Smith College Stories Part 12

Yours faithfully, ARNOLD M. RITCH.

IX

FROM MISS MARION HUNTER TO MRS. HENRY STOCKTON

_Northampton, Ma.s.s., Nov. 7, 189-._

MY DEAR MRS. STOCKTON: As you have certainly not forgotten that I a.s.sured you in the early fall of my interest, professionally and personally, in your daughter, you will need no further explanation, nor be at all alarmed, when I tell you that Elizabeth is a little over-worked of late. In the house with her as I am, I see that she is trying to carry a little too much of our unfortunately famous "social life" in connection with her studies, where she is unwilling to lose a high grade. She entered so well prepared that she has nothing to fear from a short absence, and as she tells me that she does not sleep well at all of late, she will have no difficulty in getting an honorable furlough. Two weeks or so of rest and freedom from strain will set her up perfectly, I have no doubt, and she can return with perfect safety to her work, which is, I repeat, quite satisfactory.

Yours very cordially, MARION HUNTER.

X

FROM MRS. HENRY STOCKTON TO MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON (_Telegram_)

_Lowell, Ma.s.s., Nov. 8._

Come home immediately will arrange with college and explain myself.

MOTHER.

XI

FROM MISS MARION HUNTER TO MISS CONSTANCE JACKSON

_Northampton, Ma.s.s., Nov. 10, 189-._

DEAR CON: I'm afraid it will be impossible for me to accept your seductive invitation for Thanksgiving. We're pulling the girls up a little sharply this year, and it would hardly do for me to come back late. But it _would_ be good to hear a little music once more!

It was rather odd that you should have mentioned that idiotic affair of mine in Paris--the hero of it has just written me a long letter _apropos_ of his nephew, who wants to marry that little Miss Stockton, whose Harvard cousin you knew so well. That portly squire of dames is actually simple and straightforward enough to suggest that I precipitate the damsel into the expectant arms of his nephew and heir-apparent--he is used to getting his own way, certainly, and he writes a rather attractive letter. I owe him much (as you know) and if Elizabeth, who is a dear little thing and far too nice for the crowd she's getting in with--you knew Carol Sawyer, didn't you?--has such a weak-kneed interest in college as to be turned out of the way by a sight of the destined young gentleman, I fancy she would not have remained long with us in any case. She's a pretty creature and had cunning ways--I shall miss her in the house. For I don't believe she'll come back; she's not at all strong, and her parents are much worried about her health. It is more than probable that the Home will prove her sphere.

Personally, I don't mind stating that I would it were mine. When I consider how my days are spent----

You might not believe it, but they grow stupider and stupider.

Perhaps I've been at it a bit too long, but I never saw such papers as these freshmen give one.

And they have begun singing four hymns in succession on Sunday morning! It's very hard--why they should select _Abide with Me_ and _Lead, Kindly Light_ for morning exercises and wail them both through to the bitter end every Sunday in the year is one of the local mysteries.

I must get at my papers, they cover everything. Remember me to Mr.

Jackson; it was very kind of him to suggest it, but I must wait till Christmas for the Opera, I'm afraid. If I should not come back next year--and it is more than possible that I shan't--I may be in Boston.

I hope in that case you won't have gone away.

Yours always, M. I. HUNTER.

XII

FROM MISS ELIZABETH STOCKTON TO MISS CAROLYN SAWYER

_Lowell, Nov. 20._

CAROL DEAR: I am writing in a great hurry, as I have an engagement at four, to tell you that I have decided not to return to-day, as I intended. Will you get the key of 32 from Mrs. Driscoll, as Kitty goes home over Sunday, so it will be locked, and get out my mink collarette and my silver toilet things and my blanket wrapper, and I think there is twenty dollars in my handkerchief case. I am extremely disturbed and confused--when one is really responsible for anything one feels very much disturbed. Of course, I don't believe a word of it--it's all folly and nonsense--but still, six years is a long time. Of course, you don't know at all what I mean, dear, and I'm not sure I do either.

I forgot to say that I'm probably not coming back to college this year. Mamma feels very worried about my health--you know I didn't sleep very well nights, and I used to dream about Livy. Anyway, she and Papa are going abroad early in the spring, and really, Carol, a college education isn't everything. If I were going to teach, you know, it would be different, but you see I was almost finished at Mrs.

Meade's--I was taking advanced work--and it isn't as if I had had only the college preparation. Then, if we go abroad, I must do something with my French. You know there was simply _no_ chance to practise conversation in such a large cla.s.s, and I was forgetting it, which Arnold thinks would be a pity. He speaks very fine French himself.

Then, you see, there'll be all the galleries and everything and the Sistine Madonna and the cathedrals--they're so educative--everybody admits that. It's hardly to be supposed that Geometry and Livy are really going to be as broadening to me as a year of travel with Papa and Mamma, is it? And though I never said anything to you about it, I really have felt for some time that there was something a little narrow about the college. They seem to think it is about all there is of life, you know, with the funny little dances and the teas and all that. Even that dear Miss Hunter is really _un peu gatee_ with it all--she thinks, I believe, that a college education is all there is for anybody. She told Mamma that I wasn't well--she wanted me to keep my high grade. Oh! Carol! there are better things than grades! Life is a very much bigger thing than the campus even! I think, dear, that one really ought to consider very frankly just what we intend to do with our lives--if we are going to marry, we ought to try to make ourselves cultivated and broad-minded, and in every way worthy to be--Oh, Carol, dearest, I'm terribly happy! It isn't settled, of course: I am utterly amazed that they all seem to think it is, but it isn't. Only probably if I still feel as I do now, when we get back, I shall ask you, dear, what we promised each other--to be my bridesmaid--the first one! I'm thinking of asking Sally and Grace and Eleanor--all our old set at Mrs. Meade's, you know. I think that pink, with a deep rose for hats and sashes, would look awfully well on all of you, don't you! It seems a long time since I was in Northampton: the girls seem very young and terribly serious over queer little lessons--or else trying to play they're interested in each other. Arnold says he thinks the att.i.tude of so many women is bound to be unhealthy, and even in some cases a little morbid. I think he is quite right, don't you? After all, girls need some one besides themselves. I always thought that Mabel Towne was very bad for Katharine. Will you send, too, my Sh.e.l.ley and my selections from Keats? The way I neglected my reading--real reading, you know--oh! _c'etait affreux!_ I'm learning the loveliest song--Arnold is very fond of it:

_Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie?

L'heure s'enfuit, le jour succede au jour.

Rose ce soir, demain fletrie-- Comment vis-tu, toi qui n'as pas d'amour?_

I'm going out now for a walk. I'm sure you'll like Arnold--I think you said you met him. He doesn't remember you. Remember me to all the juniors I met, and if you see Ethel Henderson, tell her I'll write to her when I get time. Excuse this pointed pen--I'm learning to use it.

Arnold hates a stub.

Yours always, BETTY.

THE SIXTH STORY

_A FAMILY AFFAIR_

VI

A FAMILY AFFAIR

There are Jacksons and Jacksons. As everybody knows, many, possibly most, of those who bear that t.i.tle might as well have been called Jones or Robinson; on the other hand, I am told that certain Ma.s.sachusetts families of that name will, on solicitation, admit it to be their belief that Eve was a Cabot and Adam a Jackson. Without a.s.serting that she was personally convinced of this great fact, it is necessary to state that Susan was of the last-named variety of Jackson. She was distinctly democratic, however, and rather strong-willed, and for both of these reasons she came to college. It did not entirely please the family: neither of her sisters had gone, and her brothers in particular were against it. It is probable that she would have been decoyed from her plan had it not been that her cousin, Constance Quincy Jackson, had been for a year one of the young a.s.sistants who dash like meteors through the catalogue and disappear mysteriously, just as astronomers have begun to place them, into the obscurity whence they came.

Constance, like Susan, had been persistent, and was studying at Oxford before the family had quite made up its mind how to regard her; later, she frequented other and American inst.i.tutions of learning and bore off formidable degrees therefrom, and at about that time it was decided that she was remarkably brilliant, and that her much commended thesis on the Essential Somethingness of Something or Other was quite properly to be ranked with her great-grandfather's dissertation on the Immortality of the Soul.

She would do very well; she could be relied on; and entrusted to her and further armed with letters of introduction to the social magnates of the vicinity--which, I regret to say, she neglected to present till her soph.o.m.ore year--Susan began her career. Of the eminent success of this career, it is not the purpose of this story to treat. Beginning as freshman vice-president, she immediately identified herself with the leading set of her cla.s.s, and in her soph.o.m.ore year was already one of the prominent students in the college. She was one of Phi Kappa's earliest acquisitions, and belonged to three or four lesser societies, social and semi-educational; she had been on the freshman Team; she was twice a member of the Council; in her senior year she was literary editor of the _Monthly_ and cla.s.s president, besides taking a prominent part in Dramatics. She fulfilled all these duties most acceptably, taking at the same time a very high rank in her cla.s.ses: in one department, indeed, her work was p.r.o.nounced practically perfect by a somewhat exigent professor. And in addition, she was well born, well bred, and well dressed, and considered by her most enthusiastic admirers the handsomest girl in the college, though this was by no means the universal opinion.

You might imagine that Miss Jackson was therefore intolerably conceited, but in this you would err. She took no particular credit to herself for her standard of work; she had a keen mind, and had been taught to concentrate it, and her grandfather, her father, and two uncles had successively led their cla.s.ses at Harvard. It seemed perfectly natural to her to be told that she was the one young woman on whose shoulders a golf cape looked really dignified and graceful--had not her grandmother and her great-aunt been famed for their "camel's-hair-shawl shoulders"? A somewhat commanding manner and a very keen-sighted social policy had given her a prominence that she was conscious of having done nothing to discredit; and as she had been quite accustomed to see those about her in positions of authority, and had learned to lay just the proper amount of emphasis on adverse criticism, she steered her way with a signal success on the perilous sea of popularity. Her idea of the four years had been to do everything there was to be done as well as any one could do it, and she was not a person accustomed to consider failure.

I mentioned at the beginning of this story the two cla.s.ses of Jacksons. Emphatically of the former and unimportant variety was Elaine Susan Jackson of Troy, New York. Mr. Jackson kept a confectionery shop and ice cream parlor, going to his business early in the morning and returning late in the evening. This he did because he was a quiet-loving man, and his home was a noisy one. Mrs. Jackson was a managing, dictatorial woman, with an unexpected sentimental vein which she nourished on love-stories and exhausted there. From these books she had culled the names of her daughters--Elaine, Veronica, and Doris; but prudence impelled her to add to these the names of her husband's three sisters--a triumph of maternal foresight over aesthetic taste--and they stood in the family Bible, Elaine Susan, Veronica Sarah, and Doris Hannah.

Mr. Jackson was not a sentimentalist himself, and read nothing but the paper, sitting placidly behind the peanut-brittle and chocolate mice, and relapsing sometimes into absolute idleness for hours together, deep in contemplation, perhaps, possibly dozing--n.o.body ever knew. At such times he regarded the entrance of customers as an unwelcome intrusion and was accustomed to hurry them, if juvenile, into undue precipitance of choice. From this even quiet he emerged seldom but effectively: when Veronica entertained the unattractive young men she called "the boys," later than eleven o'clock, when Doris went to the theatre more than twice a week, or when they had purchased garments of a nature more than usually unsuitable and p.r.o.nounced. Then Mr. Jackson spoke, and after domestic whirlwinds and fires the still voice of an otherwise doubtful head of the family became the voice of authority.

Elaine gave him no trouble of this sort. She did not care for young men, and she never went to the theatre. Her clothes, when she had any choice in the matter, were of the plainest, and she had never teased her father for candy since she began to read, which was at a very early age. _I Say No, or the Love-letter Answered_, was her first consciously studied book, and between ten and fifteen she devoured more novels than most people get into a lifetime. Incidentally she read poetry--she got books of it for prizes at school--and one afternoon she sandwiched the _Golden Treasury_ between two detective stories. She did not care for her mother's friends, gossiping, vulgar women, and she loathed her sisters'. She had a sharp tongue, and as parental discipline was of the slightest, she criticised them all impartially with the result that she was cordially disliked by everybody she knew--a feeling she returned with interest. She found two or three ardent friends at school and was very happy with them for a time, but she was terribly exacting, and demanded an allegiance so intense and unquestioning that one by one they drifted away into other groups and left her.

In her second year at the high school they read the _Idylls of the King_, and she discovered her name and saw in one shame-filled second the idiotic bad taste of it--Elaine Susan! She imagined the lily maid of Astolat behind her father's counter and became so abased in her own mind that the school found her more haughty and disagreeable than ever. From that moment she signed her name E. Susan Jackson and requested to be called Susan. This met the approval of the teachers, and as the schoolgirls did not hold much conversation with her, the change was not a difficult one.