“What is it?” cried Jane. She paused, teakettle in hand, at the door.
“Scribner’s—has—taken—my—story!” said Agnes solemnly.
Jane dropped the teakettle.
“Agnes!” she cried.
“They’ve sent me a check for one—hundred—and—fifty—dollars!” said Agnes. “Jane! It can’t be true! I must have died and gone to heaven.”
“Let me see it!” cried Jane.
There it was—the little green slip. One hundred and fifty dollars.
Jane and Marion could hardly believe their eyes. They all had tea together. They had tea together almost every afternoon, but this was a festival. They made a laurel wreath out of a strand of potted ivy and crowned Agnes’s triumphant head. Jane began to quote Byron. They had just reached the Romantic Poets in General English.
“ ‘Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story,
The days of our youth are the days of our glory,
And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty
Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty!’
There’s your ivy, darling, we haven’t any myrtle, but—”
“Don’t you believe it,” said Agnes. “Byron was wrong. He was a funny man, anyway. I’d give up anything—anything in the world—just to write.”
“Maybe you won’t have to give up anything,” said Jane. “You write awfully well, now. Maybe you’ll have your cake and eat it, too. Byron did,” she added very wisely. “All the cake there was.”
“I’m not a bit like Byron,” said Agnes very seriously. “I’m not at all romantic. I just want to accomplish.”
Marion nodded her head soberly as if she understood. There it was, again. Accomplishment. That thing for which Jane could never muster up any enthusiasm. Jane just wanted to live along and be happy. Live along with nice funny people who were doing interesting things and told you about them. Like Agnes and Marion. And André, who had always told her so much. Nice funny people who thought you were nice and funny, too.
Jane liked her work, though. Jane liked it awfully. She could really read French, now, almost as well as English, and she had loved the lectures on Shakespeare and she was thrilled by the Romantic Poets. She always did a lot of outside reading and she had learned pages of poetry by heart. Nevertheless she never got very good marks. Not marks like Agnes and Marion. It was because she couldn’t be bothered with learning grammar and dates and irrelevant facts that didn’t interest her. She had missed that entire question in the English midyears paper on the clauses of Shakespeare’s will. Why should anyone remember the clauses of Shakespeare’s will? Jane couldn’t be bothered with them. Not when she could curl up on the Pembroke window-seat and learn Romeo and Juliet by heart. Jane thought Romeo and Juliet was the most beautiful thing that she had ever read. She loved to repeat it aloud when she was alone in her bed at night or striding over the Bryn Mawr countryside with Agnes and Marion.
“ ‘What lady’s that, which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?’
‘I know not, sir.’
‘O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.’ ”
Lovely sounds—lovely phrases!
“ ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound!
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!’ ”
What fun to know lines like that! To have them always with you, like toys in your pocket, to play with when you were lonely.
“ ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.’ ”
Who would learn the clauses of Shakespeare’s will? Agnes and Marion had, however.
Philosophy was simpler. Philosophy was very easy to learn. It was all about just what you’d thought yourself, one time or another, after you’d begun to grow up. It was strange to think that everyone had always thought about the same things, down the ages. God and man and the world. Herself and Sophocles. Agnes and Plato. And felt the same things, too. Romeo and Juliet. “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” That was what Isabel had done, when André went to France. Maybe, now she had Robin, she understood.
“Let’s go for a walk,” said Agnes.
Jane jumped to her feet. There would be mud underfoot but all the brooks would be running fast and the stripped tree branches would be tossing in the mad March wind, and the sun would be bright, and the sky would be blue, and perhaps they would find the first hepatica.
They would go for a walk.
VI
The Commencement procession was forming in front of the gymnasium. The day was hot and sultry, with the promise of rain in the air. Jane and Agnes and Marion were all Sophomore marshals. They were dressed in crisp white shirtwaists and long duck skirts and they had on their caps and gowns. They each held a little white baton, with a white and yellow bow on it, sacred insignia of office. The Seniors were in cap and gown, too, and all of the faculty. The staid professors looked strangely picturesque, standing about on the thick green turf, with their brilliant hoods of red and blue and purple silk. One scarlet gown from the University of London made a splash of vivid colour against the emerald lawn. The Seniors’ hoods were all white and yellow, trimmed with rabbit fur. President Thomas was talking to the commencement speaker. Some college trustees were clustered in a little group around her. Funny old men, thought Jane! They looked very flushed and hot in their black frock coats under academic dress. Some of them were fanning themselves with their mortar boards.
Jane was busy getting the Seniors into line.
