They got off the car where it turned at the corner of Monroe Street and started to walk south on Dearborn. Jane slipped her arm through André’s. She really had to. She felt too queer and unprotected in that dim, nocturnal thoroughfare. After a few blocks they turned east again and very soon the familiar entrance of the Auditorium loomed up in the dark like an old friend.
André and Agnes pushed casually through the concert crowd and ran up the great staircase. Agnes had good seats, in the front row of the balcony. Jane always thought the music sounded better there than downstairs. She wondered, though, if any of her mother’s friends would see her, perched up alone with André and Agnes. They would think it was very queer.
The orchestra was already assembled on the enormous stage. Theodore Thomas made his entrance as they took their seats. The first bars of the Third Symphony diverted Jane’s mind from all temporal troubles. They wafted her away from the world of her mother and Isabel, and even from that of André and Agnes, on waves of purest sound to an ethereal region where the problem of chaperonage didn’t matter. Jane leaned forward in her seat, intent on the music, watching the little waving arms of Theodore Thomas pulling that mysterious magic out of strings and keys. The Eroica Symphony—how beautifully named!
The second movement made her think of Dido—the throbbing Marcia Funebre for all gallant souls. She whispered as much to Agnes and fell to listening with closed eyes, dreaming of the deserted queen and the flames of the funeral pyre and Aeneas’s white sailed ships turned toward the promised land across the tossing seas. “I shall pass beneath the earth no common shade,” she whispered softly. A proud thought. A self-respecting thought. Something to live and die for. Something much better than just keeping a restive Aeneas, tied to your apron-strings.
She came out of her trance at the applause of the intermission. André was wild with enthusiasm. Agnes was talking of the German music she hoped to hear that summer.
“While you drink beer, Agnes!” cried André cheerfully. “And eat sausage. Beer and sausage do a lot for a symphony!”
The last half of the program was all Wagner. It was over all too soon. André and Agnes and Jane descended the stairs very slowly. Jane was beginning to think once more of the Clark Street cable car.
“I’ll take you home in a four-wheeler,” said André magnificently, as they stood at the entrance. “Jane looks tired.”
Jane smiled at him gratefully. André always understood. He hailed a disreputable vehicle. They all climbed in. It smelled dreadfully of the stable. André lowered the windows. They rattled quickly north up Wabash Avenue and over the Rush Street bridge and down Ohio Street, then turned into Pine. Nice familiar streets, safe ones, that Jane had known from her babyhood. Jane slipped quickly out of the cab at her door.
“Don’t come up the steps with me, André,” she said. “I’m all right.”
She opened the door with her latchkey. It was not late, barely half-past ten. Her mother came out of the library. She looked quite pleased.
“I didn’t think,” she said, “that Mr. Johnson would have the sense to bring you home in a cab.”
Jane made no comment. It was really a backhanded compliment for André, if her mother only knew it. And this time her mother was right, though there was no use in saying so. Jane knew perfectly well that a girl of almost seventeen shouldn’t go downtown alone with a couple of contemporaries to a Thomas concert in a Clark Street car.
II
“Don’t get oil on that coat!” called Jane’s mother from the dining-room window. Jane was oiling her bicycle under the willow tree.
“Don’t worry!” retorted Jane with a grin. The coat was made of tan covert cloth with large leg-of-mutton sleeves. It had just come home from the tailor’s and Jane thought quite as well of it as her mother did. It looked very pretty with her blue serge skirt and white shirtwaist and small blue sailor. She had laid it very carefully on the grass before getting out her oil can.
It was late June and school was over. Jane had just been thinking, under the willow tree, how strange it was that school, incredibly, was over forever. The Commencement Exercises had been very impressive. Jane and Agnes and Flora and Muriel had sat in a row on a temporary platform at the end of the study hall with seven other classmates, all dressed in white muslin and carrying beautiful bouquets of roses. A clergyman had prayed over them and a professor from Northwestern University had delivered an address on “Success in Life,” and Miss Milgrim had made a little speech about the Class of ’94 and all it had done for the school and had handed each of them a little parchment diploma tied with blue and yellow ribbon. Blue and yellow were the school colors.
Ten days before that Jane had taken her Bryn Mawr examinations. Only last week she had heard that she had passed them. Her mother had received that information with a tolerant smile. But her father had been very much pleased. He had given her a little green enamel pin shaped like a four-leaved clover, for luck, with a real pearl, like a dew drop, in the centre. She was wearing it now, at the collar of her shirtwaist.
Jane felt a little sad when she thought of that important entity, the Class of ’94, already irrevocably scattered. Agnes had sailed for England and the day after school closed Flora and her mother had left for Bar Harbor. The Lesters were packing up for the White Mountains. Edith was going to join them there later with her beautiful little boy.
Jane would see Flora and Muriel, of course, in September, but Agnes was gone for a year and, what was much worse, André was leaving for
