A Reversion To Type | Page 3

other. Four years was little to lend to such an
experiment. But the older women, who sat on those prim little
platforms year after year--a sudden curiosity possessed her to know
how many of them were really satisfied.
Could it be that they had preferred--actually preferred--But she had,
herself, three years ago. She shook her head decidedly. "Not for nine
years, not for nine!" she murmured, as she caught through the heavy
door a familiar voice raised to emphasize some French phrase.
And yet, somebody must teach them. They could not be born with
foreign idioms and historical dates and mathematical formulae in their
little heads. She herself deplored the modern tendency that sent a
changing drift of young teachers through the colleges, to learn at the
expense of the students a soon relinquished profession. But how
ridiculous the position of the women who prided themselves on the
steadiness and continuity of their service! Surely they must find it an
empty success at times. They must regret.
She was passing through the chapel. Two scrubbing-women were
straightening the chairs, their backs turned to her.
"From all I hear," said one, with a chuckle and a sly glance, "we'll be
afther gettin' our invitations soon."
"An' to what?" demanded the other quickly.

"Sure, they say it's a weddin'."
"Ah, now, hush yer noise, Mary Nolan; 'tis no such thing. I've had
enough o' husbands. I know when I'm doin' well, an' that's as I am!"
"'Tis strange that the men sh'd think different, now, but they do!"
They laughed heartily and long. The German assistant looked at the
broad backs meditatively. Just now they seemed to her more consistent
than any other women in the great building.
She walked quickly across the greening campus. The close-set brick
buildings seemed to press up against her; every window stood for some
crowded, narrow room, filled with books and tea-cups and clothes and
photographs--hundreds of them, and all alike. In her own room she
tried to reason herself out of this intolerable depression, to realize the
advantages of a quiet life in what was surely the same pleasant,
cultured atmosphere to which she had so eagerly looked forward three
years ago. Her room was large, well furnished, perfectly heated; and if
the condition of her closet would have appeared nothing short of
appalling to a householder, that condition was owing to the hopeless
exigencies of the occasion. With the exception of that whited sepulchre,
all was neat, artistic, eminently habitable. She surveyed it critically: the
"Mona Lisa," the large "Melrose Abbey," the Burne-Jones draperies,
and the "Blessed Damozel" that spread a placid if monotonous culture
through the rooms of educated single women. A proper appreciation of
polished wood, the sanitary and aesthetic values of the open fire, a
certain scheme in couch-pillows, all linked it to the dozen other rooms
that occupied the same relative ground-floor corners in a dozen other
houses. Some of them had more books, some ran to handsome
photographs, some afforded fads in old furniture; but it was only a
question of more or less. It looked utterly impersonal to-day; its very
atmosphere was artificial, typical, a pretended self-sufficiency.
How many years more should she live in it--three, nine, thirteen? The
tide of girls would ebb and flow with every June and September;
eighteen to twenty-two would ring their changes through the terms, and
she could take her choice of the two methods of regarding them: she

could insist on a perennial interest in the separate personalities, and
endure weariness for the sake of an uncertain influence; or she could
mass them frankly as the student body, and confine the connection to
marking their class-room efforts and serving their meat in the
dining-room. The latter was at once more honest and more easy; all but
the most ambitious or the most conscientious came ta it sooner or later.
The youngest among the assistants, themselves fresh from college,
mingled naturally enough with the students; they danced and skated
and enjoyed their girlish authority. The older women, seasoned to the
life, settled there indefinitely, identified themselves more or less with
the town, amused themselves with their little aristocracy of precedence,
and wove and interwove the complicated, slender strands of college
gossip. But a woman of barely thirty, too old for friendships with
young girls, too young to find her placid recreation in the stereotyped
round of social functions, that seemed so perfectly imitative of the
normal and yet so curiously unsuccessful at bottom--what was there for
her?
Her eyes were fixed on the hill-slope view that made her room so
desirable. It occurred to her that its changelessness was not necessarily
so attractive a characteristic as the local poets practised themselves in
assuring her.
A light knock at the door recalled to her the