Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/113

 some Mädchen who cared not for calculus and Hebrew, but only to be what her mother had been, wife and house-mother. But this was treason. Our grandmothers had thought that.

She looked at the girl in the middle row. What beautiful hair she had! What an idiot she was to give up four years of her life to this round of work and play and pretence of living! Oh, to go back to Germany—to see Bertha and her mother again, and hear the father’s ’cello! Hermann had loved her so! He had said, so quietly and yet so surely: “But thou wilt come back, my heart’s own. And always I wait here for thee. Make me not wait long!” He had seemed too quiet then—too slow and too easily content. She had wanted quicker, busier, more individual life. And now her heart said, “O fool!”

Was it too late? Suppose she should go, after all? Suppose she should go, and all should be as it had been, only a