Chapter I: I

When Nora saw Petersfield College hidden away in purple hills, she forgot Cordelia and Maronac Harbor. For her the venerable brick buildings draped in ivy, as exquisite as an old woman swathed in fine lace, the graceful tower above the trees, the sweep of grass and shrubbery, were little more than a setting for the girls, girls her own age everywhere, on the tennis courts, the walks, leaning out of the windows, girls destined to be her friends.

The older students in the residence hall to which she and Eleanor Porter had been assigned took immediate possession of them. After dinner they were carried off to a spread in ‘Fuzzy’ Leland’s room. Fuzzy, dressed in a white sweater and white serge skirt, with hair as straight as wire and the figure of a twelve-year-old boy, was a champion tennis player.

Her room was the typical student domain at Petersfield. Banners representing most of the colleges of the country and chaotically varied in color scheme adorned the walls. Photographs upheld in fish-net took on dust from year to year. Tables, window-sills, the floor space under chairs and bed held the books out of which Petersfield appeared to have been feeding the previous moment. Wicker chairs in a collapsible state and the couch heaped with cushions held all of the fifteen girls who were not on the floor.

Several of the guests were strumming mandolins and singing ‘Dear Petersfield, thy hills we love,’ to the accompanying gabble of the rest. There were rapid introductions, queries as to where the freshmen had come from, much giggling, and references to mysterious and confusing college events—Greek games—step singing—freshman song-fest—Michaelmas play. All their talk buzzed around Petersfield.

‘You better get Miss Perkins. She’s a sweet thing.’

‘Not that horrid Lambert woman.’

‘I’m passing off French orals, girls. He’s such a darling. Just the cutest——’

‘She’s brought eight trunks—fifteen evening dresses and three fur coats. And a maid came with her to help unpack.’

‘I’m going to take life easy this year. You watch.’

‘As if she ever cracked a book! Listen to Margie.’

‘My own true love! My turtle dove!’ warbled one of the mandolin artists.

The girls began to help Fuzzy pass the food. There was a roast chicken one of the girls had brought from home, some messy jelly, a miscellaneous assortment of cake, cookies, lukewarm cocoa, very sweet, pickles, chocolates. In spite of the fact that an interval of only three hours had elapsed since dinner, the food all disappeared.

Fuzzy asked Eleanor and Nora if they played tennis. Eleanor, who had tennis ambitions, confessed afterward to Nora that she felt weak at her stomach when she talked to Fuzzy.

‘If she’d only like me,’ she whispered. ‘Do you know she’s one of the most popular girls at college?’

Nora, after the quiet life at Cordelia’s, felt very tired when she got back to her room. But as she leaned out of her window and listened to the procession of girls singing as they marched around the campus, she already felt the charm of her college.

For the first week the older girls took charge of the freshmen, advised them about furnishing their rooms, informed them about various college activities, explained the course of study. Night after night the devastating spreads continued. Then at last the freshmen were handed over to the faculty.

All of Nora’s teachers were women, some old, some young. The older ones seemed nicer, their voices mellow and low. The young instructors were restless, strident, metallic, inclined to be humorous over the mistakes of freshmen. College classes seemed very similar to high school. One went on studying the same old things: English—no change; history—more work in the library; French instead of German; more Latin if you wanted it or classes in baby Greek; geology instead of botany.

But college life made all the difference. It was wonderful. You sat in chapel, squeezed in a great throng, while Prexy in college gown talked about the great opportunities for women with trained minds and their responsibilities toward the rest of the world. You stood on the library steps and sang ‘Dear Petersfield, thy hills we love.’ At meals girls from San Francisco, from Denver, Boston, Mobile, and Santa Fe sat at the same table. There was even a girl from Hawaii. In class meeting you seconded the motion made by a charming young person in a rose dress whom you longed to know. You studied your lessons with three or four girls piled on your couch, you walked in a squadron out on the country road to the cider mill or picnicked in the grove overlooking the lake. Never for a waking moment were you left by yourself.

After a few days the freshman class broke up into its component parts. The upperclassmen had long since returned to their Olympian heights. Groups were formed, depending largely upon the halls in which freshmen lived, and also upon a common interest in tennis, plays, study. The athletic crowd to which Eleanor attached herself swept over the geographical borders of halls. The dramatic crowd fiercely guarded its entrances against all freshmen except those who manifested a slavish desire to perform the jobs disagreeable to the real stars. The society crowd, always weak among the freshmen, began to imitate its chosen leaders, who were already talking about Prom Week. The grinds, an ignominious crew at Petersfield as at most institutions supposedly designed for the higher learning, dug into their work and remembered that a poet had been produced from the studious upperclassmen and another intellectual luminary had been sent abroad by the college for a year of study. Then there were those like Nora, undecided where they would leap.

The freshmen, however, were united by their common drudgery. They took no joy in their labors. To the query of upperclassmen why these young lambs did not frisk gaily about on the college green, they always answered, ‘No time. Too much to do.’ What puzzled them in their stray moments was why their elders studied so much less. They gathered in groups of four, five, or six after dinner and initiated a noisy evening of toil. Studying by one’s self was too depressingly impossible. They formed frequent conspiracies to complain to their taskmistresses about their burdens, but they never did. Every one was against them. Their neighbors wanted to sleep and put them to flight. They had to learn to choose places for congregation close to meek or indifferent girls—or very sound sleepers.

Sometimes Nora revolted from this intellectual gregariousness and crept into deserted corners of the library or into some abandoned classroom. Where was all this joy that one got from intellectual achievement? she asked herself. Was it all some romantic tale created by the old for the deception of the young? Professor Steele, the grey-haired head of the history department, who sometimes lectured to the freshman history class, told them the satisfaction of her life had come from the production of a modest shelf of volumes now used by her students. She seemed like an honest woman, but one wondered.

As Nora and her classmates looked about them, they discovered that much attention was given to friendship at Petersfield. It was different from the careless comradeship of the group in which one happened to fall. Sometimes a girl had an older member of the faculty for her friend. She worshipped her from afar, studied to please her, sent her flowers before Christmas vacation, called upon her for a few scared moments in Faculty Hall. She was called ‘my dear’ as a final reward. If the faculty friend were young, she made an ideal companion for picnics, expeditions to New York—only an hour away by train, a confidante to whom one entrusted the problems of a difficult home life.

Miss Goodwin, the most popular faculty friend, was so universally adored by freshmen that she was humorously designated ‘The Freshman Disease.’ She was neither young nor old, tall nor short. She wasn’t exactly handsome, but her magnificent eyes could easily slay a victim. She affected the masculine in dress, wearing strictly tailored clothes, and mannish felt hats, shoes, and ties; her voice was full of chesty tones. Her province was the æsthetic. She wrote poetic dramas which the students acted. She read poetry aloud to choice spirits who flocked to her rooms. She was delightfully friendly and informal. In an atmosphere in which a freshman felt lonely and often queer, Miss Goodwin restored self-respect and confidence.

Nora, much to the envy of the less fortunate, was assigned to Miss Goodwin’s English class. But for some reason not entirely plain to herself, she remained a cold auditor of her poetic and dramatic displays.

‘No, I don’t care for her much,’ she stated frankly to those who demanded to know if she wasn’t ‘crazy’ about Miss Goodwin. ‘She tires me, I guess. I didn’t come here to take a course in Miss Goodwin, and we don’t learn much English.’

From such apostasy the girls shrank away. Before the month was over, Nora was transferred to another section. She was a little worried. Had the fire of Miss Goodwin’s eloquence grown cold before her critical young eyes?

The weaker of Miss Goodwin’s disciples dropped down to the lower plane of friendship with other girls, usually members of their own class. Friendship was the great human experience. Nora, observing these sudden infatuations, realized that she and Eleanor did not fit into the strict college interpretation of the word. Eleanor, trailing after Fuzzy Leland, was already on the freshman tennis team. Nora, too, desired a friend.

Nora was studying history in her room the night her neighbors had adjourned to the assembly hall to hear a famous woman lecture on the question of woman suffrage. In a community life quiet moments must be snatched when they could be.

A knock at her door struck the moment of Robespierre’s ascendancy. Emily Moorhead, a tall dark girl from the opposite end of the corridor, perched on Nora’s couch.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, dear,’ she said, stretching out like a sleepy cat. ‘I saw the light under your door.’

There was something about Emily which brought back to Nora her earliest childhood terror. Waking up from a nap, she had seen crawling toward her, with silent, crouching tread, a striped creature which resembled the tiger in her alphabet book. Her screams had brought her mother running into the room. But all the assurances that the visitor was a nice tiger-pussy from next door could not efface an experience which repeated itself always at the sight of a cat. Yes, Emily, languorously sleek and purring, was exactly like a cat.

‘I’m so glad to find you alone, Nora. I want to know you better. Don’t you often feel there are people about you—something inside of you reaches out to them? You long for them.’ Emily dropped her lazy feline pose and sat erect. ‘I’m like that. There are few people here I care about, but those few——’ Emily’s tone was significantly tender.

Nora had been instructed by Cordelia to distrust a diagnosis of the heart in this open fashion. She secretly hoped she didn’t belong to Emily’s few.

Emily began to save a seat for her at meals; she made lengthy visits after dinner when Nora wanted to study. She asked her advice about clothes. But Nora felt no devotion growing for this new and inconvenient shadow. She tried to avoid Emily, but with no great success.

One evening Emily stayed longer than usual. Suddenly she threw her arms about Nora. ‘You darling. You don’t know how I love you, Nora. I want to be your only friend—the only one you trust your secrets to. I’m so lonely. No one understands me. I yearn to be loved.’

Nora detached herself violently and avoided the sight of Emily’s darkly flushed face. ‘I don’t like people that way,’ she said coldly. ‘And I’m very sorry, but I’ve got some work to do to-night.’

Emily slammed the door after her. The next week silly little Sally Winthrop was walking through the corridors with Emily’s arm over her shoulder. They were inseparable. Nora looked the other way.

II

With the spring, many of the freshmen, Nora among them, developed nerves and bad tempers. They complained that they couldn’t sleep at night. Mary Hopkins surreptitiously dragged her couch across the hall to her friend Mabel Witherspoon’s room. The next morning a very chilly housemother superintended its journey back. The college physician gave the verdict that injudicious study and disregard of the rules about exercise were responsible for the decline in freshman morale. Her patients said among themselves that it was too much Petersfield.

The college, in spite of its proximity to New York, prided itself upon its seclusion from the world. The village which supplied the material needs was three miles away. The simplicity of life many of the girls would never experience again. But after eight months of sylvan peace, the freshmen sighed ungratefully for the world. They regarded the juniors and seniors returning with their chaperons on the nine o’clock train after a day in New York with the awed wonder of mediæval villagers gazing upon a pilgrim with cockle shell and staff back from a holy shrine.

Talk circled around teachers, studies, other girls, summer vacation. Boys were mentioned only in vague generalities. Except during prom week the only males who invaded the campus delivered groceries, meat, or ice.

‘I’m going to flirt with the baker’s boy,’ Gladys Spencer threatened.

Could one be sure that one’s fellow freshmen never thought about love? Nora had abased recollections of the hours she had wasted dreaming—longing—that some day——Even at Petersfield—almost like a convent—a nunnery—she could not entirely keep burning desires out of her mental labors. If those ridiculous women had let Father Stokesbury alone——He was the finest man she had ever known. Heroes, great figures in history, King Alfred, and Cromwell, and Garibaldi, and Louis XV (she had a catholicity in her ideals as a result of the freshman survey history course)—they dazzled one’s imagination, but one sighed for some real person. Alone on walks—wanting to be alone—to think——She wouldn’t go through life like Cordelia and Lizzie Guildford, and then when it was too late——Her dreams dealt with unrealities. A hero—something to attach the virtues one admired to—a kind of spiritual clotheshorse for the imagination to play upon. He looked a little like Father Stokesbury. Not a clergyman, but with his smile and enigmatic blue eyes.

Of course one had moments filled with flattering theories about maidenly self-sufficiency. When lessons went well. Then again——

III

At the beginning of her second year, Nora met Cabell Westley, a classmate from Georgia, who occupied the room just above hers. Cabell was frankly bored with Petersfield. She dragged her feet when she walked and powdered her nose during the class hour. Her favorite evening amusement was to dress up in party clothes, and spend endless time on a cluster of curls which she draped over her left ear. When she was properly arrayed, she descended the fire-escape which crossed Nora’s window. She leaped down from the window-sill airily, and surveyed her friend studying.

‘You’re killin’ yourself, child. It’s my duty to give you a minute o’ rest. How’d I look, darlin’? Fit to kill?’ She pirouetted in front of Nora’s mirror, singing in a monotone:

‘I’m dyin’ for some one to love me,
Some one to call my own.’

Then turning suddenly, she added in an attempt at desperation, ‘I mean it, honey. I honest am.’

Writing letters to her boy friends in Georgia and reading their replies to an available victim demanded much of her time. For Nora, these passionate declarations of love had an uncanny fascination. Cabell had been engaged numerous times. Her fiancés, past and present, in an alternating row of silver and ivory frames on her dressing-table, she arranged and rearranged according to their place in her favor at the moment. From day to day they bobbed up and down the line like contestants in an animated spelling-match.

She liked to review their qualifications. ‘Nice boy. Wonderful eyes, don’t you think? But such a jealous disposition.’ And of another. ‘He’s got heaps o’ money. But drink! Honey, he’d swallow the ocean if you’d sell it to him over the bar. And gamblin’! He’s no mamma’s boy to settle down with. And I love my peace an’ comfort. A nice easy pair o’ old shoes the mornin’ after a dance; that’s my idea of a husband.’

She explained in detail how easy it was to be engaged to two or even three boys simultaneously, if a girl used her head a little. ‘Keep ’em apart. One at Sewaunee. The other at Athens. An’ one in Atlanta.’

Between classes and before and after meals Cabell sauntered up and down the corridors in her shambling fashion, seeking excitement and singing her usual plaint, ‘I’m dyin’ for some one to love me.’

Nora heard a whistle and smelled tobacco one night after she had gone to bed. A window above her was opened. There were stealthy words exchanged with a deep voice below, suppressed giggles, and then high heels clattered on the fire-escape. In the brightness from a light below, Nora saw Cabell distinctly as she passed her window. She at once closed her eyes and pretended deep sleep.

When Cabell’s midnight flights into the unknown with a village youth of no untarnished reputation finally were made known to the faculty, Cabell was doomed to return to Georgia. She made farewell visits to all her friends, her jaunty cheerfulness quite untouched by the disgrace which ought to have weighted her down.

‘Good-bye, honey,’ she said to Nora. ‘Now don’t you think naughty things about poor little Cabell. She just had to keep in practice.’

From the first letter, Nora gathered that Cabell’s technique had suffered little. After a second, Nora never heard from her again.

IV

Eleanor and Fuzzy were patient with Nora’s attempts to be athletic. They showed her about strokes, chops, and their deadly effective service.

‘You must keep at it,’ Fuzzy admonished her. ‘Swing your racquet in your room every evening. I keep up practice that way all winter.’

‘Don’t think of anything but the game while you’re playing,’ Eleanor added.

‘But I can’t help thinking of other things.’

‘Then you’ll never make a player,’ they told her.

Nora tried basket-ball next, indoor baseball, skating, and skiing, but she went through them all in the same undistinguished fashion. She was greatly disappointed, for she wanted to belong to the athletic crowd, in her opinion the sanest and the most vigorous in college. They were a handsome, cheerful group, with none of the sick fancies of Gwendolen Morris, writer of exotic verse for the college paper, whose brains Nora was forced to admire. But it was hopeless to try to compete with others in brawn and muscle.

Her days were crowded with ill-assorted studies. Chemistry ate up her time as relentlessly as mathematics her freshman year. But she was still in the stage of believing what she was told, and did not discredit the theory that the necessary mental discipline comes from the hated subjects which are conquered with the greatest pains. She spent beautiful spring afternoons in the nauseous atmosphere of the laboratory, going over experiments again and again before they came out correctly.

She left the laboratory late one afternoon and strolled up the hill on the other side of the lake. When she heard voices, she dropped down under a tree to escape company. She kept very still. The voices came nearer and nearer. Nora closed her eyes. A low voice, a high piping voice—Minna Horton and Gwendolen Morris in one of their interminable debates. If they would only go on up the hill.

The low tones came from a spot not far away. At first she disregarded them. Then a chance phrase interrupting her thoughts froze her into immediate attention. The words of lovers—exchanges of devotion, undying devotion. Nora opened her eyes. The two girls embraced, kissed each other again and again. She was conscious of the drooping narrowness of Gwendolen’s shoulders, the slenderness of her neck, as she threw herself against Minna’s bulky frame.

Suddenly, the two girls fell apart. Whistles and catcalls echoed from the hilltop. A young boy, who had been cutting grass with a scythe, was shouting and jeering down upon them. The grin on his red face and the cackling derision of his laughter were like the capers of a satyr invading a nymph’s sacred bower. The girls fled to the protection of the campus buildings.

Nora lay buried in the fresh spring grass, her hands pressed hard against her eyes. Finally she roused herself to escape to her room. The stream of girls passed her unobserved.

Minna Horton was an honor science student with ambitions to be a doctor. Gwendolen was the literary genius of the campus. They had been intimate friends since their freshman year, a little too exclusively interested in each other, perhaps, but among the cleverest girls Nora knew. And all the time possibly, this poison. Nora had a sick memory of the fungi she had studied in botany, the rank growths, forms of life springing up in unhealthy places, feeding on rot—slime molds found in damp earth and decaying vegetable matter. Creation wasn’t all clean and pure. Nor human relationships.

Nora had got her first shock in Maronac. A saloon-keeper there, a very low man, had a meek little daughter who had gone to school with her. She remembered the girl’s downcast brown eyes. Freda had suddenly disappeared. The girls whispered. Nora heard them. Like Beatrice Cenci and her father.

But girls—two girls. She couldn’t understand why she felt faint at the thought. Emily Moorhead, her first year. Only instinct, like the swift revulsion of a young animal sniffing at a poisonous weed, had held her back.

It wasn’t their fault. They hungered for affection. Was it a choice between this and pranks like Cabell Westley’s?

Petersfield was, after all, not very different from Maronac Harbor. It duplicated the unequal proportion of sexes, the narrow conversational boundaries, the emotional strain. The only difference she could discover was that there were no old people at Petersfield—at least none of the professors was very old—no babies, no dogs, and no cats except in the college kitchens. Among the meagre sprinkling of men, not particularly imposing, there was none equal to Father Stokesbury.

What were the girls to do? They wanted something which college had not given them. Intellectual ambitions, the splendid women on the faculty, the vigorous student body were not enough. But what—what else?

Nora herself was the same girl who had left Maronac Harbor. She had gone on all this year perpetuating her freshman follies. Her arrogance still isolated her. She had distrusted girlish intimacy because of Emily Moorhead. She had scorned friendship with the women who could have given her some of the lessons of age and wisdom because other girls fawned upon their professors and used their favor for ulterior ends. The intellectual hunger, the longing for companionship, which made her suffer in Maronac were still unsatisfied.

And what Cabell had—what other girls wanted—the chance to be admired, loved. Never in Maronac Harbor. No one had even glanced at her. Would she finally, like Minna and Gwendolen—in her desperate need to be loved——No, never. But what was she going to do?

V

Nina Willoughby, a tall, slim girl who wore, with bored nonchalance, the handsome clothes her family heaped upon her, had recently taken up woman suffrage. She had marched down Fifth Avenue in a procession of suffragettes, and her photograph had appeared in the ‘Times’ the preceding Sunday. All Petersfield now worshipped her.

She was urged to organize college enthusiasm for political enfranchisement. The place of the first meeting, to which Mary Howe dragged Nora, was strangely enough a deserted graveyard. Nora, from a section of the country fresh in its memories, had spent many an afternoon reading the inscriptions of a preceding century upon the lichen-covered brown stones lying flat in the tall weeds.

When Nora and Mary arrived, Nina and her subalterns already had a goodly number of followers gathered around them. In the spring twilight the birds, long ago retired to slumber after a busy day, were chattering a lively protest at being disturbed.

A program of eloquent speeches resulted in the formation of the Woman Suffrage League. At once the new reformers burned for action. Nora, on the fringe of the crowd, listened in amazement to Nina’s proposal that they prove the seriousness of their protest against the cruel exclusion of woman from the public affairs of her community and country by spending the night in the graveyard with no bed but a hard flat stone. Shrill shouts of approval rent the still night.

A graveyard—sleeping there—votes for women—Nora tried to puzzle out the connection. While she was still weighing this new college problem, one of the officials of the Woman Suffrage League had separated her from Mary, and she was stretched out on a tombstone, very hard and cold, with the stars and a young moon shining down upon her. Her unaccustomed bed got colder every moment. The weeds tickled her nose—made her sneeze. Her back—her neck—it was as if some unseen monster were taking great icy nips out of her raw flesh.

Next to her squirmed Frances Thompson, a freshman in Nora’s hall. ‘I wish I could sneak home,’ she whispered. ‘I’d rather sleep than vote any night.’

‘I won’t stay here,’ Nora whispered back. ‘I’m going to chuck it.’

‘Come on.’

The two bobbed up, and slowly, on hands and knees, began crawling toward the stone wall near them. The birds began to scold afresh. A dog barked. They stopped an instant, and then crept on. The tall weeds assisted their escape, and the moon whisked under a cloud. A few more paces, and Frances began to giggle. Nora gave her a frantic punch. They clambered over the wall, their hands and legs cut by blackberry thorns. On the other side, they halted, found out where they were, and then began to run.

The chapel clock was striking. They flew over the rough ground. A moment more, and they were inside the doors before they were locked for the night.

Safely inside Nora’s room, they stood examining each other. Their faces were scratched. Frances’s hand was bleeding. Nora’s pleated skirt was torn by the last fence. Throwing themselves on the couch, they rocked back and forth with wild laughter.

Nora began to rub her aching back. ‘It’s got—the—the print of Eliza Cook’s obituary,’ she snorted between her seizures. ‘“Eliza Cook, died in childbed 1801. Requiescat in peace.”’

During the next day, Nora observed her sleepy classmates under Professor Steele’s all-seeing eye. They sneezed. There was a suspicious aroma of camphor about them.

That night the New York papers came out with blazing headlines:

PETERSFIELD GIRLS MAKE PROTEST
NIGHT OF VIGIL IN GRAVEYARD
VOTES FOR WOMEN

So this was Nina’s scheme. Publicity for woman suffrage. Women were a queer crowd. In England they heckled members of Parliament and fought the police. They seemed to enjoy being dragged off to prison and starving themselves. What would they start doing in America if fools like Nina had their way? As for Nora herself, she was done with woman suffrage.

Prexy was furious. For several days it looked as if the seniors who had started the affair might not receive their diplomas.

Miss Goodwin’s latest poetic drama, fortunately, diverted the college authorities from Nina’s escapade. The play was to be presented in the new open-air theatre. Practically every girl in college was dragged into it. Nora hurried away from laboratory to drape herself in Greek robes. The play was written in the classical spirit, with the girls personifying various abstractions never quite clear during rehearsals, and with dancing throngs weaving in and out among the maidens declaiming Miss Goodwin’s resounding hexameters.

The evening of the performance, the sun set over the pines in front of the audience with a melodramatic arc of crimson and orange as the opening songs began. Never, all the oldest professors said, had there been a more perfect spring night at Petersfield. The white-robed Grecians in their choral rites did honor to the trees, the flowers, the fountain, the sky, and last to their own maidenhood, represented by a tutelary spirit, Miss Goodwin, a little too stout for classic draperies. As they circled round her, they sang a concluding devotional before the final dance of the maidens ended the play.

‘It’s the true spirit of our colleges,’ Nora’s Greek professor announced afterward. ‘Our reverence for girlhood, for maidenhood. Miss Goodwin has placed our modern attitude in Greek form with real genius. But the intellectual world has always been Greek. It’s the spirit of the mind.’

The play had been great fun. During the excitement of the past days, even Nora had got loose from her moorings. She watched Miss Goodwin seated even more securely upon her throne, her laurel wreath fresh and shining, with a quietly amused smile.

‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ breathed the freshmen.

Nora, in the last expiring moments of sophomore scorn, curled her lip in a final ironic quiver. ‘Wonderful,’ she agreed.