“I don’t think she’ll need much looking out for,” said Agnes. “This is Jane’s kind of place.”
Jane was sure it was, even at the long Freshman supper table in Pembroke, which was very terrifying. Jane sat between her father and Agnes. On Agnes’s other side was the warden and beyond her father sat a little dark-eyed Freshman from Gloversville, New York. Her name was Marion Park. She talked very politely to Jane’s father throughout the meal.
“That’s a bright kid,” Jane’s father said, as they left the table. “I bet she’ll amount to something some day.” Jane felt that she and Agnes would like Marion Park.
The Seniors were singing on Taylor steps just as Agnes had prophesied. Jane and her father and Agnes strolled up and down in the gathering twilight and listened to them. There were lots of girls about, more than a hundred, Jane thought, all in light summer dresses, walking up and down under the maple trees, occasionally lining up in a great semicircle before the steps, joining the Seniors in a song. Some of the songs were awfully funny.
“If your cranium—is a vacuum—and you’d like to learn
How an intellect—you can cultivate—from the smallest germ,
On the management—of the universe—if your hopes you stake,
Or a treatise—on the ineffable—you propose to make,
If you contemplate—making politics—your exclusive aim,
And are looking for—some coadjutor—in your little game,
And in short if there—should be anything—that you fail to know,
To the Sophomore—to the Sophomore—go—go—go!”
Jane’s father thought the songs were awfully funny, too.
He laughed quite as much over them as Jane and Agnes did.
“Bright girls,” he said. “Nice bright girls.”
That was just what they were, thought Jane. And her kind. Like Agnes. Not at all like Flora and Muriel, whom she loved of course and who had written to her only last week from Farmington, but who she didn’t feel would fit into Bryn Mawr very well. They were just—different.
Agnes came into her bedroom that night in her cotton crepe kimono, just before she turned out the light. Jane was sitting up in her little wooden bed.
“Open the window, Agnes,” said Jane. “I like this place. I’m going to like it a lot.”
Agnes opened the window in silence. Dear old Agnes—it was fun to be rooming with her! But Jane hadn’t forgotten. She hadn’t forgotten one bit. She sat there in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightgown, with her hair braided tightly in two straight pigtails, looking very like the little Jane that used to run up Pine Street to meet André under the Water Works Tower. She hadn’t forgotten, but she wasn’t the same little Jane, in spite of appearances. She was beginning to learn that the world was wide.
“Since I can’t marry André,” she said solemnly, “I’d rather be here than anywhere else.”
II
“It’s funny,” said Jane to Agnes. “All the years you’re trying to get into college you think it’s the work that counts. When you get there you see it’s the people.”
Jane and Agnes were sitting on their window-seat, looking out over the gnarled branches of the cherry tree. It was an afternoon in late January. The sun was sinking behind the stripped boughs of the maples and the campus was covered with snow. Jane and Agnes had just finished their midyear examinations. They had taken Minor Latin that morning. And English two days ago. And Biology the day before that. They were pretty sure that they had passed them all. Now they had five days of vacation before the second semester began.
“The work counts a lot,” said Agnes.
Jane wondered if the work counted more for Agnes than it did for her. Agnes was continuing to be terribly bright. She expected to take a job, when she graduated, and she was hoping to write, on the side. Agnes was writing now, all the time. Stories that she sometimes sent to magazines. Jane thought they were awfully good, though the editors always sent them back with rejection slips, Agnes was never discouraged. She just went on writing.
Jane never did much of anything, except just enough work to keep up in her courses. She loved the General English and she liked Horace and she found the Biology awfully interesting. She didn’t think, though, that she was going to enjoy cutting up rabbits, much, next semester. Angleworms were different. They seemed born to suffer. On fish hooks and in robins’ beaks if not in laboratories. Little soft furry rabbits—that was different.
Jane liked all her work and she liked her professors, much better than any of the teachers that she had ever had at Miss Milgrim’s. Still—she never applied herself like Agnes. It was too much fun to take long rambling walks over the wooded countryside with friendly classmates, and make tea in the dormitory, and get up hall plays, and sit up half the night on somebody’s window-seat, talking about—well, almost anything. Beowulf or the Freshman show, or whether there really was an omniscient God that heard your prayers, or the funny thing that had happened in the Livy lecture when—Sometimes Jane thought, very solemnly, that she would never really be serious. Serious as a young woman ought to be who had the advantage of a college education and lived in a world where there was so much to be done.
President M. Carey Thomas always had a great deal to say to the students about the advantage of a college education and she was always calling their attention to the opportunities for women’s work that were opening up in the world. Jane felt a little guilty when she listened to her.
President M. Carey Thomas spoke to the students every day in chapel, after the morning hymn and the reading from the Bible and the Quaker prayer. Jane always went to chapel for she simply loved to hear her. She loved to look at her, too. President Thomas was very beautiful. She stood up behind the reading desk in her black silk gown with the blue
