We had met, after two years or so out in the "wide, wide world" of which we had sung so dolefully, the last weeks of senior year. I discovered that Evelyn had substituted soft "fluffs" for the stiff collars she had clung to tenaciously through four years of college, and she admitted that after the first shock she quite liked the new way I did my hair. Later she also admitted that she made a practice of carrying a parasol, or even of wearing a hat, when it was excessively sunny. Emboldened by the confession, I ventured to produce some embroidery and went to work as if such femininity had always been my pose. Then we talked, and exchanged various bits of news about the members of the class who had wandered so far since our separation.

"Wasn't it sad about Janet?" I asked at last. And then as Evelyn kept silent, I went on, "you knew, didn't you?—She died last November just a little while after her engagement was announced. It was typhoid fever. I thought you knew, of course."

"Yes, I knew," said Evelyn, and went on examining the bookcase.

"I think I'll tell you about it," she exclaimed at last. "It won't do any good. But I think I'd like to tell you. You know Janey and I were awfully good friends while she was at college. We even thought of rooming together, but we were both so well satisfied with our single suites that we decided not to. We were almost like roommates, though. Janet always saw that I was registered when I went home and I always stole rolls for her when she was locked out from breakfast. We wore each other's clothes indiscriminately. I have one of her handkerchiefs yet. You know how it was. We were just awfully good friends."

"I know—Janet would do anything under the sun for any one she liked—go on."

"Well, then she left college. She didn't like it—one bit. She was perfectly frank and said she wanted to come out before she was twenty. Do you know how it is in those western towns? They think a girl is antique when she's twenty-one. She came out and was a great success, I believe. You know how she stopped writing to first one, then another of us, and we were all rather hurt about it."

"Well, she was a disappointment. I had always thought her so superbly loyal, and we heard that she said college was 'such a bore.'"

"Yes, I believed that too, but not until I had written several letters after she had stopped. Finally I gave up and thought I'd never hear from her again. I felt pretty bitter about it. At last she wrote me and told me of her engagement. Just the real old Janey, it was—called me by some absurd nickname she'd invented, confessed that she'd been horrid about not writing, and then said that although the engagement wasn't to be announced immediately, she wanted me to be one of the first to know, and would I congratulate her?"

"When was this?" I asked, after a pause. Evelyn had seized my scissors and seemed to be too much interested in snipping ends of embroidery silk to remember Janet or me, or any one else. She dropped the scissors and took up a book of college kodaks. I repeated my question, just to remind her that I was still there.

She turned her back and went on. "That was some time in May. It came to me at a most unpropitious time. Some member of the family had been ill and I was tired and cross and feeling unjustifiably righteous. So I sat down then and there and told poor old happy Janet how nice and high-minded I had been about writing and how unfriendly she had been. I said of course I hoped she would be happy and all that but of course after this long hiatus we could never be friends in the same old way. Oh, it was an icy letter, just as politely nasty as I could make it! I sent it off and afterwards I felt just exactly the way I used to when I was a small child and had been naughty and wanted to make up. But I didn't. I tried to forget it. I was very busy and had a lot of people visiting me, last summer. So the thought of Janet didn't come into my head very often and when it did I mentally changed the subject. Of course I never heard from her again.

"One day, after we came back to town I was reading, not thinking of anything but the book—Janey least of all. Nothing in that book could have reminded me of her. I read it over afterwards to see. I looked up all of a sudden, thinking of Janet—thinking of her as if I had been with her an hour before. I dropped the book and felt as if I had just seen her, standing at the door in a familiar kimono, and heard her addressing me for the first time by that ridiculous nickname that she had just invented. I had heard through some people from her town that she was going to be married soon. My pride simply vanished. I dashed up and wrote her in the good old friendly way, told her what a nice lady she was and how often I thought of her, what I had been doing, and all sorts of natural old things, as if I had been writing to her regularly for years. I sent that letter off wondering if she would answer. Two days later I heard somehow that she had typhoid fever, but I thought that if she got my letter she would surely answer somehow, though she had been ill for days then."

Evelyn turned and showed me a photograph of herself and Janet laughing and entwined in an attitude of exaggerated affection.

"The next thing I heard of Janey," she continued, "was the news of her death and I shall never know whether she received my letter."

Clara Warren Vail, '97.

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