Chapter I: I

A park, a lake, a red pillar box, a postman on a bicycle wearing a funny flat helmet, a tall iron fence with an opening through which the taxi passed. Nora had arrived at Saint Ethelfreda College in London. It was exactly what an English college should be: red brick covered with ivy, a stretch of that vivid green grass one always suspected on postcards, and flowers, actually the snapdragons which since Newman’s ‘Apologia’ one expected to find in English college gardens. The maid at the door, with her crisp cap and apron and stiffly starched movements, was a perfect specimen of the English servant, like those in the novel Nora had read on the boat coming over.

‘Miss Talbot is expecting you, Miss. Won’t you step this way, Miss?’

Nora was ushered into a large room, very chilly and damp even the first week of October, with all of the windows opening out into the pleasant garden. A small, brown-haired woman, the resident tutor, Miss Talbot, rose to shake hands with Miss Deming, the pupil of that unusual woman, Professor Steele, who had visited Saint Ethelfreda.

Miss Talbot was all smiles, too many of them. Nora wished that the resident tutor’s habit of cocking her head on one side like a robin and opening her blue eyes very wide did not tempt her to laughter. On the way to her room Nora was introduced to several severe-looking women in college gowns who must be dons. They didn’t seem to recognize the American’s donnishness. Evidently short hair didn’t impress the English as a sign of a highly developed intellect.

The room set aside for the new American student was delightful, with windows overlooking the garden and the park beyond, where through the trees Nora could see sheep grazing. A fireplace and a scuttle of coals. The delights of an open fire would be hers. A desk near the window, a big armchair, a couch with an India print cover—everything most comfortable surely. A knock at the door, and the maid she had seen downstairs entered.

‘I trust everything’s all right, Miss. You want a bit of fire? London is damp to the Americans, we find. We’ve had American young ladies here before, Miss. I always take care of them.’

The maid, whose name was Clara, made Nora feel apologetic for her careless, undistinguished American speech.

‘Now,’ Clara went on, when the coals began to burn, ‘I’m going to bring up your tea. Miss Talbot said I might. I said you’d be tired after the weary journey up to London.’

At the sound of the dinner bell the Saint Ethelfreda students gathered in the chilly common room. Miss Talbot hurriedly introduced Nora to the gaunt young woman beside her.

‘Miss South from New Zealand. Like two colonials, really.’

Nora looked at Miss South. Then her glance travelled to a girl standing apart from the others, a girl with heavy black hair held by a large jewelled pin, and deeply circled eyes, her wrinkled dress in startling contrast to the English, all correctly attired for a formal eight o’clock dinner.

‘Mademoiselle Lafleur, your next-door neighbor,’ murmured Miss Talbot.

The French girl’s tragic eyes lighted up for a moment. Miss Talbot put out a stiff arm through which she slipped her hand, Nora was seized by the New-Zealander, and a long procession of dons and students, two by two, marched into the hall.

The dining-hall soared into heights of new oak imitating some Elizabethan pattern, Nora suspected, and the girls seated at the rows of tables appeared insignificant in the vastness of space over them.

Nora’s neighbors ate steadily and swiftly, talking very little. All of them had red cheeks. Like Peggotty’s in ‘David Copperfield,’ as brilliant as a red velvet pincushion. Nora had heard about English complexions. It was the dampness, which at the moment hung like a grey cloud around the chandeliers suspended from the lofty ceiling, now obscured. These girls were so bony, too. Their arms, their necks, their cheeks. Not one morsel of superfluous flesh.

From across the table she caught the word hockey—the hockey matches. Hockey, not yet introduced at Petersfield, had already invaded some of the American colleges, Nora told them.

‘It’s a topping game,’ ventured a quiet little girl with a shy smile. ‘Topping.’

Miss Talbot rose, Mademoiselle Lafleur took her arm, and the procession marched back to the common room. The solemnity of the ceremony was really delicious. The English girls began passing coffee. It was vile. One sip almost choked Nora. She saw the French girl slide her cup under the sofa. The dons, raw-boned and talking hockey, took two cups.

Nora, back in her room, closed the windows to shut out the clammy chill of English air, and shook some coal over the fire. The common room had kept the shivers chasing up and down her backbone.

A knock on her door. A girl who looked like Fuzzy Leland at Petersfield, but much taller and thinner, entered.

‘Won’t you come to cocoa at ten o’clock?’ she said. ‘In my room at the end of the corridor.’

Petersfield all over again. Even to night feeds. But something hot to drink would be grateful before getting into bed. The sheets were always damp. Some one on the boat had warned her never to sleep in an English bed without slipping a watch between the sheets to see if the glass got damp. But if it did, what next? Nora decided it was more comfortable not to know too much about the sheets.

In the tall girl’s room—Sheldon her name was, and English girls called one another by last names just like boys—five girls sat on the floor in front of a bright fire. They were very friendly to the strange American, but they didn’t talk much. Long—long pauses. The cocoa made a comforting warm trickle down Nora’s clammy interior.

In bed that night Nora prayed that she wouldn’t have to live her freshman year over again at thirty-one. It would be worse than reincarnation. Those cocoa parties! Professor Steele was responsible for her coming to Saint Ethelfreda. She had selected Miss Talbot as a reliable caretaker for her dear pupil. Nora had counted on cheap lodgings near the British Museum and the School of Economics before Miss Steele got started on the lurid horrors of an unheated room, or at best one with a reeking gas-fire, presided over by a slatternly landlady. She also preached to Nora the duty of studying English university women at first hand. Her pupil, with her deceptive youth, would be accepted as one of the girls and could find out if they, in spite of their seriousness, were any cleverer than the frivolous American girl who had brains, even while she concealed them.

So here Nora was. Her room was very still. She could hear the ducks on the lake and the striking of a church bell. Saint Ethelfreda College, after a cocoa party, had betaken itself to slumber or to study, instead of conversing loudly in the corridors, romping and squealing in the Petersfield fashion. An American had to admit that the English respected quiet.

At breakfast Annette Lafleur slipped into the vacant chair beside Nora. All around her sat the English girls fresh from a morning tub, their hair brushed back into a tight bun in a straight line with their shiny noses. The French girl wore the tumbled dress of the night before. The jewelled pin, which still upheld her sable coils, had an uncertain, trembling tilt. Beside the snappy alertness of her neighbors, she looked as if she had passed a troubled, sleepless night. She stirred a cup of tea languidly, and looked around her. The English were quietly consuming frightful quantities of porridge.

Opposite Nora sat the same quiet little hockey enthusiast to whom Nora had spoken at dinner. She came from Dorsetshire, and her name by some strange twist was Dorset, Lucy Dorset.

‘Going to play in the match Saturday, Dorset?’ called out the cocoa-party hostess of the night before.

‘Hockey—always that hockey,’ muttered the French girl. She turned to Nora. ‘I want to talk to you about America. Some day soon? This afternoon maybe? I know many Americans.’

Nora and the New-Zealander walked through the park after breakfast, the feeble sun lighting up the brown of the London trees and the red buses lumbering past them. Miss South leaped on to the proper bus, Nora clumsily catching on behind her.

At the British Museum they passed the guardian policemen at the outer gate, the sight-seers already assembling, and the guards within. The signatures of the Saint Ethelfreda officers gave Nora immediate access to the reading-room sanctities.

‘That much done,’ sighed Miss South, leading the way to University College and then to the School of Economics to arrange about lectures.

On her return, Nora knocked on the door next to hers. Mademoiselle Lafleur, wrapped in a big white shawl, was leaning over a cold grate rubbing her hands together.

‘Haven’t you lit your fire yet?’ Nora asked.

The French girl shook her head. In the centre of the mantel shelf above her was a little shrine covered with gaily colored silk for a picture of Napoleon as a young man, draped with the tricolor. Beside him nodded two white carnations in a tipsy little vase. Mademoiselle Lafleur observed the direction of Nora’s gaze.

‘The Savior of France,’ she said. ‘I pray for the coming of his successor to save my poor country. A strong man——’

‘I think a descendant of the Napoleon family lives in America.’ Nora was conscious of the inappropriateness of her matter-of-fact tone. ‘At least I have a vague memory——’

‘If it could be a ruler with Napoleon’s blood,’ sighed Annette Lafleur.

When Nora suggested tea in her room in front of a blazing fire, the great melancholy eyes lit up with a faint ray of response. The sight of Clara bringing in a tray with an abundance of bread and butter, damson preserves, plum cake, and tea for two hungry people, changed her into an eager and normal girl.

‘Beautiful—beautiful.’

‘I’m going to start calling you Annette immediately,’ announced Nora, pouring out fragrant hot tea from a squatty brown earthenware teapot. ‘And please call me Nora.’

‘With pleasure—Nora.’ Annette laughed over her clumsy fumbling with the name. ‘To escape “Mademoiselle.” Mademoiselle—Mademoiselle with these English from morning until night. Like a servant. It is horrible. Miss—Miss—how would they suffer it?’ Annette began to drink her tea, her chair up close to the comforting flames.

Annette began to question her new friend eagerly about the United States. She had met American boys during the war. When the big trucks stopped in front of her country home and the soldiers tried to buy gasoline, she, the only member of her family speaking English, had to talk to them. She had begun filling a note-book with her observations of American men. To draw them out, she made a list of questions.

‘“Do you believe in Platonic love?” That was one of my questions,’ Annette said, looking at Nora with a triumphant and superior air. ‘And always the young American man said yes, he believed in Platonic love.’

‘Of course,’ Nora agreed.

‘Then I decided the American young man is remarkable. Now the Frenchman—of course I love my countrymen best—but no Frenchman believes in Platonic love. And the Englishman—but they are too cold—too frozen to believe in anything about love. The Englishman—I hate that kind of man.’

Nora had hoped there wouldn’t be another cocoa party that night. But there was. This time Annette was invited. Cocoa parties were absolutely new in her experience. She sat perched on a stool before her hostess’s fire staring around her, a quizzical wonder in her eloquent eyes.

In Nora’s room afterward she went off into spasms of amusement. ‘I shall write home,’ she snorted. ‘Cocoa—cocoa party.’ In her mocking tones the words sounded very ridiculous. ‘Oh, my God!’ Annette threw herself face downward on Nora’s couch.

The French girl interspersed all her remarks with free translations of her _mon Dieu_. They flavored her speech like red pepper. Of course the English girls were shocked by her ‘My God,’ which snapped out like a firecracker.

But even more startling was the American student’s announcement that she was taking lectures at the School of Economics. None of them went down there. Somehow it seemed outside the pale of respectability, an un-English place, they had been told. It also brought back too vivid memories of that recent shameful but mercifully brief period when a Labor Government had ruled England, and a coal-miner had donned satin breeches to bow before the King. There seemed to be no radicals at Saint Ethelfreda.

II

Down in the visitors’ room, located with the assistance of Clara, Nora found Ellen Powys. Ellen, very fresh and lovely, with the pink bloom of her new home, looked very English in her broad-brimmed hat, tweed costume, homespun scarf, and chamois gloves.

‘I’ve come to carry you home with me for tea,’ she said, enfolding Nora in a warm embrace. She looked around the bare little room with its hissing gas-fire. ‘Isn’t this the quaintest place? Like an inquisitorial chamber. And I walked through miles and miles of halls to find it.’

Ellen was the mother of four substantial British subjects, waiting to be displayed to Mummy’s American friend in a big cheerful nursery, presided over by a Scotch nurse; two boys and two girls, the youngest a babe of three months. They were beautiful and blond like their parents, with firm hard legs like pillars. Even the small baby promised a stalwart robustness.

‘You see,’ explained Ellen, as they drove away in her two-seater, ‘I’m not clever like Michael. So I took to the baby business. All we can hope is that the children will inherit their father’s brains.’

On Sunday Nora went a second time to the Powys’s Kensington flat, where Michael’s friends working with him on the paper and a pleasant mixture of other people dropped in for supper.

Michael had the same beautiful radiance, but he looked more substantial, and his enthusiasms were tempered by a sobriety and humor which he had not yet developed in his Petersfield days.

‘I expected you’d get over,’ Michael said to Nora. ‘I hope we can be some help to you, Ellen and I. We’ll do what we can.’

The guests began to arrive rapidly. They were gayer than Nora had anticipated, with a careless and informal kindness to the American stranger unlike the studied benevolence of Saint Ethelfreda. In their talk, glancing over various employments and avocations, there was none of that veneration for the arts which characterizes the outsider. Most of them, it appeared, had a recognized place in a chosen craft.

‘Jolly piece of acting you put on last week, Jerry.’ A stout man expanding beyond the confines of his dinner jacket nodded toward an Irish boy stretched out on the floor before the fire.

‘And a jolly bit of writing you spun out for me in “The Londoner,”’ the actor rejoined. ‘It was kind of you, Norris.’

‘The honest overflow of a disciplined heart,’ laughed the other.

Supper was handed out informally to the guests, who stood around in groups balancing plates or sought quiet corners. Nora found herself in a window-seat between an elderly woman whose studio overlooked Hammersmith Bridge and a young journalist who was trying between assignments to write a great novel on the war. Others joined them, talked to Nora, drifted away. Ellen brought up a few people to be introduced to Nora, but she left her guests largely to themselves.

It was the most delightful evening Nora had yet spent in England. She leaped on a bus at a near-by corner, with a new affection for London and for old friends. At the edge of the park near the college gates, she passed two policemen.

‘Good evening, Miss,’ they said with a warming politeness.

Yes, London was a charming place. She sped along, the church bell striking, striking. It must be midnight. She reached the college gates. They were closed. She tried to pull them open. She strained against them. No response. They were locked. The porter’s lodge on the other side was in darkness. She looked around. No one was in sight. She examined the gate. Yes, she could climb over it. She lifted her skirt, placed one foot on the first cross-piece, up and up, now over, and quickly climbed down the other side. Walking up the avenue of beech trees, casting long shadows over the driveway, she remembered that this was Sunday night, Sunday in England, church-going, propriety, a quiet evening at home. The college entrance was locked. Of course it would be. But a light in one of the first-floor windows saved her. She crept over to it, called softly, and Willis, a very serious second-year girl, appeared at the window.

‘I’m locked out,’ Nora said.

‘Of course. It’s past midnight,’ announced Willis.

‘May I climb into your window?’ The window-sill was close to the ground. The only difficulty was in leaping over the flower borders which stretched between.

‘I oughtn’t to let you,’ scolded Willis. ‘If you trample the flowers——’

But Willis was so absorbed in higher mathematics that she had no desire to inquire into the American girl’s irregularity. She said good-night chillily and went on with her work.

The next morning a note in Nora’s post-office box summoned her to Miss Talbot’s room. She knocked on what she thought was the proper door.

‘Come in,’ called a faint voice.

Miss Talbot was seated at the opposite end of her very long room in front of an official table.

‘Will you please go around to the other door,’ suggested Miss Talbot, ‘and not tramp through my sitting-room?’ Nora looked around her, backed out of the room, and found a door marked ‘Office.’ Evidently, Miss Talbot’s room possessed a public and a private entrance.

Nora stood in front of the official table, Miss Talbot not asking her to be seated.

‘I am informed that you were not in the college at closing time last night, Miss Deming. Your entrance later needs some explanation.’

‘I—I didn’t know—that the gates were locked. When I returned——’ Nora felt the black guilt of a small child unable to make the proper explanation to his elders.

‘You did not consult me about any evening engagement, Miss Deming.’

‘You mean that I—if I go out evenings——’

‘Every resident in this college makes no engagement without consulting me,’ Miss Talbot declared.

‘I—I didn’t know,’ Nora faltered.

‘Oh.’ Into Miss Talbot’s exclamation one could read almost anything.

Outside the inquisitorial chamber, Nora realized that Miss Talbot was ignorant of her academic standing in her own country, her age, her years of independence. She must go back and explain. But something held her outside Miss Talbot’s door. Why should she live in this English college without the restrictions of the other students, free of the shackles which held them? The girls had accepted her as one of them. She would not spoil the naturalness of her position.

Her heart still beat with enraged thumps. Her cheeks burned. She remembered now the rancor the young suffer against restraint. So this was what the English girls had to endure.

Annette was delighted at Nora’s experience in bumping her head against the unyielding stone wall of a British Sabbath. She, too, had suffered. But she had her peculiar kind of revenge. Whenever Miss Talbot appeared within her orbit, she muttered under her breath two phrases which she had found in Gaston Leroux: ‘Smirking with the careful charm of a woman a little along in years who relies still on infantine graces,’ and ‘fat smile of importance,’ which was even better.

The English girls called Miss Talbot ‘Tabby,’ and they resented her tyranny as much as did the two foreigners. None of them, however, dared to rebel. Poor Jonesie, an honors student in chemistry, always studying long after midnight, had asked for permission to go to a Bach concert.

‘You will never distinguish yourself by running out at night like a servant girl,’ pronounced Tabby icily.

Jones, on a scholarship and not far enough removed from the servant class to escape the sting in Tabby’s words, had submitted to the decision.

‘She’s a tyrant,’ one of Jonesie’s champions said. ‘It’s power she loves. Poor Jonesie who gets dull working so hard——’

‘If one felt Tabby did it for our good. The way she grins when she says something nasty——’

But Fairfield, a stubby girl from Cheshire, always defended Tabby. ‘She’s clever—awfully clever. You all know that.’ No one disputed Fairfield. All of them had too many sore memories of Tabby’s relentlessly powerful tongue. ‘You’ve got to let Tabby have a little temperament,’ she concluded.

Nora soon discovered that Fairfield was right. Tabby was so much more than a tyrant. At the International Dinner given at the Trafalgar Club, she overheard Miss Talbot talking to a distinguished Frenchman partly in French and partly in English in a brilliant fashion which she realized she at Tabby’s age could never equal. In the candlelight, Tabby, with her firm white neck and shoulders, the brilliant green of her eyes, the delicately shifting color of her face intensified by the rose of her gown, was very handsome, one of the most notable women there. Only as the shades of Saint Ethelfreda drew around her did she become sharp and hard, ruling with a force which none dared question. She had two lives which never crossed each other.

III

Lucy wanted to be Nora’s friend. She gave a light little knock on Nora’s door, lingered over her fire, talked to her about Hardy, the Dorsetshire poet, whose verse stirred her, another Dorsetshire person, as nothing else had. Gradually she told more about herself. She came from a family whose ambition for her was success at the county balls. But she wasn’t a success. She couldn’t be. At dances her hair got wet and stringy. She knew she was awkward. And dancing made her tired—so very tired. She came to college to escape the county balls. Her father had been angry, her mother sad, at their daughter’s failure. But she loved Saint Ethelfreda. And she loved hockey. Hardy and hockey—strange little Lucy.

One night she looked up at Nora with a bird-like glance from her footstool in front of the fire. ‘Do you like Mademoiselle?’ she asked. ‘I’ve seen you talking to her.’

‘I find her very interesting—very different,’ Nora told her.

‘I’m afraid I don’t care for the French. We always have a French girl here at college. They seem very strange. Not like the English. I don’t like people who are different. That’s English, I suppose. We’re narrow, you think?’

‘But I’m different.’

‘In such a nice way,’ interrupted Lucy. ‘You seem so friendly—easy to talk to. Really,’ she added, the courage rising in the depths of scared, blue-green eyes.

There seemed no poetry in the English girls—except Lucy—no imagination. When Annette insisted upon reading aloud her latest discovery in English verse at the cocoa parties, reading it as it should be read—tenderly, with moments of fire, of passion, their red cheeks flushed carmine and they looked down toward their boots. They appeared proud of their lack of emotion, at least their concealment of it, of their regular and studious life at college. They expected to secure posts in a school, good ones if they got ‘firsts’ in the examinations, those eventful examinations, which, at the end of three years, decided their professional standing in life. To be successful students, they eliminated all vanity. Neatness, an almost oppressive soapy cleanliness, they insisted upon, but scraped-back hair and dull woollen dresses under academic gowns were the marks of the serious university woman. They, the daughters of doctors, barristers, schoolmasters, and clergymen in provincial towns, had no curiosity about London. They laughed at the time Nora wasted with sight-seeing. They had been to the Tower and the Zoo. A few of the more spirited had visited Madame Tussaud’s. When necessity took them to East London, they avoided buses which carried one relentlessly through miserable thoroughfares. They used the Underground, bolted out as quickly as they could, and didn’t look around them. They felt a sense of good form in not staring at the misery of others. Out of kindness several of the older girls went with Nora to the City churches like Saint Bartholomew’s, but they disapproved of her choosing a different one each Sunday. They hinted that it seemed too much like church sight-seeing. But Nora told them with a laugh that she was not above such ecclesiastical junketings.

All the political sense the female novelists gave to Englishwomen Nora never discovered at Saint Ethelfreda. Not one of them had attended a session of Parliament. There wasn’t time. They couldn’t understand politics. Conservative, Liberal—they left all that to their fathers. A government election the year before had started the college, so Maggs said, into staging a mock election, in which, even in play, most of Saint Ethelfreda had kept away from Labor. The few votes given all came from day students, London girls, who sported with a mild radicalism. But never the residents from the provinces.

‘Too stodgy and respectable,’ declared Maggs, a new acquaintance of Nora’s, who was Cockney to the marrow.

There were no Socialist Leagues, no arguments about the duty of bearing fatherless children, or of becoming sisters to the unwashed Bolshevists.

When Nora dropped in to visit the history seminars, she kept comparing the English and the American way. Petersfield played more lightly with the mind. It wasted time with college activities, but there was an intensity, an enlivening force in its best moments which she felt Saint Ethelfreda lacked. Here was the daily faithful application, the mature self-direction which flitting American girls seldom arrived at, the solid, honest accomplishment. Balance, restraint—these were the intellectual virtues of Saint Ethelfreda. But the ignorance of contemporary events, the indifference held the students in a sluggish theoretical backwater. They could not translate what they read into terms of the present. Yet was Petersfield any better? She was probably nursing romantic memories of her own college. All college women, possibly, were equally out of the world.

The brilliant students at University College and the School of Economics were generally men. Not all. The short-haired women with masculine dress and the prim Quaker ladies with strong opinions she had met at Professor MacPherson’s Sunday afternoon teas argued boldly about political philosophy with the Hindoos, the eager Jews, the Boer, the Canadians, a Siamese, the New-Zealanders, the Egyptian, the shabby Irish and English. Although they were solidly Labor, they represented delicate shades of distinction hard for an outsider like Nora to catch. Some of them were Fabians, much interested in the Fabian Kindergarten, instituted for the young and faltering in radical thought. Others were Guild Socialists ready to watch the spectacular downfall of the present capitalistic society almost any moment. When Nora carried back these prophecies to her own college, the chemistry don had laughed like a horse, throwing back her head, and screaming, ‘What nonsense!’ Others among Professor MacPherson’s guests, merging Fabianism and Guild Socialism, represented the most subtle and tantalizing of thinkers. But none of them had the middle-class taboos of Saint Ethelfreda, with the belief in the necessity of respectability. How they despised Saint Ethelfreda! Those women!

Michael Powys’s crowd, which Nora met almost every Sunday, were less statistical, less grubby. What brought all of them to Ellen’s little drawing-room was their common belief that a man could be a painter or a journalist and at the same time hope that England could be made a less hopeless hole to live in. They wanted to reconstruct a society shattered by war and still, after eight years, sadly in pieces, so that one could be spiritually comfortable while one fiddled in Queen’s Hall or hurried off the last pages of proof. But all of this seriousness they concealed. To Nora the well-set-up and carefully finished young men were the most graceful product of British civilization. Their perfection of ease, the best American men never succeeded in giving the effect of such undesigned art. The women, young matrons like Ellen, with serene eyes and delicate flower-like bloom, lacked the nervous intensity which wore one out with American women.

But at ten o’clock the porter was beginning to lock the college gates, and Nora had to leave these delightful people warming up to their best conversation to return to another week of porridge, Tabby, and the dons, and table talk of hockey.

IV

London was now held fast in the grip of November fogs. The light October mists were only happy memories. Day after day, when Nora looked out of her window, even the nearest trees were hidden by greyish vapor, and the thick air made her eyes burn and her throat dry. Going to the Museum, she felt as if she were walking in her sleep as she passed from one choking area to another. The water on the pavements, the slimy streets, the sooty air made her spirits sink. She felt as if something were pushing her down to the pavement, and she would never be able to get up again.

In the reading-room the grey clouds floated up to the lofty dome, dropping down upon the men and women huddled in their stalls, and giving to the benevolent attendants in skull caps imprisoned in a sacred inner circle the dark, forbidding obscurity of mischief-loving genii.

When she and Annette went to the theatre in Hammersmith, the fog, like pea-soup the British described it, was so dense that the policemen after the play escorted parties to the Underground. Along the edge of the park they felt their way, touching the iron palings of the fence for guidance. They heard voices near by, but could see no one.

When the fog lifted after five days and a convalescent sun glimmered weakly over the streets, Nora went to the Wallace gallery to see ‘The Laughing Cavalier.’ She found it an amusing pastime to move slowly away from the compelling smile of the merry gentleman in the painting to see how far it could follow her. Farther and farther away she went, the eyes pursuing her with their tantalizing gaiety. Suddenly the laughter was gone. She looked around her. The same pall had fallen over all the neighboring canvases—Reynolds, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Titian, and the rest. The fog had returned and was rapidly filling the gallery. As she passed through the room full of old French clocks, all ticking away with different voices and rhythms in the dimness, they seemed to be closing in upon her, ticking, ticking, in her ears, all around her head, at her back, over her feet. She ran down the staircase to get away, and out into the black chasms of Marylebone High Street.

The next day she was back in the B.M. She had been reading aimlessly for almost two months and had got nowhere. Nineteenth-century England stretched out greater and greater, vast unexplored spaces. One plunge seemed as sensible as another. It really made no difference. Sometimes she stayed away from the reading-room and from her lectures, but the weeks were slipping by, and she had done nothing. If she sat in that grey, airless tomb, an inspiration might suddenly come to her. She had a cold, and her hacking cough made the dried-up old woman in the chair next look up sharply from her copying. She reached in her bag, and brought out a box of lozenges.

‘Here, take this,’ she said crossly. Nora obediently swallowed one, and thanked her.

Another day Nora, writing hard on a new project for a book, toiled with a scratching pen. Screech—screech—it was annoying. Once more her neighbor regarded her with hostility. She handed Nora a thick blotter.

‘I can’t stand that pen of yours,’ she scolded. ‘You write on this.’

Four o’clock. Nora was accomplishing nothing. She would go back to college. She reached her room exhausted, her head aching, her neck stiff. As she sipped her tea in front of the fire, the pounding of heels in the hallway making throbs of pain shoot through her head, she knew that she hated everything at Saint Ethelfreda, everything except Annette and Lucy and Maggs—and dear old Clara who made her fire and brought her beautiful tea every day. Tabby and the other dons—yes, she hated them. They had no feeling. They were so hard—hard. Was it being shut up in a college nunnery which made them like this? Would she—yes, she was afraid that some day she, too——‘Consign me to the watery depths if I get that way,’ she confided to her diary. ‘Make me love the human race, O ye great powers of the universe.’

‘I don’t see how you can live this way,’ protested Annette as she watched her friend start off after breakfast every morning. ‘A system so unbending—I should die, Nora.’

She clapped her hands together for joy when Nora, after dinner, stretched out on her couch, with Annette and Lucy for an audience, before the fire, cursed the B.M. and all the diabolical realms of scholarship.

‘You Americans are delightful!’ cried Annette. ‘So—so complicated. Going off to the B.M. with that bag after breakfast. That Nora, I say—she cares only for books and for working. But now you are delightful—delightful, Nora.’ She rushed over and kissed her friend on both cheeks.

But Lucy was shaking her head. Lucy’s main regret was that she had wasted most of her youth with the county balls. ‘You don’t know, Nora. You’ve done so much. And I—I must work every minute now to make up for all the time I lost. Books—books. I can never get enough. There’s nothing in life equal to good books. They are everything.’

Annette snorted. ‘It is the soul—the heart. An empty heart——’ Annette’s great eyes were lifted toward the ceiling. ‘A heart not loving——In this college there is nothing for the heart—nothing.’

Lucy looked arch. ‘Is it the young men you miss, Annette?’

‘English young men? I do not care for English young men.’ Annette marched out of the room.

‘You know the French,’ hinted Lucy when Annette had closed the door majestically behind her. Lucy had read Balzac the preceding summer and had even peeped into Maupassant’s ‘Une Vie.’ ‘They’re always thinking about young men.’

Poor Lucy! Did she never have shy memories of the young men in Dorset with whom she had danced year after year?

When Nora emerged from the reading-room at noon and found the sun shining, a low pale sun scarcely rising above the grey Georgian houses with yellow blinds in Bedford Square, she often decided not to go back to her work, but to spend the afternoon walking the streets. She was almost happy then. She loved the winding lanes of the City, the mazes of Southwark, the forest of church spires she saw from London Bridge.

But too often at the end of these footsore adventures, there was the old pressure of pain at her neck, the tight ache in her throat. She must be homesick. It was being out of her own country. She wanted Petersfield, Miss Steele, Ruth and Helen, dear Cordelia and the quiet Maronac house near the lake. With her international conception, she had once scoffed at an irrational love of one’s own country. But there was something—you just couldn’t explain it away. She felt it even in the friendliness of Michael’s and Ellen’s drawing-room. The most charming, appealing people, and yet between them and her such fearful gulfs yawned. From the women she felt less separated, but it was the men she wanted to know. The Irish actor—there were several actors; the violinist who played for his friends as he never played in Queen’s Hall; the painter in the Royal College of Art hating his classes the way Margaret Abington had hated hers; the intense man with the streaks of grey in his chrysanthemum-yellow hair, who was on Michael’s paper—it was they who followed her as she ran toward the college gates. But perhaps even more she thought of the men who were nothing. What they did wasn’t what mattered. It was their grace, their careless talk with her, their mere existence she wanted for herself. But they were all English, and removed from her by this silly and accidental fact. She always the stranger. She vowed she would keep away from the supper parties, but the next week she suffered all over again the blend of pleasure and pain.

No one—nothing was to blame. She was tired. She worked too steadily in the B.M. The bad air, and then getting nowhere with her work. She must stay away for a few days and rest. But in the morning she started reading a new book. She was afraid of the silence of her room, broken only by the hard heels of the English girls marching back and forth to and from lectures. She admitted to herself sitting late at night over her dying fire that when she had come to England she had counted on life’s being different for her. New scenes. A fresh existence. Something—changing all the past. The men at Ellen’s—each week the feeling that she would meet some one who——But always the same thing. The Englishmen standing in groups against the wall. ‘Clever American woman,’ they might say. ‘Attractive in an odd way. Almost beautiful, you know.’ These composed Britishers whom Annette hated and Nora found mysteriously different. But never did they and she quite meet on a common understanding. Perhaps if she had not been forced to hurry away so soon after supper——

‘It’s ridiculous—you running back to that old college like a schoolgirl,’ scolded Ellen. ‘Michael could write a letter to that woman—his connection with the paper would impress her. That kind always are impressed that way.’

‘If you like,’ Michael added, smiling at Nora.

But Nora remained firm in asking for no concessions, and each week she had the same sensation of just missing what she most wanted.

Work—doing something. She must keep very busy.

V

On the last Saturday before the Christmas vacation, Maggs, Nora, Annette, and Lucy went to visit the Docks. From the Underground they walked through Shadwell, the district where Michael Powys, as a Cambridge undergraduate, had lived in his vacations. When they started, the sun had shone upon their undertaking, but now the gloom of winter intensified the dreariness of the rows and rows of wretched houses and the dirt of the children playing in the narrow streets.

A guide at the entrance to the Docks conferred with Maggs. He handed over the young women to the foreman of the ivory warehouse. Thousands of elephants’ tusks from East and West Africa, from Asia, from South Africa, lay piled upon the floor. The foreman pointed to one beautiful polished tusk, a creamy, shiny white.

‘Worth two hundred and fifty pounds, that one,’ he informed them.

There were walrus and rhinoceros tusks in the great warehouse, and twisted tusks, at least five feet long, from an Arctic fish, out of which ivory beads were made.

The spice warehouse had the delicious odor which Nora associated with Eastern tales. Nutmegs, cloves, cinnamon, all sent up great columns of pungent sweetness. Wool—rubber—in all stages. Australia, South Africa, Siam, New Zealand, South America. The tropics—frozen seas. These far-off treasures nursed the imagination, freed one from the confining walls of Saint Ethelfreda. Oceans—typhoons—sailors—deserts—caravans—the whole world.

The wine cellars the guide saved for the end, dim, cavernous spaces, the roofs white with the fungus growth from evaporating wine, through which both the guide and his party carried torches which lighted up the rows of fat casks.

But the heavy fog had shut off the river from the Docks, and no boats could land, so the wharves stretched out into nothing.

On the way back to the Underground station, they passed the Shadwell Market. Nora thought herself hardened to misery after almost three months of London. She had learned to hurry past the men without legs sprawled on the pavement who drew pictures with colored chalk and held out ragged caps for pennies. She had seen a wild-eyed man feeding out of a garbage can in Tottenham Court Road. From the steps of the National Gallery she had watched the army of unemployed mass themselves at Trafalgar Square, distribute their handbills, with unutterable woes upon them, and make their terrible speeches. She knew that if she stood in a theatre queue to get a cheap seat in the pit, she must endure the lively business contrived by those who gathered in a few pennies where they could. There were the three blind men led past the queue by a fat boy. They seemed to follow her everywhere. And the organ wheeled up by the red-faced man, who played and sang, while his friend, with iron plates on his heels, did a clog dance. There were whole families trooping past, avoiding the penalties of begging by some pathetic display of feeble wits. Card tricksters, melodramatic monologuists with appeals to heaven, fiddlers, pipers—all of them concluding with the same speech before they passed the hat. They were the London unemployed. The world owed them a living. ‘Only a penny or two, Miss.’

But Nora was not prepared for Shadwell Market filled with Christmas toys. Dolls hung suspended over the crowd of children, beautiful smiling dolls with pink and blue dresses, perambulators for dolls, beds, bureaus, little stoves, boxes of dishes with tiny teapots, Noah’s arks, games, drums, pistols, trumpets, a toy telephone, pails of candy, barrels of nuts, apples, oranges. Around them crowded dirty ragged little girls of eight or ten, carrying pale babies under their shawls. Even little boys carried babies. Women, tugging small children by the hand, showed that there would soon be new babies. Babies—more babies. So the world goes on.

Nora had never seen so many children before. And children in a great flock often bring tears to the eyes, even if they are happy children.

The others stopped to buy some toys for the college Christmas tea. Nora bought dolls, and, when she came to the dirtiest little girls carrying the dirtiest babies, she slipped a doll into their hands.

The next morning in the British Museum, Nora picked up a book Annette had wanted her to read. It was about the emotion of beauty. She read a few pages. Then the book dropped from her hand. She had decided that instant to write a history of women in the textile industries.

VI

Nora was sitting in the drawing-room of Michael Powys’s brother Tom in Felton, two hours out of Manchester. Mrs. Powys, in a setting of heavily stuffed furniture and large oil paintings, was pouring tea. Her fat blonde face had an amusing lack of harmony with her elaborate Paris clothes.

‘I can’t understand why you want to see our mills, Miss Deming. You won’t understand anything about it. I never can. Just fearful noise and queer hot smells. I insisted that we live as far away as possible. All that dirt, you know. Even here the atmosphere is always smoky. Please don’t talk about the mill to Tom when he comes in. He’s so bored by any reference to it. Of course, it’s profitable. But if he hadn’t inherited the business, we could live in London or near by like Michael and Ellen.’

As a preparation for her visit the next morning, Mrs. Powys felt impelled to contribute a few facts. ‘They’re so ungrateful—working-people. The more you do for them, the worse they are. In bad times, my husband has kept his factory going at a loss to himself just to help out his hands. But they never appreciate such things.’

‘Isn’t it also an advantage to an employer to keep his industry from getting disorganized?’ Nora inquired.

‘Not at all. And you’ll be shocked at the way those mill women neglect their children. Off to the mills before their babies are two weeks old. The children grow up wild—hardly know their mothers. If they’d stay home, take care of their houses, and cook proper meals——’

It was useless to bring a ray of light into Mrs. Powys’s dark views of the human beings upon whom her husband’s industry rested.

In the morning Nora motored through hilly country dark with smoke to Mr. Powys’s mill, where the manager conducted her over the various departments, shouting out explanations of the mysteries of cotton manufacture above the din of machinery. He had worked for the Powys family, father and son, for forty years. Splendid men both of them. If their workers did the right thing, they couldn’t have better employers. But with these trade-unions putting wrong ideas in people’s heads and the Labor Party in Parliament shouting nonsense, there was no telling what England was coming to.

On the second day Nora was conducted through another mill by Miss Chapin, a slow-moving, spiritless woman in the Welfare Department, and a friend of Maggs and the girls at the Working-Women’s College near London. They went from one hot, noisy department to another. In the spinning-room Nora found women employed, ring-spinning it was instead of the mules, which required men. Many of the workers were far advanced in pregnancy. And the little ‘doffers’ who took off the full bobbins and put on empty ones appeared very small for the legal fourteen years. Neglect and undernourishment had not made giants of North England people.

Miss Chapin was discouraged about her mill. It belonged to an extensive limited company, with no concern in the industry except its profits. She disapproved of the policy carried out of taking back the mothers of illegitimate children, a bad example for the rest of the girls.

‘The only difference they make is that the unmarried girls have to stop work a month sooner than the others. But they can come back as quick. They bring their babies in here for me to see. It’s seldom they try to get rid of them. I can’t understand it.’

There was much Miss Chapin would never understand. But she did the best she could.

Nora mingled in the noon crowd of mill people hurrying home to their dinner. The women, with their shawls thrown over their heads shuffling along in clogs, were a picturesque novelty to a stranger. Small brothers and sisters came bringing lunches wrapped up in red bandanna handkerchiefs for members of the family who lived too far away from the mills to go home. The babies in the perambulators, potential spinners and weavers, in a community where few children dreamed of a future outside the mills, looked sad to Nora. The rows of stone houses buzzed with the excitement of home-coming workers. A little doffer whom Nora had noticed in the spinning-room smiled at her from a group of children.

‘I seen you in our place,’ she said shyly.

Nora ate a cheerless bun and a hard banana on a chilly bench near the trolley line. The spring sun had been obscured by the dense clouds of smoke which gave the manufacturing community a uniformly drab countenance. Raw winds blew from the sea.

The trolley entered a beautiful valley, with tall chimneys rising above the pale green foliage of early spring. The next mill, unlike the efficiently constructed new building Nora had seen in the morning, was a rambling structure close to a stream, which had evidently in an early day furnished water-power. Miss Gretton, the Welfare Worker, in a light but littered office, was a brown-eyed, enthusiastic woman close to forty. She was attached to her employer, John Alexander, by a lifetime of the finest kind of association. He was a grand old man with four sons just like him. All of them lived within sight of the factory. Four generations of workers had toiled in the mills established by the grandfather of the present owner. His employees were recognized in all the mill towns clustered around Manchester as steady, honest men and women. Old John Alexander got the best of them. He tolerated no looseness. No children born out of wedlock in his mills. One case in fifty years, Miss Gretton said.

The workers stopped to show Nora what they were doing. At piece-rates, this meant the gift of valuable time. But a pleasant spirit of friendliness was evident everywhere. One woman explained her warping; another, handsome and pink-cheeked, her weaving. In a corner a very old man, following an obsolete method of warping, worked alone.

‘He was too old to learn the new ways,’ Miss Gretton explained. ‘He never looks up from his work. I don’t believe he’s seen me all the years I’ve been here.’

In the Welfare Room a young girl brought tea for the visitor. All the mill was taking a few minutes off for afternoon ‘drinking.’ Over their tea Miss Gretton admitted that family mills like hers were rapidly being replaced by the limited companies operating scores of mills, with impersonal, disinterested stockholders. The paternalistic system must give way to some organization where the workers looked out for their own well-being. But the old way, at least their mill, had been so pleasant. Like Miss Chapin she had her discouragements. The evening clubs designed for the improvement of the work-people were not well attended.

‘The cinema and boxing matches—it’s all some of them want. And now the radio. We’ve tried reviving some of the old village customs—the games, the May pole and the May dances. There’s one old man who’s tried to keep them up. But they don’t care. And the reading-clubs and the lectures—what was my father’s life and mine—only a few want them.’

When they parted at the trolley station, Nora, waving from the car until she could see Miss Gretton’s sturdy figure no longer, knew that her book was already begun.

VII

In the British Museum reading-room Nora began over again. All her life she had been preparing herself for the new book. Women—women—their lives—their frustrations—their work. What she had done before was like the background of a tapestry—sky, earth, trees. She was now to weave in the main figures. These she had already started in the dark winter weeks when she thought she was accomplishing nothing.

She wanted to be fair, to observe all sides, to keep her historic perspective. She was pleading no cause, making no case. Perhaps when the facts were gathered, her readers could go farther. But that was not for her. She no longer felt fatigue. Every day showed some trifle finished. More and more hours—stretching out the labor of the day.

At night the immensity of her task lay before her when she tried to sleep, like the vast spaces of the heavens which she had observed with Ruth Ewing back in Petersfield. All those whirling worlds and millions of suns. Numbers, space, time, they went beyond all human comprehension. Hardy’s ‘Two in a Tower,’ which Ruth had sent her at Christmas time. The poetry of the sky. Immeasurable infinity. A big undertaking. It was what one tried to do. All those women—all countries—all ages. The little she could do for England was less than the smallest star. Generations of women spinning—spinning—spinning. In Greece, in Palestine, all over Europe. China, India, Japan—perhaps she would never know much about them. Even in England the Wyf of Bath, the ladies Piers Plowman had chided, Margaret of Shrewsbury—but so many more. Then women the weavers—carders—winders. In her dreams one pale figure after another—stretching on and on—an endless procession—the same unending toil. Spiders—they had become spiders. Long silken threads everywhere. Had she read of a woman changed into a spider? A Greek tale. She was awake.

* * * * *

‘Are you made so, Nora, that in the spring you can shut yourself up in that miserable B.M.?’ inquired Annette sarcastically. ‘Live on books in the spring? The sun so beautiful. The sunshine on my face, my hands—it is as if I, too, were growing like the flowers. The daffodils springing up in the grass. By moonlight I wander down to the lake. Like butterflies fluttering—the daffodils on the edge of the water. Another week, and they will be gone. My poor little Nora. Is it the little old men in the skull caps in that B.M. reading-room she dreams about at night?’ Annette, laughing, bobbed forward and kissed Nora with her double-cheeked French kiss.

‘You don’t think you are working too hard?’ inquired Lucy gently.

At first Nora fought against the pain in her neck which climbed to the top of her head and lay there like a heavy pressing stone and then went down, down her back, until each aching nerve cried out, and she could not sleep. Through a course of spring lectures at the School of Economics given by the most famous historian of industrial England, a man who emerged seldom from his country library, Nora hung on. Each day a little harder than the one before. One morning in May she had to stay in bed.

Matron, the college nurse, said all she needed was rest. She shut Annette and Lucy out of the room. She pushed back the curtains so that the sunshine streamed through wide-open windows, and one could hear the birds singing in the garden, and smell the tang of the earth and the sweetness of the flowers. Nothing but rest. Sleep—sleep once more. One hour after another. The church bells—the clicking heels in the hallway between lectures, and the voices and the strike of balls in the near-by tennis courts.

At last Nora got restless. She wanted to see Annette and Lucy. She must thank Miss Talbot for the irises she had sent. Matron gave her a reluctant smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps you may have a visitor now and then.’

From Clara, Nora first learned that London was not so peaceful as usual. Clara had come in from her walk through her favorite streets, and was making a little fire, now that the chill of evening was coming on.

When she faced around, Nora detected an unnatural excitement in her usually calm eyes. ‘I don’t know what we’re coming to,’ she began. ‘Not even the paper this morning to tell us the news.’ Clara reached for the scuttle and shook it violently over the blazing kindlings. ‘They’ve gone mad—don’t know what they’re doing. Everything’s stopped—the trains they say. And all those dock-men down where you young ladies was——’

‘You mean the miners—that it’s a sympathetic strike——’ Nora in her sick retreat had not seen a paper for days. She sat up in bed and stared at Clara.

‘There’s none o’ my sympathy in it.’ Clara turned with a snap toward Nora. ‘What do they think they’re doin’—London with no milk, butter, nothing. It’s starvation. Like the war. I know how it’ll go.’

Tabby during her frequent short visits had never mentioned the strike. To one suffering from nervous fatigue she was a delightful visitor. She had been ill during the war—a breakdown it was—and she had a skill in darting lightly over inconsequential topics which was both restful and entertaining.

What had prostrated Tabby? Had the war stricken her? One would never know.

To-night, having heard Clara’s excited tones she divined at once what they had been discussing.

‘I hoped you wouldn’t know,’ she said, when she and Nora were alone. ‘But of course that would be impossible.’ Tabby stretched out in the big chair near the fire. She looked very weary, her color gone, her eyes protruding and heavily circled. ‘Things will be patched up,’ she continued. ‘They always are in England, you know. We make no desperate experiments—tearing down the old and beginning all over again. The Labor leaders are already scared. The strike has been too successful—the suddenness and completeness. They could do almost anything if they dared. But they only talk. Every one talks. In a few days we’ll go on the same old way.’

Nora began to tell Tabby about her interrupted book, her visits to industrial England, her months of reading.

‘You are older than most of the students here, Miss Deming?’

‘Yes,’ Nora answered.

‘I thought so.’ Tabby was gazing into the fire. ‘I wonder if our universities will ever be anything but the playing-fields of infants.’

‘I’d forgotten—that we, too, are like that—until I came here. I thought at first we were better—less intellectually provincial—more interested in the broader aspects of learning. But lying here—so many things——’

Tabby had no illusions, then. But why couldn’t she do something—treat the girls like equals—show them her own mind brilliant, clear, relentlessly logical?

Even Annette had caught glimpses of the real Tabby. ‘She talks French like an angel,’ Annette often said. ‘I love her for that. For making my language beautiful—not like the rest of the English.’

Annette was beginning to droop. She longed for Paris. May in Paris. In London, the daffodils had become shrivelled husks on green stems. Before Nora was well enough to go back to the B.M., the general strike was over. The suddenness of the end no one could understand. The strikers assumed an apologetic attitude toward their recent insurrection. Only the miners held out, deserted by the rest, they thought, with no relief in sight. The vague promises of gentlemen—not for them.

VIII

Nora, seated in the taxi beside Annette, was seeing her off to Paris. That morning she had said good-bye to Lucy, fighting back her tears. The year was over. Annette, waving toward the red-brick buildings visible through the trees until they were hidden from her sight, threw herself against Nora and sobbed.

‘Dear Saint Ethelfreda, dear Saint Ethelfreda. Will I ever see the beloved college again?’

‘But Annette,’ Nora reminded her, ‘you know you really didn’t like it here.’

‘A whole year of my life—a whole year. Part of myself I leave behind me. Never again will those happy days return to me.’

At the station she wept afresh. ‘We are sisters,’ she sobbed against Nora’s shoulder. ‘Sisters forever. Although the great ocean is between us, never will I forget my dear Nora. Never until I die.’ The train sighed and began to move, Annette mopped her eyes, waved her handkerchief, and threw kisses to her dear friend. At last Nora was alone on the platform, friendless in London.

In the deserted college, she began to pack her trunk hurriedly. She was leaving London in the morning to go down to Cornwall for a few weeks. After that, she planned to take lodgings near the B.M. and read through the summer.

Late that night, she stood looking out of the window. There was a shimmer of moonlight over the garden, and she could smell the roses in the border. Like Annette, she felt a stirring of the heart at leaving Saint Ethelfreda. When she had said good-bye to the girls, she had got a glimpse into their locked lives. She pitied them as she pitied herself.

England, bowed down by taxes, by debt, by its huge pauper population, fed just enough by the dole to save it from utter starvation, held out no rosy promises to girls of the impoverished middle class. They would never marry the young men who in normal times would have become their husbands. Young men were too poor. If they married, they must seek brides with a dowry.

Consciously or unconsciously, after observing the spinsterhood of their native villages which went for a walk in the afternoon, poured out tea in a fussy, chilly drawing-room, or looked over the ‘Times’ before dinner, these girls had worked out escape from such a life by going to the universities. The hope of a profession—teaching or medicine—that was life for them. And in fighting for this kind of existence, they crushed out weakness, softness. They seemed hard. Struggling for scholarships, for ‘firsts,’ for posts with a living stipend—one had to be hard. And Miss Talbot, who knew so much better than the girls what was ahead of them, held them to their work. She had appeared tyrannical, cruel, but——

Nora, so much older, with so much more of the struggle behind her, fewer years of helpless longing for the overpowering emotion that clutched at the throat, stung the eyes, made stabs of pain at the breast—for her now there was the salty flavor of work. But for them——

A tap on the door. Clara held something in her hand. ‘A letter, Miss, by the late post.’

The letter was from Judge Andrews. Cordelia was dead. She had been dead almost three weeks. The end had come quickly. Two weeks before her death she had been living alone, no one but her family doctor suspecting there was little of life left to her. The malady had been of long standing, ever since the year Nora went away to college, Judge Andrews believed. During the last two years, when Nora had not been back to Maronac, Cordelia had been much worse. The previous summer Doctor Elliot had wanted to send for Nora before she started abroad, but Cordelia had refused. She had been a resolute, valiant sufferer.

Cordelia’s last letter was in Nora’s bag to be answered in the quiet of Cornwall. She brought it out now. The date over a month back. Close to the end. The crabbed, almost undecipherable writing was unchanged, the news the usual parish happenings. Della had a baby of her own now. She and Nora would go together to see it next summer. Cordelia wrote, made plans for the future when she knew she was dying.

A resolute woman. Resolute and self-denying always. That terrible abnegation of Cordelia’s. Regret was useless. It was too late. Cordelia with gnawing pain for two years, and no one near her. That lonely house—the succession of empty rooms—Cordelia waiting to die.

The rest of Judge Andrews’s letter was business. Cordelia left everything to Nora, more than most people thought she had, the house with all of its furnishings, and property and investments which brought a comfortable income.

Nora’s eyes were dry as she stared at the facts of Judge Andrews’s letter. If she had loved Cordelia more—been kinder—remembered her oftener.

Nora realized for the first time what it meant to be entirely alone. She had no one. The tears came. She sobbed in the stillness of her dismantled room in Saint Ethelfreda College.