Her father had done his best for her. They had talked about nothing else all Easter vacation. Except Isabel’s baby, which was coming in July. Her mother was determined that she should “come out” with Flora and Muriel. Nothing else mattered. Her father had championed her cause wholeheartedly. But Jane had detected in his final surrender a certain note of relief.
“Two years,” he said, “has been a long time to live without you, kid. In this big house.”
The procession was taking form and substance at last. The trustees had lined up at its head. Miss Thomas had fallen in behind them with the speaker. Jane slipped into her place with Agnes just behind the wardens and in front of the Seniors. The procession began to move slowly along the gravel walk.
The day was really terribly hot and the air was lifeless. The maple trees in the distance looked very round and symmetrical, almost like toy trees. Their boughs were thick with leaves. The shadows beneath them were round and symmetrical, too, and very dark. The air was sweet with the odour of newly cut grass.
The procession wound deliberately across the lawn. The black-gowned figures looked very dignified and austere in the summer sun. The bits of silken colour flashed and shimmered, here and there, with the movement of their wearers. The campus seemed strangely empty, with all its inhabitants gathered into this little procession. Jane suddenly remembered her Keats.
“What little town by river or seashore,
Or mountain built with peaceful citadel.
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?”
The morn was pious and the great, grey, ivied buildings quite deserted. The sky overhead was softly blue. Beyond the maple row, however, great puffy white and silver thunderheads were rolling up in the west. It would surely rain before nightfall.
The procession turned into Taylor Hall. It shuffled down the tiled corridor, past the great bust of Juno at the head of the passage, and slowly ascended the stairs. The chapel was decorated with the Commencement daisy chain. It was very hot and very full of people. Fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, all fanning themselves and craning their necks to look at the Seniors as they passed by. The faculty took their places on the platform. The Seniors filled the first six rows of chairs. Jane stood in line with the other marshals, facing the audience. The Head Marshal raised her baton. Everyone sat down at once. The visiting clergyman rose to make his prayer.
Jane didn’t listen much. She felt very hot and very, very sleepy. She had been up at dawn and out in the fields at six picking the daisies for the chain. It had been hard to get up but it was lots of fun to pick the daisies. The day had been cool, then, and the meadows were wet with dew. Jane had loved wading about in the long damp grass with Agnes and Marion, plucking great armfuls of the white and yellow flowers. They had gathered thousands in less than two hours. Whole fields were white with them. Great green fields, sloping up against the morning sky, with big white patches of dazzling daisies, shining in the morning sun. They picked until their fingers were red and sore.
“ ‘The meanest flower that grows,’ ” said Agnes, struggling with a fibrous stem, “in the words of the worthy Wordsworth.”
“Worthy, but wordy,” said Jane. She had found the “Prelude” rather long. “You could make an epigram out of that.”
Agnes had done so at once.
“Wordsworth was a worthy man.
He wrote as much as poet can.
But if you try to read him through
You’ll find him rather wordy, too.”
Jane and Marion had both laughed uproariously. It made Jane laugh, now, sleepy as she was and right in the middle of the prayer, just to think of it. Agnes was terribly funny. It made Jane feel very sad to think that she would never laugh again like that, over nothing at all, with Agnes and Marion. She was going out into a world where, she was quite certain, nothing would ever seem as irresistibly funny as everything did at Bryn Mawr. She was going out to grow up and live at home and come out with Flora and Muriel and be a good daughter to her father and mother and a sister to Isabel and a sister-in-law to Robin and an aunt, grotesquely enough, to Isabel’s baby. She thought she would much rather stay on in Pembroke and just be a Bryn Mawr Junior with no entangling alliances, whatever.
The prayer was over and the Commencement speaker was rising to his feet. Jane stifled a yawn. The heat was really terrific. Every window was open and Jane could see far out over the campus and the maple row to the rolling Pennsylvania hills beneath the thunder heads. What a lovely place to have to leave for Pine Street. She would carry it with her, though, back to the flat, sandy shores of Lake Michigan. She would remember, always, this paradise of flowering shrub and tree, of sweet green spaces and grey ivied walls. The memory would be a sanctuary. She was momentarily grateful to the wordy Wordsworth for an unforgettable fragment.
“They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
Jane knew all about the inward eye. But she thanked the poet for the phrase. If her education had done nothing else for her, Jane reflected, it had provided her with an apt quotation for every romantic emotion.
The Commencement exercises dragged wearily on. Jane couldn’t remember, when she tried to concentrate, just what the speaker had said his subject was. He seemed to be talking
