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.”