VI
A FAMILY AFFAIR

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Jackson was not a sentimentalist himself, and read nothing but the paper, sitting placidly behind the peanut-brittle and chocolate mice, and relapsing sometimes into absolute idleness for hours together, deep in contemplation, perhaps, possibly dozing—nobody ever knew. At such times he regarded the entrance of customers as an unwelcome intrusion and was accustomed to hurry them, if juvenile, into undue precipitance of choice. From this even quiet he emerged seldom but effectively: when Veronica entertained the unattractive young men she called "the boys," later than eleven o'clock, when Doris went to the theatre more than twice a week, or when they had purchased garments of a nature more than usually unsuitable and pronounced. Then Mr. Jackson spoke, and after domestic whirlwinds and fires the still voice of an otherwise doubtful head of the family became the voice of authority.

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

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

By the time she had been three years in the high school she was considered by every one the most brilliant student there, and the principal suggested college to her. This had never occurred to her. Though they had never lacked for necessities, Mr. Jackson's business was not conducted in a manner to lead to marked financial success, and though he said little about his affairs, it was evident to them all that matters were slowly but surely running down hill. Doris and Veronica were eager to leave school and spend a term at the Business College, some friends of theirs having done this with great success and found positions as typewriters, but their father insisted on their staying at school for two years at least. It would be time enough to leave, he said, when they had to. It was significant of the unconscious attitude of the family that there had never been any question of the oldest daughter's leaving school: Elaine had always been real bright, her mother said, and as long as books was all she took any interest in, she might as well get what she could—she presumed she'd teach.

But this acquiescent spirit changed immediately when she learned that her husband had told Elaine he would send her to college for two years anyway, and as much longer as he could afford. It seemed to Mrs. Jackson a ridiculous and unwarranted expense, particularly as he had refused to allow the term at the Business College partly on the financial score. She lectured, argued, scolded; but he was firm.

"I told her she should, and she shall," he repeated quietly. "She says she thinks she can help along after a while, and you needn't worry about her paying it back—she will, all right, if she can. I guess she's the best of the lot of us; she's worth the other two put together. You let Lainey alone, Hattie, she's all right!"

This was during her last year at school, and as she had on her own responsibility taken the classical course there, finding a fascination in the idea of Greek, she accomplished the preparation very easily.

Her mother, bowing to the inevitable, began to plume herself on her daughter "who was fitting herself to go to Smith's College," and rose many degrees in the social scale because of her. But their ideas of the necessary preparations differed so materially, that after prolonged and jarring hostilities marked by much temper on both sides, the final crash came, and after a battle royal Elaine took what money was forthcoming and conducted her affairs unchallenged from that moment. It was a relief to be freed from the wearisome squabbles, but she cried herself to sleep the night before she left—she did not perfectly know why. Later she told herself that it was because she had so little reason to cry when she left home for the first time.

She went to the train alone, because the girls were at school and her father at his business. She said good-by to her mother on the porch, with the constraint that had grown to characterize her attitude towards them all, but her mother was suddenly seized with a spasm of sentiment, and kissing her wildly, bewailed the necessity that drove her firstborn from her to strangers. Later the girl found it sadly characteristic of her life, that absurd scene on the porch; with her heart hungry and miserable for the love and confidence she had never known, she endured agonies of shame and irritation at the demonstration that came too late. She went away, outwardly cold, with tight-pressed lips; her mother read Cometh up as a Flower, and wept hysterically that Fate should have cursed her with such an unfeeling, moody child.

It is hard to determine just what incident convinced Susan—for she dropped the initial on her registration—that life had not changed for her because she was to live it in Northampton, and that she must be alone there, as she had been in Troy. Just before she left college she decided that she had known it immediately: that from the moment when she plunged into the chattering, bustling crowd in the Main Hall, where everybody knew somebody and most people knew all the others, a vague prevision of her four years' loneliness came to her: a pathetic certainty that she could not, even with the effort she was too proud to make, become in any reality a part of that sparkling, absorbed, unconscious current of life that rushed by her.

Sometimes she dated her disillusionment—for she had had her dreams: she knew them only by the pathetic disappointment of the obstinate awakening—from the day that she saw her namesake laughing in the midst of a jolly group of girls to whom she was presenting her father and her aunt. They were handsome, well-dressed people with a distinct air, and they were tolerantly amused at Sue in her new environment and showed it in a kindly, courteous way that was much appreciated. As Susan passed the group there was a great laugh, and she heard Sue's voice above the rest.

"Truly, Papa, I thought you'd finished! You know, whenever I interrupted, Papa used to make me sit absolutely still for a quarter of an hour afterward—it's not so long ago he stopped, either!"

Her father laughed, and patted her shoulder, and Susan went on out of hearing. It was only a flash; but she saw the gracious, well-ordered household, the handsome, dignified people, the atmosphere of generations of good breeding and scholarship, as clearly as if she had visited them, and her heart swelled with angry regret and a sickening certainty that all the cleverness in the world could not make up for the youth she had been cheated out of. She thought of the bickering, squabbling family table in Troy and tried to imagine her father teaching Doris and Veronica not to interrupt: her cheeks burned.

In class Sue was often near her; she knew that she was recognized chiefly by the fact that she was Susan Jackson, too. On the first day, when the instructor had called "Miss Jackson" and they had both answered, "Miss Susan Jackson," when they still replied together, and finally "Miss Susan Revere Jackson," when the matter was cleared up, Sue had looked at her with interest, and after the class made some little joking remark. If the other had answered in the same spirit, nobody knows whether this story need have been written. But Susan had heard Cornelia Burt ask: "Is she related at all, Sue?" and heard Sue's answer, "Oh, dear, no! From Troy, I believe."

Now Sue meant absolutely nothing but what she said, but her namesake read into the words a scorn that was not there—either in intention or fact. Her heart was sore with a hot, vague jealousy: this girl, no longer there than she, had stepped so easily into a place prepared, apparently, for her; she knew everybody, went everywhere; admired by her own class and made much of by the upper-class girls, she was already well known in the college. She was a part of it all—Susan only watched it. And because of this and because she admired her tremendously and envied her with all the force of a passionate, repressed nature, the poor child answered her little remark with a curtness that was almost insolent, and the manner of an offended duchess. Sue flushed a little, lifted her brows, threw a swift glance at Cornelia, and walked away with her. Susan heard them laughing in the hall, and bit her lip.

She could not know that Sue had described her in a letter to her father as "a queer, haughty thing, but terribly clever. Nobody seems to know her—I imagine she's terribly bored up here. I said some footless thing or other to her the other day, and she turned me down, as Betty says. Did you meet Dr. Twitchell? He was stopping with the Winthrops...."

Susan used to wonder afterwards if it would all have been different had she been on the campus. I know that most college people will say that it would, and it is certain that campus life was the best thing in the world for Martha Williams: nobody knows with what self-conscious egotism she might have been spoiled if her friends and foes had not conspired to laugh it out of her. But, on the other hand, those who have watched the victims of that reasonless, pitiless boycotting that only women can accomplish so lightly—so unconsciously, do you think?—know the ghastly loneliness of the one who, in the very centre of the most crowded campus house, is more solitary than the veriest island castaway.

There is no doubt that Susan needed a great deal of discipline. She had been for so many years superior to her surroundings, so long not only the cleverest but the finest-grained, most aristocratic of all those she saw about her, that although she had perfectly appreciated the fact that she would probably no longer be in that relative position, she had not estimated the difficulty of the necessary adjustment, and it is only fair to those who gave her her hardest lessons of calm neglect to state at once that her manner was a trifle irritating.

To begin with, she had made herself unpleasantly conspicuous at the time of their first freshman class-meeting by rising after half an hour of unventilated and tumultuous altercation, and leaving the room. Now it is not the custom of popular freshmen to leave their first class-meeting in this manner—not as if one were faint or demanded at recitation, but as merely intolerably bored and not a little contemptuous; and the scrambling, squabbling class regarded her accordingly. Susan Revere Jackson was bored, too—unspeakably bored; but she sat indefatigably in her chair in the front row, applauded nominations, discussed the presumably parliamentary features of the occasion, smiled and agreed, differed at proper intervals, and left the room vice-president. It is hard to know just how much enthusiasm Sue really felt: Susan, to whom she soon became the visible expression of all the triumph and ease and distilled essence of the successful college girl, used to wonder, later, as older than Susan have wondered, how much of her college life was ingenuous and how much a perfectly conscious attitude. For long before she left, Susan realized that she had greatly misjudged a large proportion of the girls, whom the event proved more practically wise than she, and that they who fill the rÔle of "fine, all 'round girl" with the greatest success are often perfectly competent to fill others, widely different.

This she did not understand at first, and as a result of her ignorance she included them all in her general condemnation: she found them immature, boisterous, inclined to be silly; or narrow-minded and dogmatic when they were less flippant. She was somewhat exacting, as has been said before, and the solemn, ponderous attitude of the occasional girl who wallows before the abstract Higher Education, and lectures the Faculty gravely on their failure to conduct her to its most eminent peaks during the freshman year, appealed as strongly to her sense of humor as if she had not herself been sadly disappointed in the somewhat restricted curriculum offered her at that period.

This was through no fault whatever of the college, but because the girl had absolutely no practical basis of expectation and knew no more of the thousand implications of college life than she did of normal girlhood with its loves and disciplines and confidences, its tremendous little social experiences, its quaint emotions, and indispensable hypocrisies. Her vague conception of college life was modelled on The Princess: she imagined graceful, gracious women, enamoured of a musical, poetic, higher knowledge, deliciously rapt at the wonderful oratory of some priestess of a cult yet unknown to her: a woman beautiful and passionate, who should understand her vaguest dreams and sympathize with her strangest sorrows as no one she had yet known or seen could do. She found a crowd of jostling, chattering schoolgirls, unformed, unpoised; many of them vulgar, many stupid, many ill-bred; overflowing a damp, cold hall that smelled of wet, washed floors; reciting, in a very average fashion, perfectly concrete and ordinary lessons from text-books only too familiar, to businesslike, middle-aged women, rather plain than otherwise, with a practical grasp of the matter in hand and a marked preference for regular attendance on the part of freshmen.

It was characteristic of her that what cut deepest in all the disillusionment was not the loss of the hope, but the shamed perception of the folly of it, the realization of the depth of practical ignorance it implied, the perfectly conscious pathos of a life so empty of real experience of the world as to make such naÏve visions possible. She did the required work and kept her thoughts about it to herself, but the effect of what she secretly felt to have been a provincial and ridiculous mistake showed itself in her manner; and the occasional hauteur of her namesake, who had inherited a very effective stare of her own, was diffidence itself compared with the reserved disdain that covered her own smarting sensitiveness.

Girls who had tumbled about with their kind from babyhood, who had found at home, at church, at school a varied if simple social training, resented her formality and could not see that pure shyness of them, pure wonder at their rough-and-ready ease of manner, their amazing power of adjustment, their quick grasp of the situation and each other, lay at the root of her jealous dignity.

So she called them "Miss," and they thought her affected; she waited for invitations that she should have taken for granted, and they thought her haughty; she made no advance in a place where only the very favored are sought out and most must earn even the humblest recognition with honest toil and assiduous advertisement, and they quietly let her alone. She was not on the campus, and as the girls in the small boarding-house with her were industrious and ordinary to the last degree and became very early impressed with her realization of this fact, she saw little of them, and her one opportunity of getting the campus gossip, which is the college gossip, grew smaller and smaller. She took solitary walks, thereby confirming the impression that she preferred to be alone—for who need be alone among a thousand girls unless she wishes it?

On such a walk, late in the fall, she stood for some time on one of the hills that rise above the town proper, looking for the hundredth time at the mountains, outlined that afternoon against the dying light of a brassy, green sky. The trees were bare and black about her; the lights in the comfortable houses were flushing up the windows with a happy evening red; belated children were hurrying home; and now and then groups of girls, fresh-cheeked from their quick walk, swung by, in haste for supper and their evening engagements. Over her heart, hungry and misunderstood, there poured a sudden flood of passionate longing for one hour of unconscious happy comradeship with homes and girls like these; one hour of some one else's—anybody else's—life; one taste of dependence on another than herself. It fell into rhythm and fascinating phrases while she gave herself up to the mood, and she made a poem of it that night. In two days she was famous, for High Authority publicly placed the poem above anything yet done in the college; it was seized by the Monthly, and copied widely in the various college publications; to the editorial board and the Faculty who did not have other reason for knowing her, she became "the girl who wrote At Autumn Dusk." It was long before she equalled it, though almost everything she did was far above a college standard; and one or two people will always think it her best poem, I have no doubt, in spite of more recent and perhaps more striking work.

For this poem was only the beginning, it may as well be admitted now, of Susan's career as a genius. This degree is frequently conferred, no doubt, when unmerited; but the article is so susceptible of imitation, the recipe for producing the traditional effect so comparatively simple, that it is to be wondered at, on the whole, that the aspirants for the title should be, among so many clever young women, so relatively few. To a frank and recently awakened interest in Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, and Co., it is only necessary to add a vacant abstraction, a forgetfulness of conventional meal hours—supper, for choice—a somewhat occult system of reply to ordinary remarks, and the courage of one's convictions in the matter of bursting out with the irrelevant results of previous and prolonged meditation irrespective of the conversation of the moment. Any one who will combine with these infallible signs of the fire from heaven as much carelessness in the matter of dress as her previous bringing up will allow—though this is naturally a variable quantity—and a certain unmistakable looseness of coiffure—was there ever a genius with taut hair? heaven avert it!—may be reasonably certain of recognition. It is understood, of course, that with the qualifications above mentioned a taste for verse and an ear for rhythm, in conjunction with the frank appreciation of the poetical firm also above mentioned, have produced their inevitable result.

The character of the output naturally has something to do with the extent of the reputation, and although Susan, the most promising candidate for the degree then in the field, had alarmingly few of the most obvious signs of her rank, this was indulgently passed over, and she was allowed her laurels.

But it was Sue Jackson on whom all the first congratulations were heaped: roses and violets, that blossom at the slightest excuse in Northampton, covered the hall table in the Hubbard House, where she spent her first two years; affectionate and mock-reverential notes crowded the bulletin board for her; a spread was actually got up and the guests invited before the mistake was known. To do her justice she would have promptly despatched the notes and flowers to her defrauded namesake, but the donors, whom she consulted, would have none of it.

"Why, Sue! Why, the idea! Didn't you write it? Oh, girls, what a joke! How perfectly funny!—Send 'em to her? Not at all. Why on earth should Neal and I send that girl flowers? For that matter, she cut us dead day before yesterday, on Round Hill, didn't she, Pat? And she's in our Greek, too. We'll have the stuff to eat, anyhow. You're a nice old thing, Sue, if you can't write 'this extraordinary poem'!"

Susan, who heard next to nothing of college news, heard about this. She heard how Sue had gayly responded to toasts: "The Poem I did not write," "My Feelings on failing to compose my Masterpiece"—this was Neal Burt's, and she was very clever over it—and others. The only thing she did not hear about was Sue's half-serious response to "My gifted God-child," suggested by an upper-class friend. She made a little graceful fun and then added quite earnestly, "And really, girls, I do think she ought to be here! After all, the Class, you know—Let's take down the flowers and all the fudge—come on! She can't do more than squelch us!"

The very girls who had scoffed at the idea before were naturally the ones to take it up immediately, and they were hastily gathering the things together, when the bell rang. They could not hope to get there and back before ten, and most of them were already deep in the matron's black list for reported lights; so they gave it up, and put the flowers in the tub, where a sudden frost over night struck them and they perished miserably.

To Susan it was the bitterest thing of all; it took the sweetness from her success; it dulled the piquancy of her sudden position. She could not possibly know how little it meant to Sue; that it was only one of many spreads, and by no means the triumphal feast she imagined; that after the first they forgot why they had planned it, almost. To her it was her chance at life, her long-delayed birthright, and Sue had taken it, too, along with everything else. "She might have left me that!"—it was her thought for more than one unhappy night.

Before she went home in June she had written a Chaucer paper that became vaguely confounded in the matter of literary rank with the works of its famous subject, in her class-mates' simple minds, so great was the commendation of Another High Authority in regard to its matter and style. It came out in the May Monthly, in which were some pretty little verses of Sue's. They were paraphrased from the French—Sue had taken any amount of French before she came up—and Susan spent her time at chapel in looking harder than ever at her namesake as she laughed and chattered and took her part in the somewhat crudely conceived jokes that seem to amuse girls so perennially. Less flexible, as she afterwards considered, less hypocritical, as she irritably felt then, she marvelled at the mental make-up of a girl capable of appreciating the force and pathos of De Musset's best work and expressing it so accurately, and able at the same time to find content in such tiresome, half-grown nonsense.

When the Monthly came out, she was amazed to receive a dozen copies with a hasty note:

It was only one of the many notes intended for Sue that had been coming to her since the beginning. But none of the invitations to dinner, to Alpha and Phi Kappa, to walk, to ride, to wheel, to eat a box from home, had the effect of this one. For Sue came after her Monthlies and in a ten minutes' conversation wrought more ruin than she would have believed possible.

"Did you get all mine and your own, too?" she asked laughingly. "I should send away a hundred, more or less, if I did 'absolutely satisfactory' Chaucer papers! I should be that proud....

"You see, Papa has to have the Monthly, if there's anything of mine in it, tout de suite—directly—now. He was wild with rage at me because he learned about that little fool story I had in, once before, from Cousin Con, 'long afterwards,' he said—it was only a week! And then, other people, you know....

"Did you get any of these off, before I came? Because it's all right if you did—I don't need a dozen. Isn't it funny I don't get any of your things? You must be somewhat cloyed with my notes and stuff—I should think you'd be bored to death. It's very wearing on me, Miss Jackson, explaining all the time, 'No, I'm not the one! I assure you I didn't write it.' You've no idea....

"My cousin is on the Harvard Monthly board, you know—he telegraphed congratulations to me. He was that set up over it! It was really very funny....

"I'm afraid I'm keeping you—were you going out? Shall I tell Helen Stuart to send yours down? She may think we've both got all we want. Do you know what Alpha's going to be to-night? Somebody said it was going to be Dr. Winthrop—he's my uncle, you know, and I thought if it was I'd go down to the station...."

She had not the slightest idea that her thoughtless and, to tell the truth, somewhat embarrassed chatter was one succession of little galling pinpricks to the other. Her father, who expected his daughter's little triumphs to be his own, as a matter of course; her cousin at Harvard; her uncle who lectured to the Alpha; her notes and flowers—she must know that there was the best of reasons for her not getting her namesake's!—her light implication that everybody went to Alpha; her very expression: "No, I'm not the one!" seemed to the girl's angry sensitiveness a studied insult. Not the one! As if there were any one else! She did not know how unbearably formal and curt she seemed to the other, nor how strongly she gave the impression of wanting to be let alone.

Sue went away to mail her Monthlies, and Susan locked her door and considered at length and in detail the humor of her visitor's light remarks as applied to herself. She fancied At Autumn Dusk and A Study of Chaucer demanded by an enraged father, and smiled—a very unpleasant and ungirlish smile. Moreover, it is possible that she did her father an injustice here. While it is improbable that he would have persisted in lending them about among his friends, to his wife's open amusement, as did Mr. Jackson of Boston, and notwithstanding the fact that he would doubtless have failed to appreciate them fully, he might have liked to see them. Later, much later, Susan was to find a number of her poems and stories clipped with care from the magazines and pasted into an old scrapbook, with the glowing notices of her first really well-known work; the book hidden under a pile of old newspapers in her father's closet. She cried over them for days—he was dead then—and published Blind Hearts shortly afterward. None of her class-mates, most of whom gave or received that exquisite sonnet-cycle for Christmas that year, could have known that the roots of it struck back to her freshman year at college.

After a stupid, hot vacation, in which she lost touch more than ever with her people, from whom she was to draw slowly apart, it seemed, forever, she came back with a little, unowned hope for other things: a vague idea that she could start fresh. She told somebody, afterwards, that just as she got to understand girls a little she lost all connection with them; she did not lose connection with them just then, so it must be that she did not then understand them.

Indeed, what was, perhaps, her greatest mistake was made at this time, and colored the year for her. It happened in this way. The Alpha had the first chance at the sophomores that year, and for a wonder, the sophomores were not only clever but possessed that intangible quality, "the Alpha spirit," in a gratifying degree. The ticket for the first drawing included the two Jacksons, Cornelia Burt, Elizabeth Twitchell, and to fulfil that tradition that inevitably elects one perfectly unexplainable girl, Kate Ackley, a young person of many and judiciously selected friends. At the very night of the election it was suddenly rumored that Sue Jackson had openly declared her intention of refusing Alpha in favor of the rival society, on the ground that she liked Phi Kappa better and had more friends there.

Now aside from the fact that this report was utterly baseless, for Sue would have preferred the Alpha, if only to go in among the first five of all, it was aside from the point. As some irritated seniors afterwards explained with much temper and reiteration to the chidden society, Alpha was sufficiently honorable in the sight of the college to endure very calmly rejection at the hands of any freshman whatsoever, whether or not they had any certainty of the truth of the rumor. But the girls were struck with the solemn necessity of immediate and drastic action, and with a gratifying thrill of excitement they struck off Sue's name and put in Margaret Pattison's, the sixth in order, whereat Phi Kappa greatly rejoiced and promptly elected Sue the next week.

Now it is very sad that the only person who seriously misunderstood this whole affair was Susan Jackson of Troy. Sue very quickly learned the whole matter; what her feelings may have been is not certain. Phi Kappa made a jubilee over her, and she became, as is well known, a great light in that society. Miss Pattison, by some mysterious free masonry—the girls who are "in everything" seem to absorb all such matters through their pores—soon found out her luck, and was frankly grateful for it. Alpha retained the courage of her convictions and assumed a distinctly here-I-stand-I-can-no-otherwise attitude. Phi Kappa chuckled privately and looked puzzled in public. But Susan had made a great mistake, and what is worse, never knew it. A little gossiping freshman in the boarding-house she had moved into, who had been injudiciously petted by the seniors and imagined herself in everybody's confidence, told Miss Jackson, with many vows of secrecy, that there had never been such a time in Alpha in the history of the college: they had meant to have Sue—oh, of course!—but there had been a terrible mistake at the balloting and names had been confused, and though etiquette forbade any expression of their real feeling, they were nearly wild at their clumsiness.

It is hardly to be wondered at that Susan jumped to her conclusion. She had got so many things intended for Sue—why not this? She knew that cleverness and even college fame are not the only calls to a society, and she had no real friends in either of the two organizations. She could not believe that the Alpha would purposely omit Sue: if they had chosen both, it would have been different, but as it was....

So she received their very earnest congratulations with a constraint that chilled them. They reasoned that she was perfectly certain of the election and took no pains to hide it, and though they could not blame her for this, they thought her more conceited than ever, and regarded her accordingly. The poor child was suffering from actual humility, however, not conceit. She could not know that her mark on both society lists was the highest ever given; that Alpha would cheerfully have sacrificed any two, or even three, of the others for her; that much as they regretted Sue, they wasted less sorrow over her now that they were sure of the leading girl in Ninety-red. For that was what they called her—the girls that she thought patronized her. They took her after-successes almost as a matter of course. "Oh, yes! she was far and away the most brilliant girl in the college!" they said. But she never heard them.

The house she had moved into with an unacknowledged hope of getting more in touch with them was the last house she should have chosen. It was filled from cellar to roof with freshmen, and not only are they notoriously clannish under such conditions, but there were at least eight or ten of them from the same prominent preparatory school, and among them was their class president. It was not possible for Susan to join herself to this little circle of satellites, and they controlled the entire house in a very short time. So she took to visiting the head of the house, a faded, placid soul with a nominal authority and a gentleness that moved even her worst freshmen—and a bad freshman combines the brutality of a boy with the finesse of a woman of the world—to a little shamed consideration during their periodic fits of social reform. Sitting by her fire in the dusk, with the smell of hot cooked chocolate drifting in from the hall, and the din of the assembled tribes in the president's room overhead, Susan passed long, bored, miserable hours. Half listening to the older woman's talk, half sunk in her thoughts, she alternately chafed with rage at the idea of her college life drifting out in solitary walks and tired women's confidences, or took a sad kind of comfort in one fire where she was always welcome, one friend that loved to talk to her.

For Mrs. Hudson grew very fond of her, and something in the girl's own baffled, unsatisfied soul must have helped her to understand the stress and pathos of the tired little woman's life. Few of the girls who afterwards read Barbara: A Study in Discipline, would have believed that the high-hearted, wonderful heroine was based on Miss Jackson's study of their freshman landlady. But most of Susan's knowledge was gained from such unscheduled courses.

In her junior year she let her work go, to a great extent, and spent much time in the town libraries, reading omnivorously. As a matter of fact, her class work deteriorated not a little, as much by reason of dangerously extended cuts as anything else. But it all failed to interest her, somehow: the detailed campaigns, the actual value of money, the soulless translations, the necessarily primary character of the beginnings of any study of modern language. She felt with growing irritation that she should have learned genders and verbs earlier in life, and she surprised her expectant teachers with poorer and poorer recitations. Mademoiselle had no means of knowing that though Miss Jackson stammered through the subjunctive she was reading dozens of novels and plays with a very fair ease; FrÄulein could not tell from her imperfect handling of the modal auxiliaries that she had written a better paper on Faust than many a six years' student of German, and already knew most of Heine by heart.

This year she made a few friends, chiefly in Phi Kappa, for some reason or other, which irritated the Alpha girls a little. To do her justice, she was utterly ignorant of this result of her connection with Bertha Kitts and Alida Fosdick, nor would it have resulted in the case of an ordinary girl. But Susan was more prominent than she ever realized, and her whole connection with the others being official and logical rather than social and actual, her conduct and opinions were very sharply criticised from a rather exacting standpoint. Nor was this wholly unfair, for she was herself an unsparing critic. More than one of the Faculty smarted under her too successful epigrams; various aspirants for popularity and power in the Alpha or the class learned to dread her comments; her few friends themselves were never quite sure of her attitude toward them. But she was not, for her part, sure of them: it is hard to make friends in one's junior year. And though she saw quite a little of Biscuits and Dick and Neal Burt—always her constant admirer—she never for a moment lost the consciousness that she was no friend of their friends, that she had no place in those groups long since formed and shaken into place. They were a little jealous of her, too, and resented her selection of this girl and that from among them, though they could not but admit that her judgment was good.

Her sources of irritation were the same always. Their very flexibility, the ease with which those she had chosen out slipped from her to their other friends (they laughed with her at them, even, after the manner of girls—did they laugh with them at her?), filled her with a hopeless jealousy. It was not their nice clothes and their good times she grudged them, though she wanted both: it was their connections, their environments, their very disciplines. When Biscuits with loud lamentations elected Philosophy at the decree of her father; when Neal took up two courses of Economics in order to help her mother with "some footless syllabi in mother's literary club;" when Betty Twitchell endured the gibes of her friends every rainy day because "Papa won't let me wear a short skirt; he hates a woman in one—I think it's perfectly horrid of him, too! Wait till I get pneumonia! As if I'd 'get a carriage' to take me from the Hatfield to College Hall!" Susan would have given every rhyme in her head for one year of their conventional, irresponsible lives.

It was not money she longed for: Neal Burt was poor enough, and made no secret of "my cousin's boots, my dear, and my aunt's silk waist, and Patsy's gloves that don't fit her, that I have on this minute!" But Neal gave her one of her worst quarter-hours, at the time her mother came up. She was a pretty little woman with Neal's eyes; her simple clothes had, like Neal's, a distinct air of taste and selection about them; her interest in everything was so pleasant, her manner so cordial and charming, that she made an easy conquest of the girls and Neal's friends in the Faculty that came to meet her and drink tea in the quiet house where Neal lived almost alone, much petted by her landlady, an old family friend. Mrs. Burt was interested in Economics that year—"the dear thing has a new fad every time I go home!"—and a prominent professor of Economics from one of the universities happening to be in town just then, one of Neal's friends among the Powers invited mother and daughter to meet him. Mrs. Burt was equally charmed and charming; the distinguished professor begged to be allowed to send her a copy of his book, in which she had been much interested, "and she went home proud as Punch!" in the words of her daughter.

Every word the kindly little woman had with Susan—and she had a great many, for Neal had interested her mother in her friend—brought closer home to her what had steadily grown to be the consuming trouble of her life. She tried to imagine her mother drinking tea with a roomful of strangers; finding the right word for every one, talking with this girl about her friends, with that about the last book, with the other about college life in general. She fancied her meeting the distinguished professor and discussing his book so brightly—and saw the closet-shelves where Marie Corelli and the Duchess jostled Edna Lyall: Mrs. Jackson said she liked some real heavy reading now and then, and Edna Lyall had a good many problems in her books. She had a sickening consciousness that her mother would inevitably defer to the girls, particularly to the confident, well-dressed ones; and every time that Neal patted Mrs. Burt's shoulder or kissed the tip of her ear, she felt her heart contract with a spasm of that terrible gnawing envy that is surely reserved, with their equally terrible capacity for loving, for a certain small proportion of women, and women only. It is a very sad thing for a girl to be ashamed of her mother.

In her junior year occurred one of her greatest triumphs. The senior class had petitioned vainly for the privilege of giving Twelfth Night as their Commencement play: the refusal, based on the obstacle presented by the part of Sir Toby, and couched in the undying phrases of the Greatest Authority—"he should be neither drunk, nor half drunk, nor bibulous, nor rioting"—impressed very deeply those more susceptible to the humorous. With a commendable intelligence the dramatics committee decided that under the limitations above quoted the play would lack in verisimilitude, and cast about for another, but that was not the end of it; for Susan, in whose hands the Alpha farewell-meeting had been unreservedly placed, wrote, staged, and directed the performance of an elaborate parody entitled First Night, from which "the objectionable element in the unfortunate William's comedy," to quote the preface, was successfully and unsparingly expurgated.

Not only were the most obvious situations cleverly treated; not only did Sir Toby, spare and ascetic, in a neat flannel wrapper, call decorously for "a stoup of thin gruel, Maria!" not only did he and his self-contained friends walk through a kind of posture dance with killing solemnity, chanting the while a staid canon in which the possibilities of "Why, should I drink on one day?" were interpreted with a novel and gratifying morality; not only did Malvolio utterly eschew an article of apparel too likely to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of the Young Person, but painstakingly assume, in the eyes of the delighted audience, heavy woollen stockings, a constant and effectual reminder of his hidden traditional garb: but a parody within a parody ran cunningly through the piece. The trials of the committee, the squabbles of the principal actors, open hits at the Faculty, sly comments on the senior class, which had been active in reforms and not wholly popular innovations—all these were interwoven with the farce; and this not in the clumsy harmless fashion of most college grinds, but pointed by a keen wit, a merciless satire, an easy, brilliant style already well on to its now recognized maturity.

Most of the principal actors in the play finally selected by the seniors, with more than half of the committee, were that year, as it happened, from Alpha, and their delight knew no bounds. Susan did not act herself, but she was a born manager; and the actors that cursed her unsparing drill and absolute authority during the long rehearsal season that made it the most finished affair of its kind, blessed her vociferously on the great night of its production. It was the most perfect success of her life—though the girls who thought she scorned her college triumphs would have laughed had she told them so, later. Every point was eagerly caught and wildly applauded; the stage setting, the funny, clever costumes, the irresistible caricatures, the wit and humor of the thing, all acted with a verve and precision unusual in college dramatics, where criticism is too often forced to take the will for the deed, all called for a tremendous and well-earned appreciation. The author was frantically summoned again and again; the seniors exhausted a congratulatory vocabulary on her. Her classmates shook her hand many times apiece.

Nor did the triumph end with the night, for the juniors, unable to contain their pride, gave surreptitious bits of the play to chosen seniors in Phi Kappa, and it was even rumored that the other society was going to request a revival of the combination entertainment, now out of vogue, with a view to having it repeated. This was suppressed by the Powers, but it got about that one of the few type-written copies of the piece had fallen into the hands of an Influential Person—probably through Neal Burt, who admired it in proportion to her own far from ordinary ability—and that the Person had assembled a select gathering of her Peers for the sole purpose of reading it, with unmistakably appreciative comments, to them. Some members of the Faculty, old Alpha girls themselves, and present on the occasion of its production, expressed their admiration in unstinted terms, and altogether the Alpha gained a tremendous prestige.

This and her appointment as editor-in-chief of the Monthly for her senior year marked the height of Susan's prosperity. She used to think, afterwards, that the play was the only pure pleasure she had ever had: it was certainly the only one that her namesake had left to her unspoiled. Fate ordered it that she should take off the bulletin-board with her notice of editorial appointment a note hastily addressed to S. Jackson, '9-. She opened it mechanically.

DEAR Old Sue: It's a miserable shame! You ought to have had it! But it seems that it makes no difference what we want, nor who would work in best with the girls. Genius isn't everything, always—but you know what I wanted!

Your disappointed
H.S.K.