I

The October sun was shining brightly down on the Bryn Mawr maples when Jane and her father first walked under the arch of Pembroke Hall, where Agnes was awaiting them. Jane thought Bryn Mawr was very beautiful. Much more beautiful than the pictures. The most beautiful place, indeed, that she had ever seen.

“Let’s look it over, Jane,” said Mr. Ward, “before we go in.” They strolled on, arm in arm, down the gravel walk beyond.

The campus stretched fresh and green before them. On one hand it terminated in a group of grey stone buildings, hung with English ivy. On the other it extended past a row of breeze blown maples to an abrupt decline, where the ground dropped off down a grassy hillside. In that direction you could see the rolling Pennsylvania country for miles and miles. Jane had never lived among hills. She thought the view was very lovely.

They passed some groups of girls, walking in twos and threes on the gravel path. They were laughing and chattering together and they paid no attention whatever to Jane and her father. Other girls were sitting, here and there, under the maples. Four or five ran out of a building, that Jane knew from the pictures must be Merion, and almost bumped into them. They were dressed in bright red gym suits, with red corduroy skirts, and they carried hockey sticks. They cantered across the campus toward the hillside, making a bright patch of colour against the green as they ran.

Pembroke Hall, as they returned to it, looked very big and important. Jane drew a little nearer to her father as they entered the front door. It seemed quite deserted for a moment. Then a coloured maid, in a neat black dress and apron, came out from a little room under the stairs. She said she would tell the warden. “The warden” sounded a bit forbidding, Jane thought. Rather like a prison. But when she appeared she proved to be a nice-looking girl with dark brown hair, not much older than Isabel. She shook hands with Jane’s father and told them how to find Jane’s room. It was on the second story, in the middle of the corridor.

Jane and Jane’s father walked alone up the wooden stairs. In the upper hall they met some more girls, laughing and shouting, hanging about the open doors of bedrooms. Inside the rooms was confusion twice confounded. Open trunks and scattered books and dishes and clothing flung on chairs. An odour of cooking chocolate permeated the air.

Agnes was waiting for them in the three-room suite. It looked very small to Jane, but otherwise just as it had in the catalogue. There was a little study with an open fireplace and a window-seat that commanded the campus, and two tiny bedrooms, opening off it. Agnes’s trunk was already unpacked. Agnes had come yesterday, straight from the steamer. She had already been out, exploring the country. A great vase of Michaelmas daisies was on the study table.

“Well, girls,” said Jane’s father, “this is great.”

It was great, thought Jane. It was much nicer than she had ever imagined. She didn’t feel shy any longer, now she had seen Agnes.

Agnes had taken her advanced standing examination in French that morning. It was easy, she said. Much easier than entrance.

Jane sat down on the window seat and gazed out over the campus. It looked very tranquil and pleasant. Yet exciting, too, with all those different girls, that seemed so much at home, walking about as if they owned the place. No one seemed to be watching them, as in school. No one was telling them what to do. As Jane looked six girls came out from under the arch. They were carrying a picnic basket and a steamer rug and several cushions and they wore green gym suits and corduroy skirts, just like the red ones Jane had seen before. They hung about under a big cherry tree under the window for a minute and they were all singing. Jane could catch the words by leaning out, around the ivy.

“Once there dwelt captiously a stern papa.
Likewise with him sojourned, daughter and ma.
Daughter’s minority tritely was spent,
To a prep boarding school, glumly she went.
One day the crisis came, outcome of years,
Father and mother firm, daughter in tears,
With stern progenitors, hotly she pled,
Lined up her arguments, this is what she said:
‘I don’t want to go to Vassar, I can’t bear to think of Smith.’ ”

They were strolling off across the campus, now, but Jane could still hear the words of the song.

“ ‘I’ve no earthly use for Radcliffe, Wellesley’s charms are merest myth,
Only spooks go to Ann Arbor, Leland Stanford’s much too far.’ ”

Their fresh young voices rose in a final wail in the middle distance.

“ ‘I don’t want to go to col⁠—lege, if⁠—I can’t⁠—go⁠—to⁠—Bryn⁠—Mawr!’ ”

“That’s a nice song,” said Jane excitedly.

“They sing all the time,” said Agnes. “The Seniors sing on the steps of Taylor Hall after dinner.”

“I’m going to love this,” said Jane.

Her father looked very much pleased.

“I hope you do, kid,” he said heartily. “And I’m sure you will. Jane’s had a pretty poor summer, Agnes.”

Agnes knew all about Jane’s summer. Jane had written her about André, just as soon as she could bear to put it down on paper. Agnes had sent her an awfully nice letter. She looked very sympathetic now.

“You must look out for her, Agnes,” said Jane’s father.

“I don’t think she’ll need much looking out for,” said Agnes. “This is Jane’s kind of place.”

Jane was sure it was, even at the long Freshman supper table in Pembroke, which was very terrifying. Jane sat between her father and Agnes. On Agnes’s other side was the warden and beyond her father sat a little dark-eyed Freshman from Gloversville, New York. Her name was Marion Park. She talked very politely to Jane’s father throughout the meal.

“That’s a bright kid,” Jane’s father said, as they left the table. “I bet she’ll amount to something some day.” Jane felt that she and Agnes would like Marion Park.

The Seniors were singing on Taylor steps just as Agnes had prophesied. Jane and her father and Agnes strolled up and down in the gathering twilight and listened to them. There were lots of girls about, more than a hundred, Jane thought, all in light summer dresses, walking up and down under the maple trees, occasionally lining up in a great semicircle before the steps, joining the Seniors in a song. Some of the songs were awfully funny.

“If your cranium⁠—is a vacuum⁠—and you’d like to learn
How an intellect⁠—you can cultivate⁠—from the smallest germ,
On the management⁠—of the universe⁠—if your hopes you stake,
Or a treatise⁠—on the ineffable⁠—you propose to make,
If you contemplate⁠—making politics⁠—your exclusive aim,
And are looking for⁠—some coadjutor⁠—in your little game,
And in short if there⁠—should be anything⁠—that you fail to know,
To the Sophomore⁠—to the Sophomore⁠—go⁠—go⁠—go!”

Jane’s father thought the songs were awfully funny, too.

He laughed quite as much over them as Jane and Agnes did.

“Bright girls,” he said. “Nice bright girls.”

That was just what they were, thought Jane. And her kind. Like Agnes. Not at all like Flora and Muriel, whom she loved of course and who had written to her only last week from Farmington, but who she didn’t feel would fit into Bryn Mawr very well. They were just⁠—different.

Agnes came into her bedroom that night in her cotton crepe kimono, just before she turned out the light. Jane was sitting up in her little wooden bed.

“Open the window, Agnes,” said Jane. “I like this place. I’m going to like it a lot.”

Agnes opened the window in silence. Dear old Agnes⁠—it was fun to be rooming with her! But Jane hadn’t forgotten. She hadn’t forgotten one bit. She sat there in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown, with her hair braided tightly in two straight pigtails, looking very like the little Jane that used to run up Pine Street to meet André under the Water Works Tower. She hadn’t forgotten, but she wasn’t the same little Jane, in spite of appearances. She was beginning to learn that the world was wide.

“Since I can’t marry André,” she said solemnly, “I’d rather be here than anywhere else.”

II

“It’s funny,” said Jane to Agnes. “All the years you’re trying to get into college you think it’s the work that counts. When you get there you see it’s the people.”

Jane and Agnes were sitting on their window-seat, looking out over the gnarled branches of the cherry tree. It was an afternoon in late January. The sun was sinking behind the stripped boughs of the maples and the campus was covered with snow. Jane and Agnes had just finished their midyear examinations. They had taken Minor Latin that morning. And English two days ago. And Biology the day before that. They were pretty sure that they had passed them all. Now they had five days of vacation before the second semester began.

“The work counts a lot,” said Agnes.

Jane wondered if the work counted more for Agnes than it did for her. Agnes was continuing to be terribly bright. She expected to take a job, when she graduated, and she was hoping to write, on the side. Agnes was writing now, all the time. Stories that she sometimes sent to magazines. Jane thought they were awfully good, though the editors always sent them back with rejection slips, Agnes was never discouraged. She just went on writing.

Jane never did much of anything, except just enough work to keep up in her courses. She loved the General English and she liked Horace and she found the Biology awfully interesting. She didn’t think, though, that she was going to enjoy cutting up rabbits, much, next semester. Angleworms were different. They seemed born to suffer. On fish hooks and in robins’ beaks if not in laboratories. Little soft furry rabbits⁠—that was different.

Jane liked all her work and she liked her professors, much better than any of the teachers that she had ever had at Miss Milgrim’s. Still⁠—she never applied herself like Agnes. It was too much fun to take long rambling walks over the wooded countryside with friendly classmates, and make tea in the dormitory, and get up hall plays, and sit up half the night on somebody’s window-seat, talking about⁠—well, almost anything. Beowulf or the Freshman show, or whether there really was an omniscient God that heard your prayers, or the funny thing that had happened in the Livy lecture when⁠—Sometimes Jane thought, very solemnly, that she would never really be serious. Serious as a young woman ought to be who had the advantage of a college education and lived in a world where there was so much to be done.

President M. Carey Thomas always had a great deal to say to the students about the advantage of a college education and she was always calling their attention to the opportunities for women’s work that were opening up in the world. Jane felt a little guilty when she listened to her.

President M. Carey Thomas spoke to the students every day in chapel, after the morning hymn and the reading from the Bible and the Quaker prayer. Jane always went to chapel for she simply loved to hear her. She loved to look at her, too. President Thomas was very beautiful. She stood up behind the reading desk in her black silk gown with the blue velvet Ph. D. stripes on its floating sleeves and her little black mortar board on her dark auburn hair. Her face was very tranquil and serene. The auburn hair was curly and rippled smoothly back from her forehead. Her mouth was firm and her chin was proud and her dark brown eyes could look very wise and persuasive. When she laughed, as she often did, there were funny friendly little lines about them in the corners.

“How lovely she looks!” Jane always thought. It was strange that Miss Thomas’s beauty always made Jane think, for a passing moment, of Flora’s mother. Flora’s mother⁠—who was so beautiful too, in such a different way. Beautiful with hair of burnished gold tightly coiffed on her distinguished little head, and gowns of rippling silk and wraps of clinging velvet, and pink cheeks with dimples, and eyes that danced and smiled, but could look very wistful, too, and romantic and sometimes very sad, like windows through which you could see down into her very soul. Miss Thomas’s eyes were like windows, too, but the soul inside was very different.

Flora’s mother’s soul was like a rose-lit room, a little intimate interior where gay and charming and tender things were bound to happen. Miss Thomas’s soul was like a vast arena, a battleground, Jane sometimes thought, where strangely impersonal wars were waged with a curiously personal ardour. Moreover, Miss Thomas could shut her windows. Flora’s mother’s were always wide open. Inviting, unprotected. You could see exactly what went on inside. But Miss Thomas could draw down the blinds, and sometimes did, when things displeased her. Then her face grew very cold and austere, but no less beautiful. A wise, wilful face, that made you understand just how she had accomplished so much, and feel that it was terribly important to do just what she wished you to do and help her make the world the place she thought it ought to be.

Jane came to know Miss Thomas’s face very well and she never tired of looking at it. She came to know her views very well, too, and it always made her feel a little unworthy to hear them. Miss Thomas spoke to the students of women’s rights and women’s suffrage and women’s work for temperance. She spoke to them of education and economic independence and their duty, as educated women, to make their contribution to the world of knowledge. She spoke with eloquence and conviction and a curiously childlike and disarming enthusiasm. Jane always felt very conscience-stricken because she knew, in her heart, that she would never do anything about all of this, that the seed was falling, as far as she was concerned, on barren ground.

Miss Thomas read from the Bible, too. Always very beautiful passages that she read very beautifully. Sometimes the echo of them lingered in Jane’s mind, long after Miss Thomas had closed the book and the Quaker prayer had been said, and Miss Thomas was talking on quite mundane topics.

“She speaks with the tongue of men and angels,” Jane often thought, as she listened and looked at the upturned faces of the students all around her. “Doth it profit her nothing?” The adolescent audience seemed dreadfully unworthy of the eloquence. Jane couldn’t believe that her generation would ever grow up to be great and forceful and wise, like the generation that had preceded them. But Miss Thomas’s confidence in the power of youth seemed to remain unshaken. She was never tired of directing it. Agnes said that was why she was a great college president.

“She works,” said Agnes, “to make what she believes in come true. You can’t do more than that.”

That was what Agnes did, in her small way, and Marion Park, too, who had turned out to be quite as nice as she looked. But did Jane? Jane often wondered. She couldn’t see her life as a crusade⁠—grievous as the wrongs might be in a world that needed them righted. Listening to Agnes and Marion Park, Jane often felt just as frivolous as Flora and Muriel.

At home, in the Christmas holidays, however, listening once more to her mother and Isabel, going out to parties where she tried not to be shy, missing André so dreadfully at every turn that nothing else seemed really to count at all, Jane had realized, of course, that she was all on Miss Thomas’s side. Life must be more important than this, she thought. There must be things for even a woman to do that would be interesting and significant. She had only to look at Flora and Muriel, comparing their dance programs in a dressing-room door, to feel just a little smug and condescending. But back at Bryn Mawr, among the people who had definite plans for concrete accomplishment, she felt again very trivial and purposeless. She didn’t really worry a bit as to whether or no she ever voted and she didn’t want to work for her living and really, she only cared about pleasing André and growing up into the kind of a girl he’d like to be with and talk to and love and marry. It was very confusing. At home she felt like an infant Susan B. Anthony. She had aired her views on women’s rights with unaccustomed vigor, at the breakfast table Isabel had derided her.

“I hope you’re satisfied, John,” her mother had said. “She’s a dreadful little bluestocking already.”

But her father had only laughed.

“The blue will come out in the wash,” he had prophesied cheerfully. “I doubt if it’s a fast colour.”

Jane doubted it, too, as she sat on the window-seat with Agnes. Agnes had the Latin examination paper in her hand.

“We might go over it with the trot,” she said, “and see what we got wrong.”

“Oh, Agnes!” said Jane. “It’s a lovely day. Let’s go for a sleigh ride. We’ll have time before supper. You go and get Marion and I’ll call up the livery stable and order a cutter.”

III

“Next year,” said Agnes lazily, stretching her long limbs beneath the budding cherry tree, “I’m going to begin Greek.”

Jane thought she would like to begin Greek, too. It made her feel awfully illiterate to have to skip the quotations she bumped into in English and French books. But she knew she would never have the stamina to do it. The alphabet was too discouraging.

“Agnes,” she said, “it makes me tired to listen to you. I’m going to take French and Philosophy and English.”

“I’m going to take an elective in Narrative Writing,” said Agnes. “I’m going to learn to write if it kills me.”

Jane contemplated the white froth of the cherry blossoms against the stainless sky.

“This place is heaven,” she said.

The captain of the Freshman basketball team sauntered up to them across the green lawn.

“I wish you two would get out and practise with the team,” she said.

“Well⁠—we won’t,” said Agnes obligingly.

“We’re intellectuals,” explained Jane sweetly. “Sit down, Mugsy, and look at the cherry blossoms.”

Mugsy dropped down cross-legged on the grass.

“You’d be good, if you’d try,” she said persuasively.

Agnes shook her head.

“Our arms and legs don’t work,” she said cheerfully.

“Only our brains,” said Jane.

“Oh⁠—honestly!” said Mugsy.

“But they work very well,” said Agnes.

“Agnes’s do,” said Jane. “You know she’s got two scholarships. They’ll be announced tomorrow.”

Mugsy looked pleasantly impressed.

“Just the same,” she said, “it wouldn’t hurt you to get out and hustle for the class.”

“We never hustle,” said Jane. “We achieve our ends with quiet dignity⁠—”

Mugsy arose in wrath.

“You make me sick,” she said, with perfect amity, and strolled off across the campus.

“This place is so nice,” said Jane, returning to the contemplation of the cherry blossoms. “You can insult your dearest friends with perfect impunity.”

“There’s Marion,” said Agnes.

Marion approached, Livy in hand. She waved two letters at Jane.

“Mail for me?” said Jane. Marion tossed the envelopes into Jane’s lap and passed on, toward Taylor Hall. The letters were from her mother and Isabel. Jane opened Isabel’s with a faint frown. Letters from home were not very inspiriting. Except her father’s. Her eyes ran down the closely written pages.

“Good gracious!” she said.

“What’s the matter?” asked Agnes.

“Great heavens!” said Jane.

“What’s happened?” asked Agnes.

“Isabel’s engaged!” said Jane, and turned the page. “Oh, mercy! It’s a secret! Don’t you write home about it, Aggie!”

“Who’s the man?” asked Agnes.

“I haven’t come to him yet, but I gather he’s a god.” Jane turned another page. “She’s awfully happy. He sounds perfectly wonderful.”

“Who is it?” asked Agnes.

Jane turned another page.

“Oh⁠—for heaven’s sake!” she said. “It’s Robin Bridges.”

“Robin Bridges?” questioned Agnes. Agnes didn’t know many people.

“Oh, yes. You know. The fat boy. He’s been underfoot for years. Small eyes and spectacles. Too many teeth. Nice and jolly, though. He plays a good tennis game.”

“When are they going to be married?” asked Agnes.

“She doesn’t say, but she wants me to be maid of honour.” Jane’s eyes continued to peruse the letter. “Rosalie’s going to be bride’s matron. Just us two. A yellow wedding. Oh⁠—here she says⁠—this autumn. September. She does sound happy.” Jane’s voice was just a little wistful.

“How old is Isabel?” asked Agnes. Perhaps her thoughts were following Jane’s.

“Oh⁠—awfully old,” said Jane. “Twenty-three, last January.” She opened her mother’s letter. “Let’s see how Mamma takes it.” She continued to read in silence.

“Well⁠—how does she?” asked Agnes.

“She thinks it’s grand,” said Jane. “She says he’s a dear boy. Boy! Why, Agnes, he’s all of thirty! As if I didn’t know Robin! She says it’s very suitable. She says Papa went to Harvard with his father. She says Isabel has a beautiful sapphire. She says the engagement’s going to be announced May first. She says they’ve begun on the trousseau already and she’s going to take Isabel to New York to get her underclothes.”

“How romantic,” commented Agnes. “There’s a postscript on your lap.”

Jane picked up the second sheet. She read it very slowly.

“She says it’s going to be very hard to give up her dear daughter and she says⁠—Oh, Agnes, she says⁠—she says⁠—that⁠—that they want me home next winter because they’ll be all alone.”

“Don’t you listen to them!” cried Agnes excitedly.

Jane looked very much disturbed.

“It’s awfully hard not to listen to Mamma,” she said.

“Don’t you do it!” said Agnes. “You got here, now you just stay!”

“Papa got me here,” said Jane.

“Well, he’ll keep you here, if you put it up to him,” said Agnes.

Jane thought perhaps he would.

“Don’t you let them put it over on you!” said Agnes.

“It must be awfully hard,” said Jane, “to give up your children.”

“Don’t talk like that!” said Agnes. “Why do people have children?”

“I suppose,” said Jane soberly, “because they love each other.”

“Well⁠—we don’t ask to be born, do we?” said Agnes. “Just you stand firm, Jane.”

Jane looked a little doubtful.

“You gave up André,” said Agnes. “I should hope that was enough.”

A little spasm of pain passed over Jane’s sober face.

“This⁠—this isn’t like giving up André,” she said quietly.

“No,” said Agnes, “but it’s one more thing. You’ve got to do what you want to some of the time.”

Jane wondered if you ever really did. Life seemed terribly complicated. She rose to her feet.

“Come walk with me to the Pike,” she said. “I want to wire Isabel.”

Agnes rose in her turn.

“Jane,” she said, “don’t tell me you’ve given up already!”

“No,” said Jane very seriously. “No. I haven’t. But families are difficult. I never know⁠—what to do.”

She didn’t know any better that night, as she lay wide awake in her little wooden bed. Miss Thomas would say⁠—take your education. Her mother would say⁠—honour your parents. Jane thought she honoured her parents and she knew she didn’t want an education, really. Not enough to fight for it. What she wanted was liberty. But was even liberty worth the fighting for? Jane hated to fight. But perhaps, her father? He was something to tie to. Jane honoured him. She honoured him more than anyone, really. Except André. Her father would see her through. He liked people to be free. Her father⁠—Anyway there were two more months to this semester. Jane fell asleep at last with a final thought for Isabel. Isabel⁠—who had a beautiful sapphire⁠—and was happy with Robin⁠—fat funny Robin⁠—with spectacles⁠—who was suitable⁠—and thirty⁠—so he could marry Isabel⁠—when he wanted to⁠—without anyone making a fuss⁠—

IV

“It’s grand,” said Agnes, “to think you’re really here. I can’t get used to it.”

“I felt like a dog to leave them,” said Jane.

They were sitting out under the maple row in the bright October sunshine. The leaves overhead were incredibly golden. The October sky looked very high and hard and blue. A stiff west wind was blowing and the leaves were fluttering down all around them in the gale. Golden maple leaves twisting and twirling and drifting in every direction. The tops of the trees were already bare.

“That’s nonsense,” said Agnes. “You have to live your own life.”

You did, of course, but just the same Jane had felt it was almost impossible to take the train to Bryn Mawr the week after Isabel’s wedding. Her mother had been very sweet about that wedding and very sorry to lose Isabel. Her father had been very sorry, too. He had come out of Isabel’s bedroom, when he went up to say goodbye to her after the reception, choking and blowing his nose. He had squeezed Jane’s hand very hard on the staircase, where she stood watching Isabel throw her bouquet. Under the awning, a few minutes later, in the midst of the laughing, jostling crowd, waiting for Isabel and Robin to rush madly in a shower of rice from the front door to the shelter of the expectant brougham, Jane knew just how he had felt. Her own eyes were full of tears as she saw the brougham, absurdly festooned with bows of satin ribbon, disappear down Pine Street. Incredible to think that Isabel was married. That she had left home forever.

That very evening, over the haphazard supper, mainly compounded of leftover sandwiches and remnants of caterer’s cake, Mrs. Ward had begun on Bryn Mawr.

“How you can think of leaving your father and me at a moment like this⁠—” she said.

“I thought it was decided, Lizzie,” Jane’s father interrupted.

Jane bit into an anchovy sandwich in silence, then discarded it in favour of a macaroon.

“How you can want to waste any more time in that ridiculous college,” said Mrs. Ward, “instead of coming home and making a début with the girls your own age, friends you’ve had all your life⁠—”

“Minnie,” said Mr. Ward, “do you think you could get me a cup of coffee? Lizzie⁠—do we have to go over all this again?”

“Flora and Muriel will be grown up and married before you come home,” prophesied Mrs. Ward gloomily. “You’ll come out with a lot of girls you don’t know⁠—years younger than yourself⁠—”

“Flora and Muriel,” said Jane indifferently, “aren’t coming out this year, after all. They’re going back to Farmington.” Muriel had told her yesterday. She hadn’t thought to mention it at home.

“Flora and Muriel,” said her mother incredulously, “are going back to Farmington?”

Jane nodded and passed her father the cream.

“Why?” asked her mother.

“Muriel wants to be with Flora,” said Jane, “and Flora’s mother doesn’t feel up to a début this winter. You know she⁠—she hasn’t been very well.”

Jane didn’t want to say quite all that Muriel had told her about Flora’s mother. In a moment, however, she observed that discretion was not necessary.

“I shouldn’t think she would be,” said her mother tartly. “I always knew how it would end. Lily Furness is a little fool and always has been.” She looked eagerly over at Jane’s father. “I don’t blame Bert Lancaster for getting tired of it.”

“He’s been dancing attendance, now, for four years and more, and what does he get out of it? I shouldn’t think she would feel very well, and I’m not at all surprised that she doesn’t want Flora on her hands. She’s got all she can do to hold Bert enough to keep up appearances. Why her husband didn’t put a stop to it long ago, before it got to this pass⁠—”

“Lizzie!” said Jane’s father with a glance at Jane. “Minnie, I’d like another cup of coffee.”

Jane felt she had unconsciously dragged a very effective herring across the scent. Her mother had forgotten Bryn Mawr. Her thoughts were busily employed on more congenial topics.

“So Lily Furness doesn’t want Flora home this winter,” she said dreamily. “Well⁠—I don’t wonder. A great girl of nineteen in the drawing-room doesn’t make it any easier to keep up the illusion.”

“Pass me a ladyfinger,” said Jane’s father.

There was a moment’s pause.

“Well,” said Jane’s mother at last, “if Flora and Muriel aren’t going to come out I suppose you might just as well be in Bryn Mawr as anywhere else for one more year.”

Jane could hardly believe her ears. She threw a startled glance at her father. He was draining his coffee cup with a slightly sardonic smile.

“But⁠—leaving you and father,” began Jane conscientiously.

“You don’t think very much of your father and me,” said Mrs. Ward, with a sigh. She rose from the table. “This house is a sight,” she said. “Minnie, get the dead flowers out of the way tonight. The men will come to pack the wedding presents in the morning.” She moved toward the door. “If there’s any punch left, keep it on ice.” She paused on the threshold to look back at Jane’s father. Her face suddenly softened and looked a little wistful. “Didn’t Isabel look lovely?” she said.

“She did, indeed,” said Jane’s father, rising in his turn.

“Robin’s a sweet boy,” said Jane’s mother. “I hope⁠—”

She paused inarticulately and looked up a little helplessly in her husband’s face.

“I hope it, too, Lizzie,” he said very tenderly. Incredibly, he kissed her. Jane, staring at them in amazement, felt her eyes fill suddenly with tears. That was when she had felt like a dog to leave them.

V

“My Gawd!” said Agnes. And Agnes never swore. She was staring at the letter held open in her hand. Jane had just brought it upstairs, as she came in for tea. Marion was kneeling on the window-seat, looking out at the afternoon sunshine slanting palely over the March campus.

“What is it?” cried Jane. She paused, teakettle in hand, at the door.

“Scribner’s⁠—has⁠—taken⁠—my⁠—story!” said Agnes solemnly.

Jane dropped the teakettle.

“Agnes!” she cried.

“They’ve sent me a check for one⁠—hundred⁠—and⁠—fifty⁠—dollars!” said Agnes. “Jane! It can’t be true! I must have died and gone to heaven.”

“Let me see it!” cried Jane.

There it was⁠—the little green slip. One hundred and fifty dollars.

Jane and Marion could hardly believe their eyes. They all had tea together. They had tea together almost every afternoon, but this was a festival. They made a laurel wreath out of a strand of potted ivy and crowned Agnes’s triumphant head. Jane began to quote Byron. They had just reached the Romantic Poets in General English.

“ ‘Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story,
The days of our youth are the days of our glory,
And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty
Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty!’

There’s your ivy, darling, we haven’t any myrtle, but⁠—”

“Don’t you believe it,” said Agnes. “Byron was wrong. He was a funny man, anyway. I’d give up anything⁠—anything in the world⁠—just to write.”

“Maybe you won’t have to give up anything,” said Jane. “You write awfully well, now. Maybe you’ll have your cake and eat it, too. Byron did,” she added very wisely. “All the cake there was.”

“I’m not a bit like Byron,” said Agnes very seriously. “I’m not at all romantic. I just want to accomplish.”

Marion nodded her head soberly as if she understood. There it was, again. Accomplishment. That thing for which Jane could never muster up any enthusiasm. Jane just wanted to live along and be happy. Live along with nice funny people who were doing interesting things and told you about them. Like Agnes and Marion. And André, who had always told her so much. Nice funny people who thought you were nice and funny, too.

Jane liked her work, though. Jane liked it awfully. She could really read French, now, almost as well as English, and she had loved the lectures on Shakespeare and she was thrilled by the Romantic Poets. She always did a lot of outside reading and she had learned pages of poetry by heart. Nevertheless she never got very good marks. Not marks like Agnes and Marion. It was because she couldn’t be bothered with learning grammar and dates and irrelevant facts that didn’t interest her. She had missed that entire question in the English midyears paper on the clauses of Shakespeare’s will. Why should anyone remember the clauses of Shakespeare’s will? Jane couldn’t be bothered with them. Not when she could curl up on the Pembroke window-seat and learn Romeo and Juliet by heart. Jane thought Romeo and Juliet was the most beautiful thing that she had ever read. She loved to repeat it aloud when she was alone in her bed at night or striding over the Bryn Mawr countryside with Agnes and Marion.

“ ‘What lady’s that, which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?’
‘I know not, sir.’
‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.’ ”

Lovely sounds⁠—lovely phrases!

“ ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound!
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!’ ”

What fun to know lines like that! To have them always with you, like toys in your pocket, to play with when you were lonely.

“ ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’ ”

Who would learn the clauses of Shakespeare’s will? Agnes and Marion had, however.

Philosophy was simpler. Philosophy was very easy to learn. It was all about just what you’d thought yourself, one time or another, after you’d begun to grow up. It was strange to think that everyone had always thought about the same things, down the ages. God and man and the world. Herself and Sophocles. Agnes and Plato. And felt the same things, too. Romeo and Juliet. “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” That was what Isabel had done, when André went to France. Maybe, now she had Robin, she understood.

“Let’s go for a walk,” said Agnes.

Jane jumped to her feet. There would be mud underfoot but all the brooks would be running fast and the stripped tree branches would be tossing in the mad March wind, and the sun would be bright, and the sky would be blue, and perhaps they would find the first hepatica.

They would go for a walk.

VI

The Commencement procession was forming in front of the gymnasium. The day was hot and sultry, with the promise of rain in the air. Jane and Agnes and Marion were all Sophomore marshals. They were dressed in crisp white shirtwaists and long duck skirts and they had on their caps and gowns. They each held a little white baton, with a white and yellow bow on it, sacred insignia of office. The Seniors were in cap and gown, too, and all of the faculty. The staid professors looked strangely picturesque, standing about on the thick green turf, with their brilliant hoods of red and blue and purple silk. One scarlet gown from the University of London made a splash of vivid colour against the emerald lawn. The Seniors’ hoods were all white and yellow, trimmed with rabbit fur. President Thomas was talking to the commencement speaker. Some college trustees were clustered in a little group around her. Funny old men, thought Jane! They looked very flushed and hot in their black frock coats under academic dress. Some of them were fanning themselves with their mortar boards.

Jane was busy getting the Seniors into line. She knew nearly all of them well. She couldn’t imagine how the college was going to get along next year without the Class of ’96. She couldn’t imagine, either, how she was going to get along without the college. It was settled, now. She was not coming back.

Her father had done his best for her. They had talked about nothing else all Easter vacation. Except Isabel’s baby, which was coming in July. Her mother was determined that she should “come out” with Flora and Muriel. Nothing else mattered. Her father had championed her cause wholeheartedly. But Jane had detected in his final surrender a certain note of relief.

“Two years,” he said, “has been a long time to live without you, kid. In this big house.”

The procession was taking form and substance at last. The trustees had lined up at its head. Miss Thomas had fallen in behind them with the speaker. Jane slipped into her place with Agnes just behind the wardens and in front of the Seniors. The procession began to move slowly along the gravel walk.

The day was really terribly hot and the air was lifeless. The maple trees in the distance looked very round and symmetrical, almost like toy trees. Their boughs were thick with leaves. The shadows beneath them were round and symmetrical, too, and very dark. The air was sweet with the odour of newly cut grass.

The procession wound deliberately across the lawn. The black-gowned figures looked very dignified and austere in the summer sun. The bits of silken colour flashed and shimmered, here and there, with the movement of their wearers. The campus seemed strangely empty, with all its inhabitants gathered into this little procession. Jane suddenly remembered her Keats.

“What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel.
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?”

The morn was pious and the great, grey, ivied buildings quite deserted. The sky overhead was softly blue. Beyond the maple row, however, great puffy white and silver thunderheads were rolling up in the west. It would surely rain before nightfall.

The procession turned into Taylor Hall. It shuffled down the tiled corridor, past the great bust of Juno at the head of the passage, and slowly ascended the stairs. The chapel was decorated with the Commencement daisy chain. It was very hot and very full of people. Fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, all fanning themselves and craning their necks to look at the Seniors as they passed by. The faculty took their places on the platform. The Seniors filled the first six rows of chairs. Jane stood in line with the other marshals, facing the audience. The Head Marshal raised her baton. Everyone sat down at once. The visiting clergyman rose to make his prayer.

Jane didn’t listen much. She felt very hot and very, very sleepy. She had been up at dawn and out in the fields at six picking the daisies for the chain. It had been hard to get up but it was lots of fun to pick the daisies. The day had been cool, then, and the meadows were wet with dew. Jane had loved wading about in the long damp grass with Agnes and Marion, plucking great armfuls of the white and yellow flowers. They had gathered thousands in less than two hours. Whole fields were white with them. Great green fields, sloping up against the morning sky, with big white patches of dazzling daisies, shining in the morning sun. They picked until their fingers were red and sore.

“ ‘The meanest flower that grows,’ ” said Agnes, struggling with a fibrous stem, “in the words of the worthy Wordsworth.”

“Worthy, but wordy,” said Jane. She had found the “Prelude” rather long. “You could make an epigram out of that.”

Agnes had done so at once.

“Wordsworth was a worthy man.
He wrote as much as poet can.
But if you try to read him through
You’ll find him rather wordy, too.”

Jane and Marion had both laughed uproariously. It made Jane laugh, now, sleepy as she was and right in the middle of the prayer, just to think of it. Agnes was terribly funny. It made Jane feel very sad to think that she would never laugh again like that, over nothing at all, with Agnes and Marion. She was going out into a world where, she was quite certain, nothing would ever seem as irresistibly funny as everything did at Bryn Mawr. She was going out to grow up and live at home and come out with Flora and Muriel and be a good daughter to her father and mother and a sister to Isabel and a sister-in-law to Robin and an aunt, grotesquely enough, to Isabel’s baby. She thought she would much rather stay on in Pembroke and just be a Bryn Mawr Junior with no entangling alliances, whatever.

The prayer was over and the Commencement speaker was rising to his feet. Jane stifled a yawn. The heat was really terrific. Every window was open and Jane could see far out over the campus and the maple row to the rolling Pennsylvania hills beneath the thunder heads. What a lovely place to have to leave for Pine Street. She would carry it with her, though, back to the flat, sandy shores of Lake Michigan. She would remember, always, this paradise of flowering shrub and tree, of sweet green spaces and grey ivied walls. The memory would be a sanctuary. She was momentarily grateful to the wordy Wordsworth for an unforgettable fragment.

“They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

Jane knew all about the inward eye. But she thanked the poet for the phrase. If her education had done nothing else for her, Jane reflected, it had provided her with an apt quotation for every romantic emotion.

The Commencement exercises dragged wearily on. Jane couldn’t remember, when she tried to concentrate, just what the speaker had said his subject was. He seemed to be talking about Opportunity. Jane didn’t hear him define it. He had a lot to say, somewhere toward the end, about Preparation for Wifehood and Motherhood. That wouldn’t please Miss Thomas. She took those states of grace decidedly for granted. He sat down at last and Miss Thomas arose in his place. Jane listened dreamily. Not to the words but to the familiar cadence of that admired voice. She might never hear it again, like this from a rostrum. Miss Thomas was very brief. The dreary routine of giving out degrees began. The Seniors advanced to the platform, six at a time, received their parchments and descended. Miss Thomas’s voice went steadily on. “By the authority vested in the trustees of Bryn Mawr College by the State of Pennsylvania and by them vested in me,” and so forth and so on, for each little group, ending up with the presentation of the parchment and the final impressive phrase “I admit you to the degree of Bachelor of Arts of Bryn Mawr College and to all rights, dignities, and privileges thereto appertaining.” Rights, dignities, and privileges that would never be Jane’s. It was over at last.

The procession reformed and moved slowly out of the chapel. On the stairs of Taylor Jane became suddenly conscious of the change in the weather. The wind was up and great drops of rain were pattering down on Taylor steps. The air felt clean and cold. The caterer’s men were hurriedly dragging the tables set for the Commencement luncheon into the shelter of Pembroke. It couldn’t be out on the campus, after all. And Jane couldn’t take that last walk she had planned with Agnes and Marion, under the maple trees and down into the hollow. The procession had broken and scattered. Students and faculty, alike, were scurrying, with gowns upturned over silken hoods, to the protection of Pembroke Arch. Jane and Agnes ran there, hand in hand. There was nothing to do, now, but snatch a hurried luncheon and run back to her room to change for the train. Agnes was going to New York at three o’clock. She had taken a job with Scribner’s Magazine for the summer. Jane was leaving for the West a little later. Her last glimpse of the campus would be in the rain.