Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/1011

Rh conceived it to be. He caught the touch of tender vindication in her manner as she untied the cheap red ribbon which held the flowers together and rearranged them into two bunches so that the jarring colors might no longer offend, and felt that the really natural thing for her to do was to weep, and that she only restrained her tears for his sake. Sixteen was so young! His heart grew warm and brotherly towards her youth and inexperience; but, after all, how infinitely better that she should have cause for this passing sorrow.

He left her alone, but not for long. He was eager to talk with her of the plans about which he had been writing her the two years since he himself had been a student at Vaucluse, of the future which they should achieve together. It seemed to him only necessary for him to show her his point of view to have her adopt it as her own; and he believed, building on her buoyancy and responsiveness of disposition, that nothing he might propose would be beyond the scope of her courage.

"It may be a little lonely for you at first," he told her. "There are only a handful of women students at the college, and all of them much older than you; but it is your studies at last that are the really important thing, and I will help you with them all I can. Mrs. Bancroft will have no other lodgers and there will be nothing to interrupt our work."

"And the money, Lindsay?" she asked, a little anxiously.

"What I have will carry us through this year. Next summer we can teach and make almost enough for the year after. The trustees are planning to establish a fellowship in Greek, and if they do and I can secure it—and Professor Wayland thinks I can,—that will make us safe the next two years until you are through."

"And then?"

He straightened up buoyantly. "Then your two years at Vassar and mine at Harvard, with some teaching thrown in along the way, of course. And then Europe—Greece—all the great things!"

She smiled with him in his enthusiasm. "You are used to such bold thoughts. It is too high a flight for me all at once."

"It will not be, a year from now," he declared, confidently.

A silence fell between them, and the noise of the train made a pleasant accompaniment to his thoughts as he sketched in detail the work of the coming months. But always as a background to his hopes was that honorable social position which he meant eventually to achieve, the passion for which was a part of his Southern inheritance. Little as he had yet participated in any interests outside his daily tasks, he had perceived in the old college town its deeply grained traditions of birth and custom, perceived and respected them, and discounted the more their absence in the sorry village he had left. Sometime when he should assail it, the exclusiveness of his new environment might beat him back cruelly, but thus far it existed for him only as a barrier to what was ultimately precious and desirable. One day the gates would open at his touch, and he and the sister of his heart should enter their rightful heritage.

The afternoon waned. He pointed outside the car window. "See how different all this is from the part of the State which we have left," he said. "The landscape is still rural, but what mellowness it has; because it has been enriched by a larger, more generous human life. One can imagine what this whole section must have been in those old days, before the coming of war and desolation. And Vaucluse was the flower, the centre of it all!" His eye kindled. "Some day external prosperity will return, and then Vaucluse and her ideals will be needed more than ever; it is she who must hold in check the commercial spirit, and dominate, as she has always done, the material with the intellectual." There was a noble emotion in his face, reflecting itself in the younger countenance beside his own. Poor, young, unknown, their hearts thrilled with pride in their State, with the possibility that they also should give to her of their best when the opportunity should be theirs.

"It is a wonderful old town," Lindsay went on again. "Even Wayland says so,—our Greek professor, you know." His voice thrilled with the devotion of the hero-worshipper as he spoke the name. "He is a Harvard man, and has seen the