A quick step came down the hall and stopped. There was a rustle of silk; the step died away in the direction from which it came. Esther raised her head, carefully laying her little clay tablet on its bed of jeweller's cotton as she wheeled around an instant to smile:

"They're a bit shy of us to-night, Sydney. Haven't you finished with Marius?"

Sydney Lodge, who had swung round also and met her eye, answered:

"No wonder they are; I know I'm shy of myself. If only for once we lived in Denbigh! Then we might at least see the Faculty coming down past the staircase window and the lights going out in Taylor and know when the meeting was over." The castors complained as she pushed back her chair, then the sash went up and the breath of the night that came in and rattled Esther's papers tasted like deep well water, wonderfully pure and cool and dark. Esther wrapped her gown about her, for since dinner she had been working in the library, and crossing the study with the very light step of a very strong person leaned out the window behind her friend.

There was no moon, and the enormous star-sown hemisphere whose horizon fell below their feet, was tonight a faint blur of pearl-grey. Almost as faint and illusory was the ground, and the other halls were denoted by pinkish spots and splashes. From many of these, and in especial from the great windows of the library, ran bands of moonlight-coloured light, like a search-light seen transversely, but filmier. A step rang along the board walk, crunched the gravel, dying away muffled and uneven on grass; voices blew up to them from somewhere and a far-off singing that sounded sweet. Sydney Lodge shivered a little and was drawn in to the fire.

"Lie down and scorch your fuzzy head, young Shelley. The ten o'clock bell hasn't rung and they won't agree for hours yet."

"They never take long over the graduate fellowships,—they put them off, as last year; still, I admit the senior one is hard to settle," acknowledged Sydney, mischievously.

Esther answered with joyful appreciation: "This is quite the most picturesque situation we were ever in. If you don't get it I shall be comforted by its being Hilda——"

"—and if Hilda misses it we've all three the satisfaction of knowing the honour is yours—all three, mark you; for it is an honour, you know. And one of us must get it," finished Sydney with conviction.

At the door a knock made both girls turn pale, but as it opened appeared a mermaid-head with knotted and dripping tresses, just from the swimming-pool, to beg Sydney's company and her violin below on the second floor. The invitation declined, the two were silent awhile.

II

Sydney, on the grey furry rug, trailed her slim length closer to the fire like a pale-green enchanted caterpillar.

"Did you hear Hilda on Marius at dinner?" she inquired drowsily. "She said if he hadn't stopped to bury his dead——"

"She's quite right. He is very beautiful but all wrong, you know. The supreme end of living——"

"Is fullness of life," cut in Sydney. "That's an axiom, like the being of a feeling is its being felt, and that other, about the esse of a thing's being percipi. Anyway, he had it, fullness of life. But it lands you in the Uebermensch, all the same, and he is a fearful brute."

Mechanically Esther murmured: "Nonsense, the Uebermensch is the Magnanimous Man, essentially."

"He's not a bit. Anyway, I don't believe you can work equations like that," replied Sydney, stretching up one hand pink against the fire. "I don't think the Magnanimous Man is the opposite of Marius and I know he isn't the same as the Uebermensch, even temperamentally. He risked greatly for great ends: Marius of course never risked at all but the Uebermensch is always chancing it for no particular reason. He doesn't go in for final causes, does he? Please, between them I prefer the Aristotelian,—but not to know personally. It's bound to end in hardness."

"In the last analysis, your soul's your own," declared Esther with a habitual gesture of wrapping her gown about her, but the other broke in with a little cry:

"Ah, but it isn't! It's every one's else, in the last analysis."

"But it is not really so good in the long run even for the other people, that Tristem Neminem Fecit. Remember Jane Barry, what she gave up for her people; they hadn't a thing against the man, but they couldn't spare her. Now they have an invalid, and when I was there at Christmas I noticed a very real hardness, which wasn't in the least pretty."

Sydney answered with a candour almost noble: "Really, of course, one should only make great renouncements on one's deathbed."

"Do you suppose that if Marlowe came by to-morrow and said: 'Chuck the degree, chuck Sydney there on the hearthrug, and come for a walk around the world,' I shouldn't go?"

"I suppose you would go, 'still climbing after knowledge infinite.' But then you've no ties," finished Sydney, strong in the recollection of a father, a mother and several brothers and sisters.

"Don't you call yourself a tie?" laughed Esther.

"I believe you would go," Sydney repeated with a note of regretful admiration. "Now I pray I should have grace to reply: 'Thank you kindly, sir, but I'm bespoke.' I mean, if you had broken your back, for instance, or gone blind."

In an old oval mirror on the opposite wall Esther Lawes regarded for an instant her own fair strength, and the large grey eyes a little too clear and bright and round; from year to year they used to give out.

"I believe you would," she echoed, gazing down with her usual pleased sense of Sydney's beauty. Never did girl better match than Sydney Lodge her gracious name, radiant, the very sound of it, with sylvan and romantic suggestions. Her slimness had the graceless grace of Shakespeare's disguised heroines; her curls, of hair the most golden red, prompted the quaint Elizabethan epithet of "gold wires"; and her academic gown sat as straightly on her as the Oread's coat of sycamore bark.

"God forbid," said Sydney Lodge solemnly. "The Powers have a trick now and then of taking us at our word, and our answered prayers are fruit bitter in the eating."

While she spoke they became conscious that the great bell was ringing, with strokes that sounded now near, now far distant, from every quarter, rhythmic in their pulse; the first distinct enough yet echoing familiarly, as though it were the second or third, the last in like manner seeming a faint intermediate one, whose successors the ear had lost. And like the wind awhile before, so the bell had a tang of darkness and the great spaces outside.

III

In the house there were movements, and voices cut short by banging doors. Sydney had picked up a lamp and disappeared into her bedroom in a sphere of radiance, like a glow-worm. The dimmed room, which seemed yellower, took a new look: the whole Italian Renaissance, very adequately represented by the pictures on the walls, withdrew into itself and darkness. Esther stared absently from the long steamer chair at the faintly yellowed walls, at the pink bed of coals, and two Tanagra figurines above,—the lady who binds up her hair and the other lady carrying a wide basin in her slender hands, who forever bends over it to watch her own reflected face.

The girl was disturbed more by this fellowship business than even to her close friend she could betray. Not wanting the fellowship for herself, she did crave it for Sydney. Moreover, they could then go abroad together. She had longed that day to hint as much to a professor that was, she thought, disposed to overvalue her own rather advanced work along a very narrow line as against Sydney's all-round brilliancy. And while she heard the other opening drawers and rustling in her wardrobe, Esther pursued her misgiving a step further than it had ever before taken her, although at no time was she a fancier of illusions.

Their alliance, hers and Sydney's, ran back at least a dozen years, away into childhood, and was rooted in all sorts of mutual dependencies. Both moreover were fastidious and constant in their personal affections, making indeed few acquaintances but giving up fewer, and although Sydney had besides what the other called the goose-brigade, a succession of waddling and hissing creatures of both sexes that passed for swans, yet these never got farther than, so to speak, the common outside her windows. Esther herself, without near relatives and secure of a tiny income on which one could starve at least comfortably, having come to college in the interest less of culture than of pedantry, had in the interest of amusement supplemented her Greek with English, and her Hebrew, by way of serious study, with Assyrian and kindred tongues. But Sydney, positively, had gone through as many stages and as well-defined as a silk-worm. Once her violin was the be-all and the end-all; her masters had advised a professional training, urged the expediency of having a career up one's sleeve. Esther felt that it was she who had unconsciously lopped off that possibility, in her own enthusiasm for the college which she was then about to enter, to which she whirled off her friend, plumping her down mentally breathless in a field of Latin and Greek. For the past year or two years, however, the classical prepossessions had been yielding to a keener preoccupation with English and a kindling ambition along the line of what the Sunday papers call literary work. This was furthered partly by Esther's own growing delight in the same matters and partly by the influence of other members of their class, notably Hilda Railton.

It was in the argot of their own vanishing here and now, of course, that they had been talking, using counters precisely as the poker-player does, to stand for an immense amount, or at any rate for an indefinite amount. Sydney was wonderful at catching not merely the turn of a phrase, but a turn of thought: she was simpatica.

"Do you know," said the voice from the inner room, "I can't get that Japanese thing of Hilda's out of my head. Don't you think I might look for one at that same Fifth Avenue place when I am at home at Easter, and try it over my table?"

Hilda's Japanese print! There you were. After all, one did recognize the type; it wasn't the superficial nor yet the parasite, but there was about it something of the chameleon nature. It was the ominous unruffled pool that brought Narcissus to his death. With all her brilliancy, all her charm, she was in essence simply the magical mirror.

Esther was convinced that neither Sydney herself knew this, nor any of her neighbours. She was far and away too clever. There was just one pathetic chance that somebody in the Faculty might be of so inconceivable a cleverness as to have spied the unscholastic fact.

For the third time that evening steps came to the door, and a knock. Esther waited for Sydney and the girls moved together to the threshold, opening on the mistress who held out an envelope. She offered it to Esther.

IV

Is there any place in the world, Esther Lawes often in graduate days asked her friends, where the evening light lies so long and so delicate as at Bryn Mawr? The campus, snow-piled, prolongs a pale dusk at tea-time; in spring the afternoons grow longer slowly until they are forgotten in the softness of the lengthening evenings; the great cherry-tree, black against grey Pembroke but afoam and aflutter with exquisite whiteness, merges its sharp perfume into the softer odour of the crowded flushed apple-trees and the pungent flavour of their neighbours the green-tufted larches. The misty woods back of Merion become denser aloft and under foot; and beyond the Roberts Road the meadow fills up across the brook with pale shapely violets striped at the heart by threads of purple; the long avenue of maples shakes out its heavy leafage under which all day the girls with their rugs and cushions make yellow and scarlet splashes. After dinner, on the dense short turf in front of Denbigh, she would watch the undergraduates quadrilling—comely figures in faint blues and lavenders, ribbons and ruffles all afloat. She stopped awhile on one of these bland nights in a late and sudden spring, to scan the half-familiar types, the sleek heads and white arms, in the waxing twilight, smiling to herself at her content with them and with the swirl of voiceless swallows about one of the high stone chimneys of Taylor Hall. Gathering up her own filmy dress she moved through the deep-green grass that began to dull and chill her slippers, to the shadowed postern door in the graduate wing and up to her own study. She had not dreamed of such content, she remembered, her first night in the room.

V

All the days on the steamer she had misdoubted the return to college after two years' absence, and the surprise and foreboding that sprang up when her closest gaze at the dock failed to show her Sydney Lodge, increased the mistrust. There was nothing for which to stay over in New York since Sydney, according to the friends who did show up to greet her, was still twenty miles off at the seashore, and since Esther had cabled to engage the graduate suite of rooms for themselves at college there was a place prepared and probably a letter awaiting her there. Tired with the bustle of the custom house, she scarcely noticed the sunburnt country north of Philadelphia, but from the moment of pulling out from the city westward, found vague forgotten recollections stirring like indistinguishable odours.

Strong enough at last even to satisfy her was the sense of a glad home-coming and the sudden contraction of her throat at particular perceptions: the first glimpses of the bell-tower above the trees, the stillness of the wind-swept air, the fresh and quiet beauty of the grey buildings and green turf.

As a simple mood she welcomed the feeling, prompt of course to pass, but equally prompt to return and supplant in time inevitable regrets for the other life now finally renounced.

It looked very gay, soft, desirable, that other life, while she surveyed the ungarnished and spotless emptiness of the bare study. On one table lay a pile of letters, the topmost directed in Sydney's hand so oddly like her own: a letter puzzling for the first sheet, then plain enough in its shamefaced announcement that the writer was engaged to be married—had been, indeed, for a month past but for some inexplicable reason had not wished Esther to learn before sailing. "H'm," thought Esther, "pity I didn't know this!" She looked around at the two study-tables, two lamps and two armchairs, almost the whole furniture of the room, and began to laugh. The stupid chair butting its nose against the table as maids always will leave study chairs, taunted her with the unnecessary assurance that Sydney would never occupy it.

The man in question, curiously enough, Esther had once known rather well. Her brother had been in the same class at Harvard, since whose death some years before she had scarcely seen him. But she had not heard of his meeting Sydney. He was a politician by trade, a lawyer by profession. He belonged in the Middle West.

Esther felt rather sick and very angry; Sydney at least needn't have made a fool of her! Still, she could see the comedy.

"Hello!" rang up a fine, strong voice below, and turning in the window-seat she saw on the grass brown sturdy Hilda Railton springing off her bicycle, rather warm and very pleased to see her. "I'm coming up. My room is down the hall. Let's have some tea!"

When the kettle had boiled Hilda remarked, as she shovelled in the tea: "So you're going in for the Ph. D. after all? I had dreamed you were strong-minded enough to resist the prevailing superstition. O Ichabod, Ichabod!"

Esther, laughing, echoed the Ichabod so sincerely that Hilda was prompted to change her ground and while she cut cool odorous slices of lemon to ask:

"So Sydney came back after one winter? I knew she would."

Esther answered rather dryly: "Yes, her family couldn't spare her."

"Sydney's family!" laughed Hilda, recognizing the object of hostility. "We all know it. 'Twas a pretty good year, wasn't it?"

"Ah, a golden year!"

"I had a notion from your letters last spring you were staying over there indefinitely. Then wasn't there a plan about Sydney's going back?"

"Yes. I needed more time. Last year my eyes played me a horrid trick and I couldn't work at all. Not even write letters," said Esther grimly. She had fancied it was because of her inability to answer that Sydney had written so seldom. "I had in another way almost as good a year idling about Berlin and Paris. My dear girl, you've no notion of the possibilities of idleness! So I quite thought of staying at the British Museum this winter, even alone, and finishing what I was at."

"Assyrian cylinders still?"

"Always cylinders." This with a sudden sense of coldness. "The Deluge, and others. But I changed my mind." Never should any one, her former roommate least of all, know what had changed her mind. Actually this was a letter from Sydney Lodge, written in July and saying in effect, "I need you rather badly. How soon are you coming?" She had explained on a post-card that certain bricks and cylinders ought first to be deciphered and in the meantime had cabled for the rooms. She knew—it was one of the discoveries of this extraordinary afternoon—she knew Sydney's ways even to the point of prediction; that if she should say: "But my dear child I wrote you I had engaged the suite for us both," the young lady would answer with a brilliant smile of privilege and a new note—was it the sentimental?—in her voice: "Did you really? Well, I must have been thinking of something else when I read the letter." It was impossible not to laugh, but Esther covered the laughter with a sudden inspiration:

"Oh, I say, don't you want to share my study?"

"But Sydney?" cried poor Hilda, setting down her flowered teacup.

"Sydney's engaged. One Lewis Mason."

"Oh, dear!" Hilda answered flatly. "I'm rather sorry. I always believed in her, you know. She might have done things."

"Presumably one can do things with a husband. He is supposed to help," replied Esther, throwing forward her general convictions in the grotesque struggle for loyalty.

"Ah, she can't. And," added the girl, conclusively, "he won't."

"How's that?"

Hilda returned violently: "I know the beggar. She stayed a Sunday with Helen when I was there this summer and—he called in the evening. He's in politics, but quite respectable. I don't know why I shouldn't come, if you really want me: I'm taking my Ph. D., too, you know. Think it over. He's what they called," said Hilda with an explicit vagueness, "'le parfait gentleman.'"

VI

Esther looked around, when she went back to the emptiness, almost with a little shiver. This was the end then: aprÈs tant de jours: aprÈs tant de fleurs. She had just for a little while known the unacademic world, people who had seen something different in her face, something rather sweet and rather sensitive.

How far all the things seemed and all alike how dim: the socialist meetings in Berlin, the cheap dinners at a droll crÊmerie in Paris frescoed all around with the history of the Queen of Hearts and the immemorial tarts; even the soft after-dinner hour when she was staying with her cousins down in Leicestershire; even a delicious painter-boy who had just got into the Salon—all alike out of reach. The life before her looked poor and thin: books to be sure were at hand and one could hurry up to New York two or three times in a winter for the opera, and go abroad every summer with a companion chosen, like Hilda, expressly for her impersonality, one year to Greece, another time for the French cathedrals and chÂteaux.

Hilda—"she's impersonal as a Velasquez," she had written in the first week—proved for the aggrieved young woman the Griselda of companions.

Even to herself Esther would only admit a few grounds of grievance. Sydney did well to marry, though there were elements of pain in the shock and the strangeness of her elected husband, but she, or somebody else, might have sounded a note of warning. That faint sigh of amorous trouble and the consequent precipitate response! Esther found herself in the position of one running at full speed who stops short, consciously red-faced and rather blown. The picture made her angry and undigested anger made her sick and spoiled her work.

There was even a sense of participation in Sydney's guilt, a secret confession of some dawdling in Paris, some philandering, that provoked to wholesome laughter. She had moments of saying to her inward interlocutor that it was rather absurd to chafe at the loss after all of only a few months, in June she would go back to London, to Paris, to the great glad world. But these conversations shared more or less the chimerical character of the thoughts when one lies awake at night and in the bodily warmth and darkness and the inner blaze of the overheated brain, one's perceptions, one's values are all monstrous. At last she saw that she had in truth been only playing with the thought of the straight, brown-bearded young artist in his little round cap like a Holbein drawing. Him she had not left behind without annoyance, though certainly she would not have wished to bring him along; but she could not even for Sydney have left behind her lexicons and manuscripts, and comical little bricks done up in pasteboard jewel boxes.

VII

The moon plainly was coming up in a hurry behind Dalton as Esther paused at the entrance to her room, for though still invisible it filled with light the air outside all the windows. Against this pale-blue background Hilda on the sill was making coffee in a tall green porcelain pot. The air was full of the spicy steam.

"DÉgenÉrÉe!" laughed Esther. "Didn't you have coffee for dinner?"

"Dinner was a long time ago," replied Hilda sententiously. "Besides, I didn't have enough. Where have you been? Your frock is clammy."

"In the Harriton family graveyard, first, sitting on the steps over the wall and listening to a woodthrush. Did you ever have enough?" Esther added, lighting a lamp as she spoke, while the brass teakettle winked in the soft light and the outside earth vanished. "Hilda, it's a good world."

"A well-enough world," answered Hilda crossing the yellow patch to get the delicate cups. As she returned with them Esther studied her black serge skirt and caught it up.

"Cat-hairs!" she affirmed. "How was Helen?—I've not seen her for a long time. And how was Pasht? He has a black soul."

"He's uncommonly beautiful. If you go to Chapel to-morrow," said Hilda irrelevantly, "you will hear the President announce that I am appointed a Reader in English for next year. Pretty good, isn't it, for a Canadian who is Scotch?"

"That's all right, Doctor Railton," murmured Esther congratulating her and adding, "Then I'm sure of you here next year." This was before the days of Low Buildings, and Readers lived in the Halls where and how they could.

Esther lay back in her chair, admiring the tarnished frame of a quaint oval mirror that reflected a really admirable Japanese water-colour of Hilda's. She was glad the study would be unchanged another year, and quiet. She thought, too, with a little shudder of the hot bad air of crowded rooms, the loud noise of voices, the indecorous bustle of a life made up of many acquaintances.

"I am going to Spain this summer to look at some Arabic manuscripts," she said at length. "You'd better come too. If we cross cheaply and don't travel we can live on nothing. Berenson says the Spanish galleries are full of wonderful pictures, practically unknown."

"My dear, I've a family," laughed Hilda ruefully.

"Didn't you say last night that they were going to the winds of heaven this year and that you didn't know what to do? Represent to them, moreover, that one shouldn't lose so superb a chance of doing me. Seriously, I shall take a whole stateroom, not having forgotten the seasick German girl I came home with last time, and you'd much better occupy the other berth. Indeed, I can't travel alone in Spain, you know."

Her eyes were fixed on eighteen square inches of pinkish brocade pinned against the wall—her Christmas present to Hilda and a ruinous extravagance. A chance word, from a lecture, she had caught up and fancied once, came back: "Nobody frames the multiplication table and hangs it on the wall." But surely that was because the multiplication table was shallow and petty and strikingly untrue: there were tracts of knowledge infinite and unfathomable where one would never tire.

The things, she realized, which one does not ask too much of—and the people—are the things which are forever surprising one with unguessed possibilities.

"Curiosity, after all, is the only insatiable emotion," said Esther out of her experience, and there were always more little bricks: one might even in time when one had read all the rest, go and dig some up with one's own hands.

Georgiana Goddard King, '96.

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