Abbe Carter Goodloe

“ Miss Atterbury looked thoughtfully and intently at Miss Thayer.
“You say he is a friend of yours?” she demanded, slowly.
“Oh, yes; we got to be very good friends this summer. He taught me how to play fifteen-ball pool—that’s about all he knows,” went on the girl, scornfully. “He’s an awful duffer about everything else. You ought to see him play tennis! It’s not very edifying, but it’s awfully funny.”
Miss Atterbury gave a little gasp of delight. ”

“ When they turned into Kneeland Street, the girl’s courage and strength failed her. Kneeland Street itself is a disgrace to Boston. It is not by any means the street a young man would choose to walk on with a young lady in the evening—indeed it is not the street one would choose to walk on in broad daylight with a policeman in hailing distance. Cunningham could have cursed himself for the whole thing. He drew the girl closer to him and walked swiftly on. ”

“ But Miss Ronald, whose particular craze in the beauty line was a cream complexion, gray eyes, and red-brown hair, had declared the new-comer to be lovely, and even after she had discovered that this handsome girl was not of her own social standing, that her people were unknown and unimportant, she still declared her intention of cultivating her. She had found this harder to do than she had expected, and so, as she led her around the room, she rather delighted in the belief that she was impressing this girl by the many evidences of a gay social career. ”

“ Miss Arbuthnot looked away. “I am not sure—I—I was never in love,” she said uncertainly. A curious wave of jealousy swept over her that she who had been such a student, whose whole life had been a study, should have somehow missed experiences that this girl had lived through already. The girl shook her head softly, pityingly, as if she could hardly believe her. ”

“ To-day woman seems to forget that she must learn to live, not live to learn. At the risk of being branded as ‘behind the times,’ of being considered narrow, bigoted, old-fashioned, I must say that until woman re-discovers that life is everything, that all she can learn here in a hundred times the four years of her college course is but the least part of what life and nature can teach her, until then I shall not be wholly satisfied with the modern education of woman. ”

“ The room they went into was a typical college room, with its bookstands and long chairs and cushions and innumerable trophies, of which Miss Ronald was rather proud. She was a stylish girl, with New York manners and clothes, and a pretty, rather expressionless face, strongly addicted to fads, and after almost four years of college life still something of a fool. She had become popular through her own efforts and the fact that she had a brother at Harvard. If a girl really wishes to be a favorite in college she must arrange to have some male relative at a neighboring university. ”

“ A SHORT STUDY IN EVOLUTION A COLLEGE for women is generally looked upon by the outside world and the visiting preachers as a haven of rest, a sort of oasis in the desert of life, a Paradise with a large and flourishing Tree of Knowledge of which one is commanded to eat, and where one is happily ignorant of the “struggle for life,” and the woes and evils of the world. ”

“ At any rate, I shall not give up my career for any man.”
Miss Hungerford always spoke of her “career” to her friends with a sad sort of expression, as if it cut her off from them in some unexplainable way, and made her not of this world. Unconsciously she enjoyed the mingled admiration and awe of the less ambitiously intellectual of her “set” when they heard that she was really going to college. ”

“ As he wearily pulled the heavy, unwieldy boat about after the light practice-barge, which kept an appalling distance ahead of him, he decided within himself that the physical development of women had been carried to an absurd and alarming extent, and that men simply were not in it with them when it came to endurance and enthusiasm, and that he had made the mistake of his life when he wrote that article on athletics in girls’ colleges, and that his chief might talk until he was blue in the face before he would ever consent again to write about anything of which he knew so little. ”

“ To her uninterested gaze the large majority seemed to be distressingly like all previous freshman classes, and endowed with the same modest amount of good looks and intellectual foreheads.
But in college life it is a strange fact that while upper classes find it rather difficult to become acquainted among the lower ones, owing, of course, to the unwritten code which prevents a senior from appearing interested in any but those of her own class, yet the incoming students are allowed and take every opportunity of ingratiating themselves with upper-class girls, without injury to their dignity. ”

“ THE GENIUS OF BOWLDER BLUFF MISS ARNOLD found him wandering aimlessly, though with a pleased, interested look, around the dimly lit College Library. She had gone there herself to escape for a few moments from the heat and lights and the crowd around the Scotch celebrity to whom the reception was being tendered, and was looking rather desultorily at an article in the latest Revue des Deux Mondes, when he emerged from one of the alcoves and stood hesitatingly before her. ”

“ Don’t let your father—don’t let anyone—persuade you to bind yourself to a man you don’t know, whose life has been so vitally different from your own as to render the possibility of sympathy between you very slight.”
Miss Lavington looked at her rather coldly.
“You are interesting yourself unnecessarily,” she said; “I loved him not so many years ago—it cannot be possible that so short a time would change us completely.”
The Beauty leaned her head back with sudden wearied look on her face. “A few years at our time of life makes all the difference in the world,” she said, earnestly. ”

“ She could see no objection, however, to being pointed out as “Miss Hungerford, you know, the brilliant young authoress.” Yes, life was a failure, art was everything! Nothing should ever come between her and her work.
Then she sat down at her desk and tried to write. She remembered the keen sense of pleasure she always experienced when she had finished a sonnet or scene of a play, but she was thinking now of how she would receive Stanhope. “I will give him my hand in a very quiet, friendly way that will show at once what my decision is. Nothing shall make me alter or give up my career.” ”

“ Why, she had the audacity to say to Colonel Gray, after one of his irascible explosions at things in general—“My dear Colonel, you are a living example of squaring the circle—quite round yet full of angles!” You know how rotund the Colonel is, Alma. Think of it! To Colonel Gray, whose irritability is simply proverbial. And he actually seemed to enjoy it! Men of a certain age seem to be only too willing to make fools of themselves if a young girl looks at them. ”

“ A girl cries when she’s tired, doesn’t she? Well, a man just keeps going, you know, and doesn’t let it make any difference to him.”
“I am so glad to hear that, Mr. Newbold,” said Miss Yale, with prompt and suspicious sympathy, and a sudden firmness of tone, “because I wanted dreadfully to ask you to try the track, but hated to do so, for I knew you were tired—at least you look so. But since you just keep going, and it doesn’t make any difference to you, why I would be so awfully obliged if you would run around three or four times. ”

“ Cahill,” she went on smiling over at him, “for she has had a great deal of trouble already.” The girl pushed her chair back a little, and her fine, earnest face grew grave and perplexed.
Miss Cahill gave a little gasp. “I knew she had a history, Edith! She looks like it. She is awfully pretty,” she went on, turning to her brother. “I have seen her several times at the settlement, but we are not friends yet—I doubt if she even knows my name. I would like to know her, though—there is something so sad about her eyes and mouth, and her voice makes one cry.” ”

“ Stanhope reminded her friend that she had been immured at Malta since leaving the Riviera.
“Oh, well, of course her fame has reached there by this time. Why, all Paris is talking about her—and you know yourself”—observed that astute lady, impressively—“how much it takes to make Paris stop and look at you.” Mrs. Stanhope said “Yes,” and wanted to know who The Beauty’s people were, and where she had come from.
“Oh, I don’t know,” declared her friend. “No one seems to inquire. She is so beautiful and sufficient in herself that one does not care much for the rest. ”

“ During the last semestre of the year Miss Hungerford, who was very tired and busy, seemed almost oblivious of the young girl’s existence, and even forgot to smile at her when they met on the campus. And when on her Baccalaureate Sunday a box of white roses—the last mute expression of Miss Harmon’s expiring affection—was handed her without any card, she wondered who had sent them and concluded they must have been ordered by a man she knew.
Three years after leaving college Miss Hungerford married, much to her friends’ surprise, and a year after that she and her husband went abroad. ”

“ It was a rare and pleasingly curious sight that Miss Yale and Miss Thayer and a great many other young women assembled near the track, apparently by a strange coincidence, looked upon. It is not often that one has the chance of seeing an immaculately dressed youth, with flushed and desperate countenance, tear madly around an eight-lap track in the presence of a number of flatteringly attentive young women. ”

“ He reflected that perhaps her invitation had not been entirely disinterested—that she considered it as stupid to go out rowing alone, as he did to wander around the college without his sister—and that as she had been kind enough to save him from a solitary afternoon, it was his part to be as amusing and entertaining as possible.
“You must not consider us in the light of very young girls,” she explained. “You know this is a woman’s college.”
“That’s what is so nice,” returned Allardyce confidently. “You are girls with the brains and attainments of women. ”

“ The girl gave a little in-drawn gasp. “Well, it’s worse than anything you can conceive of. I think one has to live in one of them and then move away and have ten miles of dead level prairie land between you and it to know just what loneliness is. But we were so happy, so happy at first—until Julian was taken ill.” She leaned back against the couch and clasped her hands around her knees.
“It was awful—I can’t tell you,” she went on in a broken voice. “But you know what unspeakable agony it is to see what you love best on earth ill and suffering, and you nearly powerless to do a thing. ”

“ Allardyce was considerably mystified and a little offended.
“But she’s very bright,” added the girl, quickly; “especially in mathematics, where I see most of her; but I believe she is not a very hard student.”
“Well,” said Allardyce, jocosely; “I’ll tell you a secret. I am the hard student of the family, and that’s much better than that my sister should be, I think. I don’t approve of girls working too hard. It makes them old—takes away their freshness—especially if they go in for mathematics. ”

“ Even the least romantic girl is apt to find unexpected possibilities in her nature in the way of romantic devotion, so that it was not surprising that Miss Betty Harmon, unimaginative and unsentimental as she was, should have admired so extravagantly as handsome and interesting a girl as Eva Hungerford. The crude Western girl found something extremely attractive in the senior—grace, a social ease and distinction, and that indefinable magnetism which a wealthy, consciously beautiful girl possesses. ”

“ Better to die in harness, nobly striving after perfection, than to live to an ingloriously happy old age. She saw herself a melancholy woman, whose youth and beauty had fled before the exhausting demands of her genius. ”

“ It was possibly because she was small and blond and quite irrepressible that her most intimate friend, Edith Minot, of Baltimore, whom she{122} brought home with her, was tall and rather stately, with a dark, severe beauty quite in contrast to that of Miss Cahill. They were alike, however, in a great many ways, in their young enthusiasms and in their devotion to art—they worshipped Israels and Blommers and Herzog—and in their vast interest in electrical inventions and discoveries, and in their sympathy with whatever was weak or ill or oppressed, and in modern charities and college settlements. ”

“ One would think that a girl was as weak as a kitten, and didn’t know a boat from an elevator, or a five-lap running track from an ice-wagon, or a golf club from a sewing-machine. He—whoever the man is who wrote this ridiculous article—seems to think that all our training and physical development is a huge joke. He don’t even know how stupid he is. ”