The Cost | Page 8

effervescent of laughter and life, now silent and almost somber. It was two weeks before she, not easily won to the confiding mood for all her frankness, let Olivia into her secret. Of course, it was at night; of course, they were in the same bed. And when Olivia had heard she came nearer to the truth about Dumont than had Pauline's mother. But, while she felt sure there was a way to cure Pauline, she knew that way was not the one which had been pursued. "They've only made her obstinate," she thought, as she, lying with hands clasped behind her head, watched Pauline, propped upon an elbow, staring with dreamful determination into the moonlight.
"It'll come out all right," she said; her voice always suggested that she knew what she was talking about. "Your father'll give in sooner or later--if YOU don't change."
"But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't listen to his side--to our side--of it."
"Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait."
Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of peril to him.
"We want it settled," she said evasively.
"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he here now?"
"He's in Chicago--in charge of his father's office there. He may stay all winter."
"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from experience--she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when, going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider view.
But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was only one man whom she could have loved or could love.
"Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her cousin against discussion.
"At any rate," replied Olivia, "a little experience would do you no harm." She suddenly sat up in bed. "A splendid idea!" she exclaimed. "Why not come to Battle Field with me?"
"I'd like it," said Pauline, always eager for self-improvement and roused by Olivia's stories of her college experiences. "But father'd never let me go to Battle Field College."
"Battle Field UNIVERSITY," corrected Olivia. "It has classical courses and scientific courses and a preparatory school--and a military department for men and a music department for women. And it's going to have lots and lots of real university schools--when it gets the money. And there's a healthy, middle-aged wagon-maker who's said to be thinking of leaving it a million or so--if he should ever die and if they should change its name to his."
"But it's coeducation, isn't it? Father would never consent. It was all mother could do to persuade him to let me go to public school."
"But maybe he'd let you go with me, where he wouldn't let you go all alone."
And so it turned out. Colonel Gardiner, anxious to get his daughter away from Saint X and into new scenes where Dumont might grow dim, consented as soon as Olivia explained her plan.
Instead of entering "senior prep", Pauline was able to make freshman with only three conditions. In the first week she was initiated into Olivia's fraternity, the Kappa Alpha Kappa, joined the woman's literary and debating society, and was fascinated and absorbed by crowding new events, associations, occupations, thoughts. In spite of herself her old-time high spirits came flooding back. She caught herself humming--and checked herself reproachfully. She caught herself singing--and lowered it to humming. She caught herself whistling--and decided that she might as well be cheerful while she waited for fate to befriend her and Jack. And she found that she thought about him none the less steadfastly for thinking hopefully.
Battle Field put no more restraint upon its young women than it put upon its young men--and it put no restraint upon the young men. In theory and practice it was democratic, American, western--an outgrowth of that pioneer life in which the men and the women had fought and toiled and enjoyed, side by side, in absolute equality, with absolute freedom of association. It recognized that its students had been brought up in the free, simple, frank way, that all came from a region where individualism was a religion,