged by way of the eastern en- trance of the Main Building, upon the campus. There was a green-gold light under the tall trees and upon the stretching lawn where the whites, blues, pinks and yellows of the gowns of the crowd gave an ii8 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES effect like a gigantic flower garden on the farther side of the lake. Here and there in the garden were black spots that were the academic gowns and caps of Junior and Senior. The brilliant streamers hanging from the May Pole and the banners and boughs that decorated the throne awaiting the May queen, were stirred by a fitful breeze. Up from the green to the blue and gold sky ascended a humming murmur, broken now and then by a laugh or a clear call of a voice across the lake. Just as they descended the slope by Music Hall they caught sight of the procession forming by the southern porch. The Freshmen were clad in gold and green frocks of an ancient style that made them look like a crowd of old-time maidens preparing for a frolic on the common. At sight of them, and of the merry as- sembly come thus uniquely a-Maying, at the sound of music, from an orchestra of girls, that suddenly commenced to play an old English melody, Diana drew in a long breath and shut her eyes for a moment. It was all intensely real to her; it was more than real. The turf under her feet, the music, the soft wind in her face she felt in every delicate fibre of her body. She was carried back, more than in imagination, in her soul, to long-ago days when there was merry- making like this in tiny villages, to remote ages when girl barbarians roamed the woods, piping thin tunes on willow reeds. She would have liked to dance strange graceful steps on the grass. Then all at once a gust of longing to join in the quaint pageant swept through her. She was wildly sorry that she had never amounted to anything in college, that she was only an onlooker. Suddenly the two Sophomores with whom she walked each seized her by an arm. A blast from the trumpet of one of the heralds, and then a sweet, high fc- ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 119 call — one of the Freshmen played a cornet — evidently proclaimed something of importance. The long pro- cession of green and gold maidens was ready to start. "Why," said Diana, coming out of her dream, "we must be late. They are ready to start ; they're waiting for the queen. Have the people had time already to vote? I didn't know that we were late!" "Yes, they've voted," said the bigger Sophomore in a queer voice; "don't you see them running this way and that way? They're looking for the queen." "They'll put the white robe on her," murmured Diana; "and there's the pretty little boy who'll carry the crown on a green cushion." "They're coming this way," the smaller Sophomore interrupted ; "let's hurry and — and meet them." "Why," Diana cried ; "why, maybe one of you girls has been elected the queen — ^the Queen of the May! Oh, I hope so ! See — they're coming towards us. Isn't it splendid?" It was indeed true that a group of girls, headed by a tall marshal in green and gold, was coming towards them. The marshal carried the queen's robe. Every- one looked flushed and excited. Diana looked from one to the other of her com- panions, waiting breathlessly to see upon whom the robe would fall. And as she looked, suddenly, in a hush which came strangely, the white robe of the queen of the May was placed — ^upon her ! She turned dead white at first with the shock. When the blood rushed back into her cheeks making her all rosy, she did not speak, but her eyes (the color, you know, of a pool with dead leaves at the bottom) showed her exquisite thanks. She was in no way con- fused; but walked simply and naturally behind the marshal to the place where the procession awaited their queen. There was another blast of the trumpet, after which I20 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES the cornet sounded a familiar strain of music. The Freshmen in high thin tones began to sing the Alma Mater, and the procession started. It wound its way across the grass, slowly. The girls, carrying staffs wound with flowers, walked two by two behind the heralds; and as they walked they sang. Last of all, in the place of honor, preceded by a yellow-haired little boy, borrowed for the occasion, who carried the flower crown on a fat cushion, came Diana Sherwood, graceful, shy, but self-possessed — eyes a-dreaming. They led her all around the lake — it isn't very far — ■ and placed her on the throne. Then they crowned her. After that, as she sat in state, heralds and marshals ranged at her side, the choir of girls sang the old Maying song in her honor. When the song was completed the orchestra began the tune of the May Pole dance, also to be given be- fore the queen, and the performers tripped out to where in the sunlight the brilHant streamers drooped invitingly about the pole. Each girl took a streamer, placed herself in position; there was a lull in the music, and then with a tuneful ripple the dance be- gan. The aim was to braid the myriad ribbons into one compact and even texture about the pole; and then, to unbraid them. In and out the green and golden frocks flitted, while Diana watched in a golden dream of content. All the rest of the afternoon passed for her in such happiness as she had never known before. Every- one seemed, somehow, pleased and almost tender over what had happened to her. Girls whom she had known hardly more than by sight before came up and told her that they had voted for her and how glad they were that she was elected. Ladies and gentle- men were brought up to her throne and presented in court style with plenty of flourishes. Diana found herself talking and laughing with them without being ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 121 in the least afraid. (There is nothing that is so good a cure for shyness as being treated like a queen.) Miss Sanford came up to the throne, and bending over Diana's hand whispered, with a laugh in her voice: "Won't the twentieth century do this afternoon, your Majesty?" It was all, from beginning to end, a "transport of delight;" and over all the sun shone goldenly, at last wheeling low in the heavens, making long shadows on the grass. And finally the festival was ended in true old English style by a supper eaten "under the greenwood tree." Long tables were set out in the shade of the buildings, and around them and in smaller circles without tables, or in luxurious groups on the grass, gathered students and faculty with a sprinkling of visitors who had been invited to stay. It was the quaintest part of the whole day. Academic gowns were still in evidence, and dignified scarlet-hooded professors discussed the "Dry bones of scholasticism" and chicken sandwiches in the shadow of the ivied walls. Diana, wearing the robe and flower-crown, still reigned. In her heart there was dawning the know- ledge that she always would. Best of all was the thought that her dreaming, her strange ideas, her odd emotions had not been thrust aside as merely "queer." These girls, who were laughing and eating so healthily about her, who seemed to breathe fun and repartee, had understood. To be sure, that wonderful young woman over there sitting on the steps of the south porch, brilliant as ever in her contrasts of black and white and pink, had had to tell them. But it isn't everyone who, being told, can understand. The festival ended with a dance in the Chapel from which the seats had been removed. As Diana stood in the south porch resting and cool- ing between numbers, she leaned her head against a 122 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES pillar and looked oflf down at the lake, beginning to sparkle under the moon. The air was sweet and cool ; she could feel in imagination how the dew-wet grass would press under her feet if she were to tread on it. It seemed to her that down there among the willows little creatures were calling to her to come and play with them. They called, not loudly, but softly, dis- tinctly, insistently, amid the droning of the frogs. A sudden gusty breeze sprang up, bending the tree- limbs, swirling her skirts, lifting her hair with fra- grant touches. She stepped forward. "Oh, Diana," called a voice behind her. One of the Seniors — a girl whom she thought it an honor to know — came out on the porch and slipped an arm through hers. "This is my dance, you know; I hope you didn't forget." The little voices called sweetly, but under the warm human touch Diana turned, and went back into the shining room. "AND I, FOR ROSALIND." Isabel Adams strolled, book in hand, towards the grove on the south side of the lake, where the out- door rehearsals for the June play are frequently held. She was early, so she walked very slowly, drinking her fill of "the new wine of the year." The campus was more beautiful than ever on that particular May afternoon — the greensward greener, the willows more feathery, the lilacs sweeter. Everyone who could be was out of doors to enjoy it. Before leaving her room Isabel had seen that the tennis courts were full. On her way out she had passed a score or more of the girls setting off for "down-town." Now she met a gymnasium class just coming in from an out-door exercise. She could see that across the lake some of the girls had already assembled for the Shakes- peare rehearsal, and that two were paddling about on the lake in the boat while they waited. Here and there a "camera fiend" was snapping her friends, or a "bird fiend" scanned the topmost branches of the trees. The air that stirred the lilacs and carried their sweet- ness abroad was deliciously soft. Perhaps it was espe- cially pleasant because it bore something else besides the odor of the flowers — the atmosphere of perfect contentment. Everyone seemed to have breathed it in; everyone, that is, but Isabel Adams. She stopped, to be sure, and buried her nose in a fragrant purple branch as she passed, but when she raised her head again she was frowning. Isabel wandered on, saying her lines over to herself. She was Orlando in As You Like It, and since she had 123 124 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES been president of Thespis her Junior year was at great pains now to be letter perfect early in the season. " 'Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love : And thou, thrice-crowned queen of night, survey — survey With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above. Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway. O Rosalind! these trees shall by my — my — books. And in their barks my thoughts I'll character; That every eye which in this forest looks — Shall see thy virtue witness'd everywhere. Run, run, Orlando; carve on every tree The fair, the chaste and unexpressive she.' " The lines swung themselves off pretty well, she thought ; and it was not going to be very hard to say them either, when one had a real live Rosalind to talk to, and when one loved her very much indeed. For it was Rosalind Morse who had been given the part of the pretty wanderer through Arden in As You Like It, and Rosalind Morse happened to be the one girl of all others in college whom Isabel, Orlando pro tempora, loved best. It was really a most ap- propriate combination. She had congratulated herself a dozen times that she could thus play opposite a real Rosalind, and now she did so all over again as she strolled towards the lake, and struggled with her part. "It's some com- pensation, at least," she said to herself, aloud, and rounding the last lilac bush came upon Virginia Dan- vers, Elsa Heath and Lois Manning sitting on the ground translating German together. They burst out laughing, for Isabel's melodramatic speech had been quite audible. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 125 " 'Is this a dagger-r-r I see before me ?' " declaimed Virginia. " 'Out damned spot !' " "Why, Jinny," said Elsa, "Orlando never said that !" "But he went around talking to himself." "It's just histrionic genius burning, and its inspira- tion is " "Rosalind," they all, including Isabel, exclaimed to- gether, laughing. " 'Run, run, Orlando ! carve on every tree,' " Elsa, who had tried for the part and had not won it, called after Isabel, " 'The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive —her!' " As Isabel left them behind her she heard the sound of Elsa being spiritedly criticised for daring to cor- rect Shakespeare's grammar. It was, as you see, an open secret that Isabel was very happy to be Orlando to Rose Morse's Rosalind in the June Thespis play. Isabel and Rose, for short, had been chums since the autumn of their Freshman year, when they had been put into the same room together and told that they were room-mates. It had not taken them long to discover that their natures dovetailed perfectly, and, having realized that, they became the happiest of com- panions. What Isabel lacked. Rose possessed. Be- tween them they maintained a perfect balance. From that first day when dark, thin Isabel had found fair, dimpled Rose waiting beside her trunk in number 58, they had been room-mates; for three beautiful years and eight months they had shared the fun and the work of college, never for one instant losing — in the familiarity of constant contact — their joy in one an- other's personality. Each year had been better than the one preceding it, and Senior year — by far the best of all ! Isabel often longed for words to express her keen sense of the happiness of this climax of college life; for she was of an analytical turn of mind. (She 126 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES had plunged deep into the Psychological ocean her Junior year, and was dripping yet.) She had decided that the supreme joy of it was a result of the in- creased intensity of bonds now "raised to the fourth power," the feeling of freedom always experienced by those at the top of the pile, and the undercurrent of sadness caused by remembering in connection with every event that it was "the last time" — ^the hint of the retrospective point of view from which all things have an added glamor. And now, for Isabel, as this last perfect year was drawing relentlessly towards its end, the undercurrent had become the full rush of the tide. Sadness had be- gun to predominate over the joy. That was why she frowned with pain as she smelled the lilacs, why she failed to get their breath of sweet content that cast its spell over everyone else. To her the odor only brought back, with a sharpness of outline that hurt, pic- tures of other springs — ^with Rosalind — and this last best spring was nearly gone! It seemed to her as if June marked the end of all things ! Never in her whole life before had Isabel Adams experienced the meaning of the word "parting." And now, with the opening of a chasm whose depth and breadth startled her, she began to ache with the dread of it. For her it was impossible to think with calm- ness of a day when all this jolly existence would go shattering to pieces — all the pretty familiar rooms in Senior Hall cease to be forever, all the girls in the class she loved separate, never to be as a whole to- gether again! Worst of all, it was beginning to be impossible to think of the day upon which she must say good-bye to Rosalind. She suspected that it was morbid, but in her imagin- ative way she had fallen to wondering just when and where it would be, this good-bye witii Rose — ^how they would manage at last to say it. For she felt that, ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 127 even though they might meet again, the separation in June was the real parting. What were two or three weeks a year in the future compared with what had been? This thought had been bad enough all winter, but a month ago something had happened that multiplied so greatly the sadness of the whole affair, that poor Isabel was nearly submerged. Rosalind Morse's family consisted of one solitary idolized mortal, "Brother Devereaux," the girls called him. His complete and distinguished title was First Lieutenant Devereaux Potter Morse, — ^th Infantry, U. S. A. In the fall of Rosalind's Senior year, to her absolute desolation. Lieutenant Morse had been stationed in the Philippines, and from that moment on, it had been Rose's one ambition to go also to "that savage place," as Isabel termed it. So it had come about that in April of her Senior year all the com- plicated arrangements had been completed; Rose had received her appointment as a teacher in the locality of her brother's garrison; and she was consequently very happy indeed, even reconciled to graduation, by the thought of being at last near Brother Devereaux and his fascinating friends. Isabel Adams was not so selfish as to begrudge Rose her joy in the anticipation of being with her brother again, but she was human enough to be filled with despairing alarm and pain at the idea of losing Rose so completely. She was convinced that if pretty little Rosalind (she was the very replica of Shakespeare's Rose) once embarked for "that awful place," she would be gone forever. And so, with her unhappiness only momentarily lightened by joking with the girls under the lilacs, Isabel made her way around the lake and came to the group assembled for rehearsal. At the same mo- ment hurrying across the grass from the opposite di- 128 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES rection came Rosalind Morse, who had been on an errand down-town. "And now we can begin," said Miss Hanson, as she joined them, "for Orlando and Rosalind are here." Small, gay and debonaire was Rose. It was no effort at all for her to frolic and joke with Orlando in the forest of Arden. But more than once it was necessary for Miss Hanson to tell the tall, dark son of Sir Rowland DeBoys not to be so gloomy about his love-making. It was a fairly successful rehearsal on the whole, but Isabel's mind wandered from the play constantly, and she had to be prompted more than she had thought she would be. But how could she help it? Wasn't Rose — her Rose, here, who seemed a part of her very existence — agoing to steam off over the ocean? After next month, weren't week after week, month upon month, and maybe year after year, to go by with- out her so much as having one look at her? She had heard of girls that had been close friends in col- lege who had never seen one another after graduation until some such terrible lapse of time as five or even ten years had gone by! What if that should happen to her and Rose ! And she had her own theory about what would happen if Rose went to join her brother, as she was going to do. It seemed to be embodied mockingly in the words of the scene that was being rehearsed. The shepherd Sylvius was telling Phoebe what it is to love. " 'It is to be all made of faith and service ; And so am I for Phoebe.' " Phe. " 'And I for Ganymede,' " Orl. " 'And I for Rosalind,' " Ros. " 'And I for no woman.' " If Rose went to the Philippines to be as near as possible to Lieutenant Morse and his brother officers. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 129 she would indeed, in Isabel's opinion, be very soon "all made of faith and service for no woman." "It isn't that I want her to be an old maid," she said to herself, "but I want her to marry a respectable citizen in plain clothes, who will stay at home in God's country and not drag her all over the two hemi- spheres." But they were saying it again. " 'And so am I for Phoebe/ " — " 'And I for Ganymede,' " — " 'And I for Rosalind,' " — " 'And I' " — Rose almost seemed to laugh — " 'for no woman.'" And there was no use fuming about the possibility of Rose's giving up the plan. She was not going to stay in God's country, and she was going out to join Lieutenant Devereaux Potter Morse. The very date was fixed. If Isabel were not going to lose her there must be some other way than that conceived. Isabel stood behind a tree waiting for her cue. And as she kicked the turf with her heel and cursed the army, and navy too, while she was about it, she sud- denly saw with extreme clearness just exactly what she should do. When it was her turn to go on she crossed the grass quite gayly : " 'Good-day and happiness, dear Rosalind!'" Why had she never thought of it before? It was the simplest possible thing. From that moment the rehearsal went on famously. Orlando caught the swing of Rosalind's high spirits, and the scene of their mock love-making went rol- licking through in a way that won the first applause of the season from Miss Hanson. At the close of the act she rushed up to the girls with a becoming pink in her cheeks, crying : "You've got it at last ! You've got it at last! That's the way Shakespeare dreamed it. Now for mercy's sake don't let it go !" When the rehearsal was over, the girls scattered. I30 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Isabel and Rosalind remained behind making them- selves pomfortable on a bench beneath the willow trees. The frogs in the lake had begun to chant them- selves hoarse; it was late afternoon, but there was still time enough to lounge for a while before dressing for dinner. The girls talked about the play, chiefly; indeed of late they spoke of little else when alone, for they avoided mentioning Commencement and what was to follow. Isabel answered Rosalind absently. Her mind was full of the wonderful plan. "You know your part awfully well," said Rose, yawning in the face of a robin on the grass near her feet. "But I still have to be prompted." "I think Miss Hanson really liked us in that last scene — ^you were so grand and gallant — ^half amused, half in earnest with little Ganymede." "Thanks," murmured Isabel. She was trying to decide whether or not to tell Rose at once of the project that had popped into her head. Her mind was aflame with it. Finally her love for a "situation" prompted her, half unconsciously, to wait and tell Rose when they were both of them keyed to an intenser pitch. The plan was simple, and yet to her exciting. She would go, herself, to the Philippines with Rose ! That was it. She knew there would be very little difficulty in getting a position to teach there. The experience would be interesting and, more than all else, the part- ing that loomed ahead of them would be blessedly eliminated. There was a breath of relief already in the thought. Not to give up Rose ! To be with her every day! To see strange new lands in her com- pany! To watch the process which she confidently expected — that of Rosalind's becoming the object of devotion to all of Brother Devereaux's military friends. It seemed to Isabel at that moment that life ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 131 could present nothing to her that would be more at- tractive. (Of course she was normal enough always to make one exception to such a mental statement, that is, that sometime in the future it would be de- sirable to possess a husband and at least one son. But that event she left to adjust itself as a matter of course.) Isabel said to herself that she would begin to make the arrangements for obtaining a position that very- evening. There was no reason why she need wait. Of course to be sure there was her family. They might, probably would, object. But they were amenable to reason; and Isabel had received high marks in logic her Sophomore year. She was sure her syllogism would be valid : "The youngest member of a family is a dispensable member. Isabel is the youngest member of her fam- ily. Therefore, Isabel is a dispensable member of her family." Dear me, that didn't sound exactly right when it was said over to one's self. But you couldn't expect to remember your logic through Senior year. There seemed to be something queer about the major prem- ise : "The youngest member of a family is a dispens- able member." "I shall never forget," Rosalind was saying, "that you were my Orlando this spring. It couldn't have happened better, could it?" Isabel decided that the major premise was right enough and that for practical purposes the syllogism would stand. Whether all youngest members of all families were dispensable she was not prepared to say, but that she was could be proved. Her father and mother were perfectly healthy and happy. She had an older brother who was in business with his father and lived at home. The sister next older than she was at home; 132 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES the four of theni were devoted to each other. An- other sister was married and lived next door to the family home. All were in comfortable circumstances. It certainly did seem as though if Isabel Adams wanted to follow her Rosalind to the Philippine Isl- ands there would be nothing whatever to prevent her doing so. As Isabel pondered and Rose rambled on about the play or was silent, every passing moment added a member, deep bass or counter tenor, to the chorus of frogs. It began to be time to dress for dinner. Isabel and Rose would have been tempted to go in without changing their gingham shirtwaist suits, but the house Seniors had begun to sit all together at the long table with the Dean — ^that is the beginning of the end, you know — and everyone, now, was striving to look her freshest and best in honor of these last meals. "Come on, Lando," said Rosalind, "let's put on our white dresses to-night. I feel like looking grand!" They strolled slowly up the hill, leaving the frogs without an audience. At dinner that night the conversation turned upon the theme of the great friendships of history and lit- erature, everybody's mind being, as ever, towards the end of the year, especially susceptible to such a sub- ject. Of course the usual names were spoken and the usual comments about devotion and faithfulness and sacrifice made. The girls were rather painfully surprised to find that they could recall so few women's names among those that had been famous ideal friends. Indeed only Ruth and Naomi were mentioned, but the mere repetition of their names sent the beautiful old lines echoing in Isabel's heart. "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee! Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." She was sure that she knew what had been in Ruth's heart when she said that. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 133 After dinner, instead of going to the Gymnasium to dance for half an hour or so, Isabel took Rose by the hand and whispered to her in a tense, exalted tone. "Rose, I have something beautiful to tell you. Let's go up to the room now, dear." Rosalind looked wondering and interested enough to suit the most exacting revealer of secrets. They mounted to Senior Hall in the elevator without speak- ing at all, Isabel's cheeks a burning pink, her dark eyes glowing. She had made up her mind before ; even her invalid syllogism had not made her change it, but now that the matter had been raised to the ideal, that the inspiration of the Hebrew poetry had been added, she could wait no longer to tell her dainty, beautiful Rose, that she was not to "return from following after her." When they finally reached the door of their own room in Senior Hall and opened it to go in. Rose ex- claimed as Isabel turned on the light: "Why, Lando, here's a letter on the floor for you ! See, it got kicked almost under the couch. It's a won- der we found it at all." Isabel took the fat envelope. "It's from Mother," she said, and frowned. They sat down on the divan together. "Well," said Rose, "now do tell me the 'beautiful thing.' Your eyes are as big as plates. What ever has happened?" Isabel turned her letter over and over. It was written on the familiar gray paper she had always seen her mother use, with the plain initial "A" on the flap of the envelope. She opened her lips to speak and shut them again. "Thy people shall be my people," that was what Ruth said! "Rosalind," Isabel began— "I— think after all I will read my letter before we talk. I hate to think of its lying around on the floor so long, somehow. See, it 134 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES has a smudge on it — You go down and dance; there are not very many more nights that we can." "Well, you are a good one, to drag me up here for nothing," said Rose, rather decidedly. "I am dying with curiosity but I suppose I'll have to wait." "Yes, please wait," said Isabel, uncoiling a curl on Rosalind's temple and letting it fly back again with a queer expression. "All right; you're boss, Orlando," and Rosalind skipped oflF, not altogether unwilling to go to the Gymnasium and dance. Isabel opened the plump gray envelope and smoothed out the pages on her desk by the window. The campus far below was becoming shadowy; through the tops of the trees the soft air was breath- ing; the frogs down in the lake were still doing their best to be tuneful, and their voices, both hoarse and shrill, were the only sound. "Dear Baby," the letter began. "After writing those words it came over me that I was addressing them to a College Senior, and I felt very old indeed ! For you are still a baby to me — ^my very last newest baby, although time has been racing along so fast that you are now almost grown up. Quite, I presume you think; and quite I am almost tempted to think myself when I read about all the fine things you are doing and learning. I can hardly wait for the time when I shall not have to read about them but when you can tell me everything yourself. We shall not lack topics of conversation, shall we? For you know how I love to hear all about the fun. "Your father says I act like a little girl who has been promised a new doll to play with. He refers, of course, to my anticipation of having you again, and pretends to make fun of me for it. But I can ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 135 always retaliate. I tell him that he reminds me of a little boy who expects a puppy as soon as it is trained. (You must excuse our being so apparently uncom- plimentary in our terms, my dear.) Yesterday he looked up from his business letters — and you know he never likes to be interrupted — and said: "How much longer is it before Pussy will be home?" He asks that every day, Isabel. "Indeed all of our minds seem to run on the same topic. Harry said this morning, 'When does the kid graduate — I'll go down and bring her home. Do you think she will ride with me and cheer me up?' "He is more like himself lately than he has been since Helen died, and I really think your coming home to stay is the reason. I am indeed thankful that you will be here at least part of June — for that will be a hard month for him " Here followed several pages of newsy gossip, and then: "I think this is about all the news there is to-day, but here are a few more messages for you — Grand- mother telephoned over and said, 'Tell Isabel I am sending her a package of washcloths I have knitted for her, and tell her we shall be glad to have her back.' (Be sure and write Grandmother that you like the washcloths, although I know you don't.) "Fannie is on the veranda now with Toodles — ^he has grown bigger even since Easter — and she just called in : 'Tell Isabel she is missing all of Toodles's cute sayings.' I am enclosing a kodak picture of him that Harry took last week. It is good, isn't it ? "Well, my dear little daughter, write us as often as you can and come home to us as soon as you can. I am as ever, Baby, no matter how dignified you get, "Your loving mother, "Isabel Adams." 136 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Isabel put her Iiead down upon tKe dainty gray sheets on the desk and did not move for a long time. While the darkness came, and the room filled with the sweet evening air, and the familiar distant noises of the college community floated in, she sat motionless, as in her soul there slowly dawned the possibility of a saner view. It was late when Rose came back. She and Edith Travis had found that the only way to get the use of a Lit. reference book in the Library was to camp out on the spot. She came in and sat down beside the desk ; Isabel lifted her face and smiled. "Well," said Rose, "are you going to tell me the wonderful, beautiful thing?" The girl at the desk leaned forward, and lightly kissed Rosalind on the lips. "Oh, yes," she said, "my brother is coming all the way from Indiana to see me graduate. What do you think of that?" "Why," said Rose, "you might have told me that before !" And Isabel knew, though Rose did not, that that one kiss was their real good-bye. It need not now be dreaded any more. THE GREATEST THING. You have heard that Lois Manning was the one girl of all at the Junior Promenade that year which these stories represent, who was surest that she had invited, and was in consequence attended by, the right man. You have also been told that a brilliant diamond, shining solitary upon the most significant of her ten fingers attested the fact that it was a settled question between the two of them — ^that the man knew he was the right one and had been generously appreciative of his position. In fact Lois's engagement to Mr. John Sanderson had been announced just before the begin- ning of her Senior year in college. He was a young man of considerable cleverness and success who, hav- ing done post-graduate work in Cornell, had remained at the university as a member of the faculty, in the department of electrical engineering. Lois was proud of him. Almost any woman would have been for he was what a woman likes — strong, wholesome, charming, not unhandsome and moderately successful. How they met and came to their eminently satisfactory understanding is not a part of this story at all, but if you wish very much to know I think Virginia Danvers will tell you about it. An entirely different incident of their lives does belong here, how- ever, for Lois Manning was an important person of the Senior class, and the Seniors are every year — with apologies to the faculty — the most important people in college. Therefore what happened to Lois that spring has a place in these college annals. If you watch very carefully, I am sure you will find 137 138 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES that what people say from time to time, when they are really in earnest, fits in remarkably well with their later actions in the various situations and crises of their .careers; so that if you were to take some one of their statements and preface it to the corresponding act which followed you would have all ready made at j'our hand the warp and woof of a story, with the antecedent material in quite the proper place. I say "when they are in earnest," because of course no other time could count. Now, anybody who has ever been there knows that for prolonged earnest conversations, in which the universe is turned inside out and its laws coolly investigated and passed judgment upon, a wo- man's college is the place of places. There everybody is expected to have an opinion and no one is afraid to express it. There is an infinite variety of subjects in these "set to's"; but the commonest are, I think, when the serious side is uppermost, the arguments pro and con the immortality of the soul — inspired by Philosophy III and IV — and the question of marriage, which cannot but arise if you take a course in Sie modern drama in "Senior Lit." And it happens very frequently that the opinions threshed out in some col- lege room, after a class which has especially interested, are acted upon later in unconscious but nice logical sequence. There was such a "set to" as this one rainy spring afternoon after Lit. VII (it was VII then) in Lois Manning's room. The girls, the five or six Seniors we know best, had come back to Senior Hall with their note-books empty and their heads full of Ibsen and Maeterlinck and the momentous question as to whether marriage is not a state which, after all, costs outrageously, usually robs a woman of time in which to pursue "the intellectual life," makes of her a "doll," and generally turns out a failure. "Dear me," drawled William, the Conqueror, ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 139 stretched out on the divan, as they all waited for the water in Lois's copper kettle to boil and thus make possible the very feminine beverage of tea, "I sure would hate to think that my brain would never de- velop any more after this year — which, it seems, would be the case if I decided to be married 1 That would certainly be a worse scandal than one in a divorce court, for it even now feels but 'pinched and small,' " indicating that she meant her brain by feeling her head very carefully. "And just think, William," broke in Barbara Bat- tle solemnly, "it would keep on getting smaller and smaller and smaller, as everything does when it isn't used" (William clutched her head in alarm) ; "be- cause your cook would have left to work in a factory and your husband would have an immense appetite and you would have to broil beefsteak, and wash the dishes, and in the evening you would be too sleepy to read your old German philosophers that you plan to study next year, or even stay awake over a good novel, or to talk intelligently to him about his busi- ness, and " "Hold on, hold on, hold on — " cried William, sitting up and exploding with laughter, "it's immodest to paint my future in such vivid, though I must say distressing colors, when I never so much as had a proposal in my life ! I stand in no immediate danger. There's the lady over there. Talk to her ! Her situ- ation is positively perilous." William, from her place among the cushions, pointed a dramatic finger at Lois hovering over the tea-kettle; and everybody laughed. "There is no doubt," said Shirley, sagely, when the laugh died down and Lois had not responded, "that the question of marriage depends upon the Servant Problem ; therefore until men consent to eat tabloids we mustn't marry them!" "This, of course," put in Isabel Adams, who would I40 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES be logical or perish, "applies to the average woman who hasn't inherited a million and can't pay exorbitant prices for help!" "It surely doesn't seem fair play," Virginia Danvers contributed from the depths of Lois's most prized Morris chair, "to ask a woman to give up freedom and a chance to advance in intellectual culture, for a state where she is in danger of becoming a 'servant in the house' at least half the year — of doing work that nine-tenths of the 'common people' despise as employ- ment." "And then there's the question of money, salaries, I mean — " this from Elsa Heath. "A cousin of mine gets twelve hundred dollars a year, and the average man she meets, we'll say, about two thousand. Shall she resign, marry him, and run an establishment for less than twice the amount she had before for her- self — doing uncongenial work into the bargain? As it is she goes to Europe every two or three years, has an artistic little apartment full of books and pic- tures and is developing a career all her own." "I think it'd be great to have a 'career,' " murmured Babbie. "Girls!" exclaimed Lois suddenly, giving the tea- kettle a little poke to hasten its boiling. "You'll think my opinion prejudiced I know, but you're going to get it just the same. Will you listen ?" "Hear! Hear! Speech!" cried William, flourishing a Cornell pillow in the air. "You know I love all this," Lois began, waving her hand vaguely towards a pile of books and a studious- looking drop-light (which glinted on her diamond, making it shine red for a minute). "I have a healthy respect for my brain, because I know it is a good one; I like an atmosphere of intellectual endeavor, of good literature, good music, and all that; and I de- spise stagnation of any kind." ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 141 "Hear! Hear!" again from William. "I agree with you that it will be very unpleasant indeed when the cook leaves, and I think a 'career' would be grand " " The will, we'll have the will ' " Babbie cut off William's speech with a cushion. "But — can't you see that you are arguing back- wards, just the way a crab walks ? Don't you realize that you have left out of consideration entirely the Greatest Thing in the World? Why, you haven't so much as mentioned it. You know what it is. It isn't this " There was a sudden pause in which nobody spoke. Lois smiled oddly, with a shy defiance mixed with a little amusement at her own expense, as of one upon whom a royal mantel had descended unsought, and who found entertainment as well as pleasure in the situation. "Well — " at last Virginia broke the silence. "Grant- ed that we had left it out — aren't you going to tell us about it — this Greatest Thing? If you use it for your refutation aren't you going to explain it ?" "Indeed I am not! You'll have to find out for yourself !" "But I'll tell you something else. I've decided that from this point of view there are just four kinds of people in the world." She told them off on her fingers. "First, those who know perfectly the Greatest Thing ; I think they are like kings and queens in a country. Second, those who have had a glimpse, however vanishing; and give thanks to the end of their days. Third, those who have never known it, but understand what has passed them by. Fourth, those — and your remarks about salaries come in here, my dear young friends — who are so dull of soul (oh, they're bright enough in books!) that they don't know what they 142 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES lack, or that they lack anything at all, because they are so contented in their greedy independence." "Hurrah !" William shouted, being released by Bab- bie. "Why don't the rest of you say something? I can't play the mob all alone !" "Go on, Mrs. Sanderson," said Shirley, "I feel as if I were at a play or a woman's rights meeting." "I never suspected Lois of having a speech in her pocket," Virginia laughed, pinching Lois's cheek just above the dimple. " 'Contented in their greedy independence' is a choice morsel ; give us some more, Lois," said Isabel. "I haven't anything more to say," replied that young lady, blushing scarlet now that she had finished. "I've made my first and last speech, girls. I'm a poor down- trodden woman without a career or a vote, and I am free to admit that — I like it. So there !" She tossed her head in a way she had and straight- ened the picture of John Sanderson that hung above her desk. Convinced or unconvinced, the girls gave a round of applause which Virginia augmented by clashing together the chafing dish cover and the dust pan from under the table. And just then the copper tea kettle had the good sense to start boiling. It cleared the air like a syllable of magic and the tea-cups were passed around, while a timely pun from Virginia (who revelled in the despised art) produced a general laugh and groan. "Stop teasing me!" she cried, as William spattered her with an amber drop. "Oh, Jinny," laughed Elsa, "I know you're descend- ed from Shakespeare ; you're both so deliberate about punning. What is that famous one about the ham, Lois ? I tried to tell the family at Christmas and got it wrong." "It was at breakfast Sunday morning," recited Lois, rather relieved to change the subject. "The maid gave her a square inch of ham, and she said on the instant : ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 143 "Mary knows I'm taking a pourse in Sliakespeare — she's given me a hamlet!" Another ripple greeted this seasoned joke and Vir- ginia looked modest. Then, while the rain poured down outside, soaking the grateful campus, and bringing good promises of violets, the most comfortable of all ceremonies went on in Lois's room, and the talk lost every sign of strenuousness, drifting at last (though nobody saw the humor of it) to the style of the bridesmaids' dresses worn at a recent wedding in the city, to which some of the girls had been invited. Finally, at half past five, the town girls — Jinny and several others who stopped for her — donned raincoats and departed. And the tea party broke up, the girls drifting away to get ready for dinner in a more or less festive manner. The rain gave no sign of ceasing; indeed, it in- creased until at six o'clock there was a torrent. It came down in sheets of water that splashed against the windows and made one feel very well sat- isfied with being in-doors. The lake — which could be seen but dimly — ^was prodigiously high, and out on College Avenue rivers raced down the middle of the street. The wind rose and lashed the dripping trees together. "Isn't it good," said Lois to Elsa, as they stood in the many-windowed corridor leading to the dining- room, two minutes before the dinner hour, "to be inside, and happy, on such a night as this? I am mighty glad I haven't got to go out in it!" Every one seemed to feel as Lois did, for there was a spirit of good-humored comfort through all the great building, that was heightened every time a shriek of wind or roar of rain penetrated into the rooms so bright and warm by contrast. There seemed to be a particularly good time going on after dinner, before the study hour began. About 144 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES forty girls went to the Gymnasium to dance; some strolled in the Chapel, flattening their noses againslj the long windows and trying to penetrate the outer blackness; others gathered in one or another of the four parlors, and the sound of several pianos being played at once produced, if you were passing through the halls, a not altogether unpleasant jangle. Here a popular comic opera air floated out to mingle there with "Drink to me," or — if you were near the stairs — with a march two-step from the Gymnasium. There was a tuneful group in the Lambda Omega room for instance. Someone had lighted the fire and a dozen girls sat around it in chairs or on the floor. Shirley Brooke was at the piano. They had begun with college songs, but after that Elsa had been sing- ing in her high clear voice. Everybody clapped when she finished so that she was obliged to give "The Song to Celia" over again. The words of rare Ben Jonson floated out distinct- ly — for that was Elsa's pride. " 'The thirst that from the soul doth rise Doth ask a drink divine. And might I of Jove's nectar sip I would not change for thine.' " As Elsa slipped into her seat she smiled across at Lois and their eyes met understandingly. Nobody but Lois knew that in that silent glance she had won a convert. But it was an unheard-of thing that Elsa should stop so soon. They called for "Beauty's Eyes" and "Constancy," "Loch Lomond," "The Mandalay," and "The Land o' the Leal." Somebody suggested "April Rain" as appropriate, and finally they asked for "Ba- by's Boat's the Silver Moon." ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 145 " 'Sail, baby, sail' " ; Elsa's voice was exquisite and her eyes wells of holy mystery. " 'Out upon that sea. Only don't forget to sail Back again — ^to me! Back again — ^to me' " ! With the last note the girls were aware that some- one was standing in the doorway. It was the maid on duty in the telephone room. In the silence she said, looking at Lois, "There's a long distance call for Miss Manning, from Ithaca." Lois jumped up, smiling, and everyone laughed; for long distance calls, special delivery letters, and telegrams from Ithaca for Miss Manning were a ludicrously common occurrence. She skipped out the doorway and Shirley's fingers rippled into a comic opera tune appropriate for the occasion. In less than five minutes — an unusually short time — they heard her coming back along the hall. Shirley unoriginally struck up the Lohengrin Bridal Chorus for her triumphal entry; but it ended in a crashing discord. Lois stumbled through the doorway clinging to the casing. Her face was dead white. Lifting her eyes slowly to Elsa's she whispered : "Something — ^has — happened — to John; John!" In the ghastly silence that followed they heard the unrelenting rain pour down. Far off thunder growled once. Elsa took Lois in her arms. "Well," she said, "then you must go to him." She did go that night, out into the rising thunder storm, which raged for an hour and thus finished the April tempest. The girls helped her get ready in 146 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES awed silence. They were young, and for most of them this was their first intimacy with the Sorrow of Woman. They ached with a strange new pity; they hovered around her tenderly; and when she disap- peared (her dark eyes piteous in her white face) they wept. And after she had gone they waited for news from her with anxiety nearly unbearable. The telephone message had been merely the bare fact that an acci- dent had occurred in the electrical laboratory of Cornell and that Mr. Sanderson was still living. They knew nothing else. The next morning, however, dreadful details came out in the paper. Recovery, it said, was doubtful. "Oh, oh," sobbed Babbie, face down on Lois' divan, "I never dreamed the world was so horrible! What shall we do?" "I don't know," answered Elsa, who was dusting Lois' desk and trying to keep fresh a bunch of violets ; "there's nothing to do I gfu'ess, except just cry about it." She put the violets under John Sanderson's picture. "And after a while," she added, "just stop crying; that's all." "All!" snorted Babbie. At last, however, after two long terrible weeks, in which the daily bulletin in the newspaper was keeping the girls on the rack, there came, one evening, a telegram from Lois. "He's going to get well," it said. That night the entire Senior Class had a spread in Senior Parlors in which the health of "Lois and John" was drunk repeatedly in grape juice, and yells containing their joined names were shouted lustily, and a photograph of John Sanderson (cut from the newspaper and framed) was hung in Senior Parlors; at which, unexpectedly, everybody cried ! ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 147 A fortnight later, Lois returned to college. She arrived in Senior Hall one evening just after the nine o'clock bell when the girls were singing around the Octagon. No one saw her at first and she stood still in a shadow waiting for the end of "The Purple and the Gold." Then Babbie called— "There's Lois!" Such a rush and swirl of kimonos in all the colors of the rainbow ! Lois was kissed and hugged hard by every girl who could get near enough ; then borne off to her own room where they took off her hat and dress and put on her little old green silk kimono that had hung in the closet while she was gone. They put her on the bed with pillows piled fore and aft. She was pale and her red brown eyes looked unnaturally large, but she had never been so pretty. She laughed rather shyly at this unusual attention, showing the dimple in her cheek as charmingly as ever. "Why do you make such a fuss ?" she said. "There's nothing the matter with me. No, Babbie, I do not want another sofa cushion, thank you !" "You see," said William, who was already taking liberties with the copper kettle, having insisted that Lois needed something hot to drink, though the night was warm; "you see, it's been simply ghastly here without you, Lois, simply ghastly." "We've lost a whole month of you, my dear," added Shirley, "and we're Seniors; 'nuff said!" Virginia Danvers, who had been up at college for the evening, simply put on Lois' slippers and said nothing. The room became full of as many of Lois' friends as could crowd into it. They sat upon the floor and draped themselves around the walls, each trying not to occupy any more space than her body absolutely required ; while everyone did her share in the conver- sation. And they looked at Lois a good deal. She had always been popular, but there seemed, now, to 148 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES be attached to her a peculiar interest. They lingered on even after Lois had consumed the tea that William insisted on her drinking, evidently in hopes that this pale, interesting heroine would "tell about it." But she said nothing except in answer to the first question, "How is John?" "He's better, thank you," was her reply. And then she asked for college news. At ten o'clock the crowd melted away, leaving Elsa, William, Shirley, Jinny and Babbie with Lois. "Quite a reception, that," remarked Virginia. "I'll bet John would have been proud of you ! It's a great thing to be a popular lady." "Don't be silly," Lois answered, "they just followed one another like sheep, that's all. Besides, they were curious." "So are we!" Lois' face suddenly changed ; there came into it the oddest expression the girls had ever seen there. She slipped off the couch without replying and began to open her dress suit case ; "I really must unpack," was all she said. Elsa looked at Shirley and Babbie looked at Wil- liam with raised eyebrows and startled eyes. The suit-case was silently emptied and Lois' clothes laid in neat piles upon the divan; then Lois went to the closet and pulled out one of her trunks which was always there. She put the clothes that had been in the suit-case into the bottom of her trunk. The girls watched her as if under a spell. "Well, well," finally Elsa laughed constrainedly. "What did you do that for, Lois ?" Lois sat down on the edge of her trunk. She was the daintiest, coolest, most charming little person in the dull green silk kimono; the most wistful and yet the most steadfast — her red brown eyes full of tenderness. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 149 "Girls," she said, "I wrote you that John will get well." They nodded. "But I didn't tell you how — ^how long it will be — A year at least, the doctors said! — He's got to go home at once — to Kentucky, and keep very still for a year and a half. There's an old house down there, in the country, that he and a twentieth cousin — his only relative — own together. He's going there because it's the quietest, cheapest, healthiest place — to get well." "How dreadful ; I had no idea," William murmured. "How horribly stupid and lonesome!" broke out Shirley. "Yes, it will be pretty bad for him in any case, but — I shall try to be diverting and gay." "You !" "Yes, me," returned Lois, more occupied in being calm than grammatical. "I'm going with him !" "W-won't you have to get a chaperone?" asked Babbie seriously. Then Lois laughed gayly for the first time. "Why no, goosie," she said, "I'm going to marry him." "When?" they all cried together. "Next week," she answered, getting pink to the roots of her hair. And after awhile they kissed her quietly, one by one, and left her alone. It was a glorious Saturday morning in the week following Lois' return to Elmira — ^the kind of Satur- day mornings that come in the spring when you are in college. The sun was golden, but not hot; a cool, sweet wind stirred the trees. The campus was purple with violets except where it was yellow with beautiful despised dandelions. It was just such a morning as ISO ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES makes Elmira girls wish they may never leave their Alma Mater. It was Lois Manning's last day in college. The girls had helped her pack the night before with solemn faces but never a word of protest. Her room was empty of all its pretty things ; the door was shut; Virginia Danvers had slammed and locked it. "I can't bear to look in," she explained ; and everyone silently thanked her. Lois insisted that she would say no good-byes, except to the Faculty, and that solemn round had been completed. "I won't say any more," she declared as she sat, dressed for the train, on William's bed. "You can't make me !" Just at that moment, Willie of the Elevator came in with a great bundle which the girls had begun to fear never would arrive. He placed it in Lois' lap. "Well," said Virginia, rising to the occasion, "you needn't say a single other good-bye if you don't want to, honey; but t-there's — ours — ^to you. Oh — ' heavens!" And she rushed into the closet where a minute later they heard her blowing her nose. With nervous fingers Lois untied the package while they all watched her in various stages of calmness. When at last the cover was off the box she bent over the American Beauty roses, her cheeks flushed pink. "You dears, you dears!" she whispered. "Let's hope she means us," quavered Babbie. Virginia emerged from the closet. "It's time," she announced in manly tones, "to go to the train." Lois carried the roses — ^beautiful, stately, prickly things — in her arms through the streets to the rail- road station. Even there, standing in the midst of the silent group, she said no good-byes. Once, look- ing over the roses shyly she whispered, as if afraid ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 151 of letting the world know, "By and by I hope I can ask you all to visit me — in Kentucky." Then the train came. It was one of those trains that send your heart into your throat, with their meaningful evil roar. Somehow or other Lois got on it. They saw her sitting by the open window, looking so dearly familiar that it was beyond any one's imaginative powers to believe that in another instant she would be no longer there. She smiled down at them a little tremulously, but still with a detached expression, as of one borne along in the sweep of great forces. Suddenly the bell on the engine clanged. Imper- ceptibly the train began to glide. Then Lois leaned towards the window and disentangling a great red rose from the mass in her lap, handed it down to Virginia Danvers on the platform. And in a moment more the train had carried her away. Not until they had reached the eastern gate of the College did any of the girls speak. Indeed they walked back almost separately, each occupied in man- aging her own countenance. But as they toiled up the driveway Elsa said: "Will you ever forget how naturally she said to Babbie that night, 'Why no, goosie, I'm going to marry him'?" "No, I won't forget it," said Virginia. "Don't you know why she said it in just that way?" "No," Shirley spoke up, while Elsa looked wise. "Why?" "Because the most natural thing in the world is — what she is doing." And Virginia stalked up the steps at the head of the little procession, clasping her thorny American Beauty rose very tight in her hand. COMMENCEMENT. For three years you have been a spectator of other Senior Vacations and other Commencements; but strange as it may seem that has in no way prepared you for your own. You have walked so long in the calm safety of under-graduate years that the unbelief in the possibility of the end's ever coming for you has become a habit of mind. The nearer the close of the last term approaches the more difficult it is for you to manage a conception of it — in spite of the fact that in your Freshmen year you mastered "Probability and Chance," and should therefore know that the longer a calamity holds off the more surely its imminence may be expected. When great changes occur we never quite grasp them until the upheaval has passed and we find ourselves sitting on a stone trying to figure out how to erect a new abode. During the change itself we are occupied with the necessity of carrying through the act of the hour and keeping a sufficiently expressionless face. Ideas more or less of this nature were flooding through Virginia Danvers' consciousness in a swollen yet calm stream. It was as if the waters were too heavy to be lifted in waves. The time of the Senior Vacation, that grateful respite before the last rush, had come; and Virginia had an hour to herself in which to think and take inventory of all she had to do in the coming week. She had searched out a quiet spot where she could be alone — she sat on the grass in the shade of a clump of bushes near the western tennis court. The foliage shielded her from the 152 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 153 windows of the Main Building, and the tennis court was deserted. No one now had time to play. But, having deliberately settled herself here, expect- ing to feel keenly the tide of emotion she had been holding back ever since Lois Manning had left col- lege, she found to her bewilderment nothing but a flat inability to take in the situation. "I don't believe it « my own Commencement," she said aloud. "I don't believe that a week from to-day some of the dearest friends I've ever known will have gone away so far I'll probably never see them again. It seems just as if Lois were up in her room now and would be down in a minute to play a set with me. I wonder if knocking my head against a tree would do any good!" She was too comfortable, however, to resort to this extremity. So she took out a little brown note-book she was forced to carry these days, and looked up her engagements for the rest of her college career. This was Thursday afternoon. To-night there was dress rehearsal for the Thespis play. As You Like It, to be given Friday. Virginia was the banished duke. No need to stop over this item for she knew her part backwards and from the middle to each end. But the Senior charge! She was to give that Tuesday morning — Class Day — and as yet had not been visited with the least glimmer of an idea for it. It must be written, read to the Dean, and learned by Monday afternoon. The Prom was Monday night. She was head of the decoration committee and would have to be in the armory nearly all day Monday. And then Tuesday night (for an instant here a pang did come) they would expect her to say something when she retired from the presidency of her society. She knew she could not trust to an inspiring last moment for that — and Tuesday might be considered practically filled when one reflected that Class Day 154 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES exercises, the Alumnae luncheon, dinner with the Dean, the farewell society meeting, Music School commencement recital, society receptions, and the last Senior spread were supposed to occur on that day. But this, with several last visits to the dressmaker, was all she had to do. As she put away the little brown note-book and drew a long breath her solitude was broken. Elsa Heath and Shirley Brooke strolled across the grass. (Elsa's home was in Pennsylvania, Shirley's in Ore- gon.) They looked as solemn as Virginia knew she would when it was all over. When they reached her corner they sat down on the grass beside her without speaking. "Let us sit upon the ground," said Virginia with an attempt at her old-time manner, "and talk about the deaths of kings !" "Don't Jinny \" Elsa said sharply, and then quickly put her hand on Virginia's because she had been sharp. The silence after that was absolute. A hot breeze stirred the foliage. It carried no sound of any kind. Up there within those windows, the girls knew, lucky Juniors and Sophomores, fortune-blessed Freshmen, were taking examinations. They even wished for the toil of examination week again; anything but this blankness when everything you had to do merely shot another bolt that was to lock you out of all this forever. Finally Shirley, who was going farthest, spoke. "Do you remember, when we were all coming up from the station last fall, how Babbie said that was the beginning of the end?" Elsa and Virginia nodded. _ "Well," added Shirley, turning her face away, "this — ^this is the end 1" o c O ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 155 In the very word "commencement" there is con- notation of warm June days, luxuriant foliage, flowers, white gowns, organ music, scarlet or crimson or Yale blue hoods, a celebrity's voice, waving fans, rows of young faces striving to be unself conscious ; and, if you include within the word the idea of the week, a rope of laurel borne by girls, a maze of happy dancers, a sweltering churchful of mothers and sisters and fathers at the Baccalaureate, quaint painted Shakesperian ladies and lords talking by a splashing fountain ; last of all, wagon loads of trunks and swift snorting trains moving away with handkerchiefs flut- tering at the windows. Virginia walked through it all with a quietness and dignity that were little short of bravery when one considered that she could not but think of Lois down in the blue grass country with John Sanderson. No one was busier than she ; for she was one of those people upon whom varying difficulties are loaded with the brief words, "Ask Jinny — " or "Tommie," or "Jane." She didn't complain ; and no one would have guessed what she once confided to Lois — that she hated responsibility. She simply accepted duties (and cor- responding tributes) with a mixture of humor and sweetness and efficiency which charmed and — ^put things through, nothing but climatic conditions hindering. On this particular Commencement the weather was perfection. The farmers wanted rain, but everybody prayed they would not get it until the week following this all-important one; and they didn't. Friday night closed down cloudless, many-starred, and white with a full moon. The portion of the campus where the Fraternity of Thespis presented the play of the year had been made ready by the erection of tiers of wooden seats that faced a group of trees 156 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES on the right of the fountain. That natural grove was the stage, sloping at the rear in the direction of the lake just enough to make possible a "green room" where, with the aid of piled-up boughs, the actors could be invisible. It was not hard to think of this as the forest of Arden. Here Orlando hung love- verses, the duke in banishment declared the trees talked to him, and Jacques "met a fool in the forest." Virginia's clear unusual voice made all her lines beau- tiful. Indeed, in the performance of everyone, in spite of unprofessional slips and the absolute lack of genius, there was a finish and simplicity and feeling that was proof of what training will do for a girl. The next day, Saturday, was threatening. But the weather man rallied again on Baccalaureate Sunday and the crowd gathered early in the down-town church; the chapel is not big enough for everything. As the hour struck, the long academic-gowned pro- cession wound in to slow music and took their seats before the wise man who was to give them a last word of guidance. Why is there something particu- larly touching about a baccalaureate sermon? Is it because the man who preaches it, be he ever so good and old, knows that he can say nothing that will spare the girl or the boy the personal struggle with the personal problem that he himself can so plainly see advancing along the road down which the pure young eyes are straining? The girls are thinking of the future — dear me yes ! — but they are finding the present a little difficult. They are hoping, for example, that some of the stanzas of that hymn on the baccalaureate programme may, by mistake, be omitted. When the charge had been received and the sermon ended, Virginia Danvers fixed her dark eyes on a stained glass window and tried to count up to a thousand while the mothers and sisters and fathers in perspiring indifference sang : ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 157 "Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in mutual love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above. "We share our mutual woes, Our mutual burdens bear; And often for each other flows The sympathizing tear. "When we at length must part, It gives us bitter pain; But one in Christ, and one in heart. We part to meet again." She looked over at Elsa, who was staring very hard at the back of Isabel Adams' head, without winking. In another moment Virginia saw that Elsa was afraid to wink for fear her full eyes would overflow. Farther down the line William the Conqueror sat with her chin in the air, wearing the fearfully bored ex- pression she always assumed when touched emotion- ally. Virginia counted up to seven hundred and ninety-three. The remarkable thing about Commencement is that it passes so quickly. You no sooner have your mind made up for a given event, have worked and dressed for it, than, while you are trying to impress upon your mind that it is actually taking place — whisk — it is gone, forever. To Virginia Danvers the Thespis play, the Baccalaureate, and the Senior Prom all blended together in a maze of strange costumes, new gowns, processions and dancing. She, being a town girl, never had the proverbial difficulty in getting a Prom Man; and could give herself up to the enjoy- ment of the most brilliant event of the college social season, the Senior Promenade. 158 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES How the girls missed Lois and John! Ever since Lois entered college he had been to the Proms with her. Their absence from the Senior box was a poig- nant fact that not for one moment could be forgotten. "Where's the little girl with the dimple ?" more than one man asked. There was an image of Lois as she would have looked that evening in the eyes of all the Seniors at that Prom — Lois, in a soft white silk-mull gown which set off her reddish brown hair and eyes, smiling over John Sanderson's shoulder, a bunch of violets at her breast. They all saw her — it amounted almost to an hallucination — ^but Barbara, William, Elsa, Shirley, and Virginia, these five, saw her clear- est. While all the time the music, the banners, the palms and flowers, the familiar faces were saying, "This is your last, your very last Prom!" But finally it ended, and there came next the series of kaleidescope slides (commonly called Class Day), that make up Tuesday of Commencement week, the fullest of all days, the day of near, dear familiar things that touch your heart and are very much harder to bear than the formalities of Wednesday. Will anybody who has had one ever forget her own Class Day? Virginia was scarcely conscious of the details. She knew that she walked with the others, oh ! so slowly, along the winding path to the south porch which was banked with greens and flowers; and that while the Sophomores made an avenue with the laurel chain the Seniors mounted the broad high steps, and standing so, close together, the laurel almost encircling them, they sang "The Step Song." She heard the History (how long ago that Sophomore escapade was, over which the people were laughing!) and the Prophecy — William was skillfully and humorously putting her finger upon the talent or the idiocyncrasy of everyone. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 159 Virginia watched William's mother and thought how proud she was that William had had energy and cleverness enough to stay in college. Seven girls out of ten would have gone home and — opened a tea-room, thought Miss Danvers. As it was, William — looking with scorn upon teachers' agencies — ^already had a position as secretary to a man who was writing a history of Germany. By and by Virginia heard herself giving the Senior charge, feeling humbly that there was nothing worthy she was capable of saying to those rows of Juniors waiting for her to pass on the symbol of seniority — the purple and gold mantel, now on her own shoulders. "It seems," she said, "as if a Senior, at the end of her last year in college, must have much to say to those just beginning theirs. Doubtless it would be so but for this — it seems to us that we cannot have come to the end. The time has been so short. We have not become wise and good as we thought we should have! We have not learned our lessons yet. Then how shall we give them to you? — But we have learned something. — You will find that when you are Seniors you will stand together as one class more strongly than ever in the years before. You are all that there is left of college as it was when you entered. Your loyalty to Alma Mater will have grown with each year until now it brims over your heart. — That is one thing that makes Senior year the happiest. There is another, though, — ^the sweetest and saddest. The friendships which before have been half-blown flowers have now blossomed, exquisitely perfect; and have found such fertile soil in Senior Hall, such gentle care and watering, that they stand hardy and Iteautiful, and we know that we shall keep them always. "You will find it so " i6o ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Virginia didn't know what else she said. That thought to her was the theme of Class Day. After the exercises all was pleasant confusion. Underclassmen, graduates and old grads swarmed over the grass. Families were introduced in proud accents. It was odd enough to be meeting in the flesh people you had known by name and photographs for four years. Isabel Adams' brother was there — and also her mother who had come on unexpectedly. Virginia heard Mrs. Adams say, "So this actually is Rose !" And she smiled to herself, for she knew the inner history of that aflfair. (Many people told her their troubles.) Elsa Heath's twin was also "on," — his own Commencement had been a week earlier. He attracted considerable attention, for everybody re- membered his last visit. And so they all strolled and talked in friendly and family groups until it was time for the Seniors and Alumnae to go out to the Country Club for luncheon. You don't want to hear it all : how they rushed back from the club for dinner with the Dean — she was the patron saint of the graduating class; how the fare- well society meetings brought tears; how the Music School commencement was beautiful ; and the society receptions brilliant ; how the last Senior spread was a funeral feast whose revelations the girls swore to keep secret forever. Wednesday morning was as glorious a Commence- ment Day as ever a class had. The girls dressed early — Senior Hall was full of flitting figures in em- broidered linens, for that was the fad of the year about which I write. After a while black gowns ap- peared over the white dresses, mortar board caps over smooth or curly hair. It was nearly time for the great event to begin. Elsa and Shirley, fully arrayed, came out of room twelve together and stopped a moment, looking back. ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES i6i "Just think," said Shirley, "we'll never be in there gain as undergraduates. After this morning we'll e — alumnae." They stopped at Lois' room. Virginia was in there utting on her cap and gown. After Lois' departure he had kept the room, bare as it was — she had not othered to bring up things for so short a time — as ,er study room. "Good morning children," she said, jabbing a hat in through her cap. "Have you got your Lit ?" The sound of the familiar words made Elsa and ihirley fly at her with protesting shrieks. "Don't spoil us," said Elsa. "We just had our xpressions all made to order — latest and correct style or Commencement morning." "Too bad about your expressions," returned Jinny. Is my cap on straight?" There was no mirror in lie dismantled room. "Let me fix it," said Shirley, administering a few ats and pokes; she knew Jinny was missing Lois' ttle attentions to her general welfare. But "Come on or we'll be late!" Virginia burst out, ulling away and starting for the door. Elsa and hirley followed. William and Babbie joined them — ^many Seniors ad already gone down, many more were on the way. "hey crowded into the elevator and descended. Well, the procession started. It wound across the impus ; it finally entejied the Chapel and fell in with le notes of the march that was rumbling from the rgan. The audience clapped and clapped for the raduating class as a whole, for individuals in it, for le Faculty, and at last for the Celebrity whose dis- nguished presence made the occasion more brilliant. Everybody knows what a college commencement is ke. This one was not different from them all. The latform was banked with flowers and on it sat the i62 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES Faculty in academic robes. There was one figure among them which all eyes sought in reverence and love — that of the President Emeritus, whose wisdom and goodness have been Elmira's inspiration for so many years. It was to him that the Celebrity, when he began to speak, paid his first tribute, as did all the others in their hearts, even though the lips were silent. The long service wore itself through. The usual hymns were sung, the degrees conferred, the hoods given, the honors announced. Finally, with the multi- tude on their feet, the Alma Mater was started. It went ringing through the old chapel sweeter than ever to the Seniors who knew they would never sing it all together again. After the service and the dispersal of the crowd many of the girls lingered to claim some of their flowers which had been used for decorating the plat- form in the chapel. Virginia had some American beauties there, but that was all, she thought. The rest were at her home. She took her roses, and was walking off when somebody called her back. "Here's something else. Jinny. It must have come late and they put it in here when they couldn't find you," said the Sophomore who had had charge of arranging the flowers. Virginia turned in surprise, and they put into her hands — a bunch of violets from Lois. That night she slept up at the College, in Lois' room. The doors of all the rooms on Senior Hall had been open during the evening, the girls lingering together, pausing long in the packing of their trunks. Now nearly all had gone to bed, but the light was still on in the corridor. Virginia lay in the cot in Lois' room alone, with the door open. She had been a long time in Elsa's and Shirley's room where the five of them, who had been such close friends, had had a long never-to-be-forgotten talk. Now it was neces- ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 163 sary to sleep. But Jinny was wakeful. So were other people apparently, for presently several Juniors, secure in the fact that college was over for the year, came to the Octagon railing and sang together. Doubtless they were calling it their first "Senior sing." Their voices rose to Jinny's ears : "Where oh, where are the grave old Seniors? Where oh, where are the grave old Seniors? Where oh, where are the grave old Seniors? Safe now in the wide, wide world! "They've gone out from their Alma Mater, They've gone out from their Alma Mater, They've gone out from their Alma Mater, Safe now in the wide, wide world ! "By and by we'll go out for to meet them, By and by we'll go out for to meet them, By and by we'll go out for to meet them. Safe now in the wide, wide world." EPILOGUE: DEPARTURE. Even though they were as yet by no means empty, the halls had already taken on, subtly, a look of bare- ness, which was emphasized by the deepening green that met the eye ever more luxuriantly as one passed the windows. Exhibiting an equal disintegration within, the doors of room after room stood open; from the pink or green or blue walls the pictures and banners had been removed and were helping to fill the packing cases that ranged substantially along the cor- ridors. Indeed every door had on one side a trunk, on the other a packing box, and in and out of the doors, bending over the trunks, making quick trips up and down the corridors were girls in not very fresh gingham shirt waist suits and with roughened hair. The very atmosphere was pervaded by a feeling of — "Can I finish in time for the next train?" For no one was anxious for the distinction of being the last to go. There was a good deal of noise — a, confusion of trunks thundering along on trucks, voices calling practical questions and answers. In the air was float- ing dust that could not be entirely dispelled by the breeze, warm yet fresh, that stole in through the windows. It needed only the addition of the clean, soapy smell of newly washed floors and the reversal of the process in connection with the packing boxes to make the scene resemble the first Saturday morning in the fall. The setting was the same, but the feel- ing was very different. 164 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES 165 Albert, large and Scandinavian, bore off one trunk after another as they were filled and locked. Willie obligingly hammered in nails that would be very hard to pull out. Mr. Locker — strange and weird circumstance — was about in the daylight. No one could quite make out why. It was the finishing touch needed to make the impression perfect — that of an old order changing, giving place to a new. Some- how, after meeting him in the sunlight without his lantern, one felt it necessary, in order to regain a sense of balance, to look out on the lawn and see "Ed" with a rake and wheelbarrow placidly working, unmoved by change. As the half hours flew by the confusion did not decrease, but instead was augmented by a new ele- ment, one that had been present by suggestion though not in reality before. Here and there among the crumpled gingham-gowned figures and the well- groomed mothers folding up dresses in an approved style, appeared girls in travelling suits carrying heavy dress-suit cases. Brief good-byes were said, unim- portant ones, between underclassmen, that included such parting admonitions as : "Be sure to write to me during the vacation." — "If you go to the mountains send me your address." — "See you at Silver Bay" — etc. Good-byes were said, that would have been important if they had not been overshadowed by such others — These last were behind closed doors. In Senior Hall there was an equal confusion but not an equal nonchalance. The disturbance, however, took the form, chiefly, of a strained vagueness. Here there was hurry, too. A dozen times Shirley Brooke emerged apparently from the bottom of her trunk asking anyone who happened to be passing near how she should ever manage to finish in time for the twelve- thirty train. The person passing always said she didn't know, and added that she hoped Shirley would i66 ELMIRA COLLEGE STORIES miss the train; as for herself she must go at four- thirteen. Virginia Danvers, although she had no packing to do, was everywhere, helping or hindering as she saw fit, being said good-bye to by half the college, holding herself in readiness to escort any number of little processions down the back way to the station. Susie Randon toiled up to Senior Hall, and meeting Jinny outside of Lois' room timidly held out her hand. Jinny kissed her — "Come back soon," she said, "and come down and call on me when you do. I shan't be liking to come up to college very much then, you know." Soon after this the little processions, the most of them anxious and sober, began to set out. Some went down Main Street to the Erie station and some went over the railroad bridge to the Lackawanna. Which- ever way they went you could always tell who in them were to embark on this train. These never carried any burden, not even a slender umbrella. As they went, one after another, the summer calm began to descend upon the campus. It is always a deeper green, having a richer abundance of foliage and tufted lawn, in the midsummer season. That change had come before this. Now came stealing in an impression of depopulation. It began to look lone- some. So many girls in all the years had gone and left it dreaming there ! They continued to go. At noon Elsa, Jinny, Bab- bie and William started out with Shirley. Her baggage would not go around so they took turns carrying it. In their minds as they walked along the quiet street was the thought of the first break in the little group that had loved one another so much, of Lois' going. This was the second. By nightfall— this very nightfall — each one would have gone a different way! Odd disconnected thoughts surged W^f. .S E M J; at 3 O -2 ~< ELMIRA COLEfeEGE STORIES 167 up, which they hadn't remembered for years. As she took her turn at carrying Shirley's suit-case Elsa suddenly recalled how when they were Freshmen she and Shirley had got up before the rising bell and swept their room, to the horror of the Dean next whom they lived, and their own later horror. Now she pidced a thread from Shirley's coat sleeve. It was a pretty coat. She had helped Shirley buy it. She would not know whether the silk facing wore well or not. Very, very soon they were at the station ; and then it was all over in a few moments. Jinny attended to checking Shirley's trunks. The girls stood together the few last minutes in silence. TTien, when the long train thundered in, Shirley stumbled up the steps. Her section was in the last car, and she went to the rear platform and stood in the doorway. "I hope you'll get the four-thirteen, Elsa," she said. "Remember to fold your evening coat the way I taught you." "All right," Elsa gulped. The train began to move. Then Jinny recovered her voice, and she gave, alone, at the top of her lungs the remarkable yell the girls had made up long ago when Shirley first came to college, to typify her enthusiasm for her native state. No one but Jinny could have remembered its complications. But as the train slid away she finished it in the middle of the track. "Oregonia ! Wow !" And the last they saw of Shirley she was laughing. * * * * By late afternoon the campus lay very still, sweet and leafy, with golden patches on the green, so quiet that the splash of the fountain could easily be heard. Brooding on and on in her venerable age, maternal, loving, she waited, undisturbed in her dream, for the return of her children. L'ENVOI: HYMN TO THE CAMPUS. The dawn awaking lifts her misty veil, And shows thee, sparkled o'er with jewels pale; I love the morning's glory in thy trees, And in the lake where trembling cloudlets sail. I love the noonday sun upon thy breast, When even the wind sinks to a breathless rest. When all thy verdure shimmers in the heat. And golden all-pervading calm seems best. I love the light of that low-hanging star. That in a violet gloaming shines so far To the west, and silvers lawn and leaves and lake, And makes thee fairer than the fairest are ! EaiD, i68