Of learning and of knowledge,
Which had upon its high brick front,
A ‘Vassar Female College’…”
But the “Female” had blown off one time in a windstorm.
“Let’s have a spread tonight,” Winkie called through the open door.
“Fine!” shouted Carney, pulling off her middy. “We can pump Isobel about her man.”
“What are you wearing?” cried Win. “She may introduce us.”
“A clean duck skirt and waist. I’ll be a vision in white.”
“I’m going to wear my smocked blue silk,” Sue chimed in. “And my lavaliere with the pearl drop. Do you think he would be impressed by pearls?”
“You idiots!” came Winkie’s voice.
“Maybe he’s been smoking cigars and Win can get a whiff of tobacco.”
This brought gratifying shrieks of laughter and Carney, stripped to her petticoat and corset cover, went happily into the attic to wash. The tower bathroom was housed out under the eaves.
She was glad she had decided to invite Isobel to Minnesota. Diving into the white waist and skirt, which with her dark hair and rosy cheeks were becoming enough to please even Isobel’s man, she planned to tell her at dinner.
But Isobel didn’t sit at her own table that night.
After grace was said, the big dining room broke into uproar. It was even more noisy than usual, due, perhaps, to the enlivening nearness of vacation. The Vice-president of the Students’ Association, whose duty it was to keep order, kept beating on a bell, but in spite of that shrill warning there was a clamor of voices.
There were ten girls at a table. The same groups ate together all year. But tonight there was an empty place at the table where the North Tower girls and Peg were seated.
“She’s certainly bidding him a fond farewell,” said Carney, serving the roast beef. The girls took turns serving, changing each week. Carney sat at the head of the table tonight.
“She’s just being mean. She knows we’re dying by inches,” said Win, filling her glass from the tall pitcher of milk.
“Maybe she’s so shattered by his departure that she can’t eat,” said Sue.
“Not Isobel…” but Carney broke off, for at that moment Isobel swept into the dining room with the handsome young man behind her. Not even glancing at her friends, she crossed to the table of the Lady Principal.
“Well, did you ever!” cried Sue.
“How did she talk Mrs. K into that?”
“I had a boy come to see me, he was a friend of my brother’s that I’d known all my life, and we could only…” but no one was listening. The visit of Sue’s brother’s friend, a momentous event in its day, was entirely eclipsed.
“I wonder if she’ll bring him to Chapel.”
“Oh, please! Please! She’d introduce us!”
“What’s for dessert?” asked Winkie. “Isn’t this peanuts-and-maple-sugar night?” Peanuts-and-maple-sugar was an endowed dessert, the gift of some peanuts-and-maple-sugar loving alumna.
But no one answered. No one else cared whether it was peanuts-and-maple-sugar night, or ice cream night, or Tombstone pudding night. Everyone was watching Isobel conversing elegantly with Mrs. K, the Lady Principal, and assorted faculty members, and her guest.
“That Isobel can wangle anything!” said Sue, and Carney thought with amusement of the Minnesota visit. Well, Isobel hadn’t wangled it exactly. Carney had made her own decision.
After dinner it was time to sing. Catching up scarfs or the light Liberty capes which were the fad that year, the students streamed out to the steps of Strong and Rockefeller Halls and sang until time for Chapel.
Step singing was a highly organized activity. Each class had song practise regularly. The juniors sang on the steps of Strong, with the freshmen down on the lawn facing them. The seniors and sophomores went to Rockefeller where the millstone from Matthew Vassar’s mill served as a rostrum.
Carney loved these nightly sings. She had grown up with a singing crowd in Deep Valley. And the campus was beautiful at this twilight hour, with the lamplighter making his rounds.
The sky was still full of tinted clouds. The air smelled of roses and pines, and of those Norway spruces which stood like stately ladies with their trailing skirts about them. When the singing stopped for a moment, you could hear the thrushes calling to one another.
But the thrushes didn’t have much chance when the Vassarites really got to going.
“The maidens fair could not enjoy,
Their bread and milk and porridge,
For graven on the forks and spoons
Was Vassar Female College
A strong east wind at last came by…”
Carney liked that one. It was such a satisfaction when “Female” blew off the sign. And she liked the one about Matthew Vassar’s brewery, and the one about Maria Mitchell, which went to the stirring tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“We’re singing for the glory of Maria Mitchell’s name.
She lived at Vassar College and you all do know the same—
She once did spy a comet and she thus was known to fame…”
Singing lustily, marching eight abreast, their song leaders in front, the girls crossed the lawn to the Chapel. They threw their wraps down at the entrance in a many-colored heap and filed inside.
Carney didn’t mind the fact that Chapel was compulsory and held every night. Not that she was especially religious. But she liked to sit relaxed in the dim light beneath the gilded angels and orient herself for the coming day.
But tonight neither Carney nor anyone else was thinking of much but Isobel’s guest.
He and Isobel sat in the special guest pew, near the front at the right, and everyone watched him. A man guest at Chapel was always the cynosure of eyes, and this one was so extremely handsome.
“He’s like a Gibson man,” Carney whispered to Win.
“She’ll certainly introduce us.”
“She’d better! The pill!”
“He’ll be going away. There couldn’t be a man on the campus after dark.”
And the Guest did indeed take leave of Isobel outside the Chapel door. But although her Tower-mates hung about, within easy beckoning distance, she didn’t introduce them.
“Stung!” said Carney as he lifted his hat and strode down the path to the Lodge Gate where a bobtailed trolley car bound for Poughkeepsie waited.
The girls fell upon Isobel.
“Who is he? Why didn’t you introduce us?…How did you ever talk Mrs. K into letting him stay for dinner?”
“I have my ways,” said Isobel inscrutably. “And as for introducing you…I wouldn’t do it after the way you behaved this afternoon…parading up and down the hall.”
“You paraded when my brother’s friend came!” cried Sue indignantly.
“You even paraded when my father came,” said Peg.
“You would have paraded if Tom Slade had come up from West Point the way he almost did come, and I’m going to have him come next year, and I won’t introduce you even if you give me all your peanuts-and-maple-sugar,” cried Carney.
“Are we having a spread tonight or aren’t we?” interrupted Winkie, looking bored.
“A spread? How divine!” Isobel exclaimed. “Is it going to be in our room? Carney, I hope you tidied up.”
“Well, if the room was tidied up, I tidied it,” said Carney. “Tell us, now, who was he? I’ll bet he was your brother.”
“Brother! Brother indeed!” scoffed Isobel, her low laugh rippling as she pulled her lilac-tinted Liberty cape from among the capes piled on the Chapel steps.
3
The Dress Suit and Suzanne
CARNEY PUT ON HER father’s dress suit for the spread.
“It was a stroke of genius bringing this to Vassar when Dad bought his new one,” she remarked as she squinted into a mirror, creating an upturned moustache with a piece of burnt cork.
“The dress suit and Suzanne,” said Isob
el, “were your two big contributions to the Tower.”
“I’m Tower mouse-catcher, too, don’t forget. You effete Easterners! Afraid to take a mouse out of a trap! How do I look?” Carney asked, turning about with a swagger.
“Ravishing!”
“That’s good. I’m your man, you know. Or didn’t you? Girls!” she shouted, as the bunch began to file in, Winkie lugging a chafing dish. “I’m Isobel’s Gibson man.”
“What’s your name?”
“Montmorency Abernethy.” Carney’s mirthful chuckle exploded.
The girls rushed up to pump her hand.
“We’re so pleased to meet you.”
“At last!”
“We’re Isobel’s dearest friends; she just forgot temporarily.”
“Don’t blame her for not introducing us, Mr. Abernethy. She’s a little…the Green-eyed Monster, you know.”
“Do we have any cheese?” Isobel asked Winkie, trying to act lofty.
“I bought some downstairs this morning.” There was a grocery store in the basement of Main where supplies for spreads and Sunday morning breakfasts could be purchased.
Peg arrived with a plate of fudge which she had made that afternoon behind her “Engaged” sign. She, too, was introduced to Mr. Abernethy, who looked at her long and ardently.
“Why haven’t we met before?” he asked.
“Why, indeed?” replied Peg, rolling her eyes toward Isobel.
“Yes, why?…Why?…Why?” There was a chorus of whys.
“I’m ignoring you. I don’t hear a word you say,” Isobel called out.
Winkie took charge of the rarebit and Peg toasted crackers over the gas light.
“Who’s going to make the cocoa?” she called.
“Not me,” said Win, who was tuning her ukulele.
“Not me,” said Isobel, who was rocking Suzanne.
“I’ll make it,” said Carney. “Where are the tea spoons?”
But the tea spoons had been packed.
“Never mind. I’ll use a shoe horn. See how ingenious I am, my love,” she called to Isobel. Turning her head, she dropped the shoe horn, stared at Isobel wildly and clapped her hand to her forehead.
“Ah me! I forgive you everything when I see you with that child in your arms…”
Isobel burst out laughing. “I give in, I give in,” she said. The girls swooped into a circle on the floor about her. “His name is Howard Sedgwick. What else do you want to know?”
“Is he in love with you?”
“I hope so. He hasn’t told me.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Um-m-m!”
“We are,” replied Win, Sue, Peg and Carney. And even Winkie condescended to ask, “What’s his college?”
“Harvard.”
“Harvard!” There were screams of delight but it didn’t matter. As a rule, after ten o’clock, it was necessary to be quiet. Seven-thirty to nine-thirty were study hours; from nine-thirty to ten noise was unrestrained; but after ten o’clock there was not supposed to be a sound except from the old watchman patrolling the halls.
It was different tonight with the last examination ended. Parties were going on all up and down the corridors. In North Tower after Isobel’s revelation Carney and Sue did the Cubanola Glide. Sue, putting a feather duster on her head, improvised a scene from Chantecler. With Win strumming her ukulele, everyone sang:
“Come on and hear,
Come on and hear,
Alexander’s Ragtime Band…”
They switched from that to “Alma Mater,” sung in parts. The bedlam was so great that not until the girls had left did Carney have a chance to tell Isobel about her mother’s letter.
Characteristically, she blurted out her news. Carney was never able to be casual.
“I wrote my mother about your coming out to Minnesota. I had a letter today. She says it’s all right.”
Carney saw a flush cross Isobel’s face.
She wondered, as she had wondered many times, just why Isobel wanted so much to come. Carney knew from her short visit there that East Hampton was very gay. There were plenty of men, and few of the restrictions which prevailed at Vassar.
To be sure, Isobel had no brothers or sisters and she wasn’t particularly close to her parents, who didn’t even seem particularly close to each other. Perhaps…though it didn’t seem likely…Isobel was attracted by the home pictures clustered about Carney’s bureau, by the frequent letters from her father, mother, and brothers which she often read aloud.
Carney had a sudden repentant realization that she might have framed her invitation more graciously.
“I think we’ll have lots of fun,” she said to make amends. “Bonnie is back from Paris, you know, and she’s going to be there. Mother says it will be a sort of house party.”
“What else does she say?” asked Isobel eagerly.
“I’ll read you her letter,” Carney offered.
Isobel reached for a dressing sacque and stretched out on the bed, and Carney thought, as she had often thought before, how beautiful Isobel was. She was a fine roommate, companionable, easy-going and obliging. She was reasonably neat, didn’t borrow too much, and never lost her temper. But best of all, she was lovely to look at, morning, noon, or night.
Her loosened hair was a rich golden brown and fell into ringlets, large and small. Her curling lashes were the same tint as her hair, her skin was flawless, her eyes darkly blue. Her lips were mobile and were often curved in a faintly mysterious smile. But she wasn’t smiling now. She was listening intently, and Carney was glad that her mother sounded so sincerely cordial.
Mrs. Sibley mentioned various girls whom Isobel would enjoy.
“I imagine,” she wrote, “that Isobel feels she almost knows your Crowd. And now,” she continued, “I must tell you about the Hutchinsons.”
“Who are the Hutchinsons?” Isobel inquired.
“Listen, my child, and you shall hear,” said Carney, returning to the letter.
“I’m sure,” her mother wrote, “you’ve heard of the Hutchinsons of New Town. He is the big milling man. (Railroad and lumber interests, too, your father says.) They have bought the old Dwyer place out at Murmuring Lake. You remember that big white affair with two acres of water-front land. They have been remodeling and putting in gardens. It’s quite the sensation of the county.
“They say that Bradstreet has decorated it. They say, too, that the Hutchinsons give very fashionable parties to which the men wear evening clothes and the ladies, low-cut ball gowns.
“Lots of ‘they says,’ but you can imagine how Deep Valley is talking. The son of the house drives about in a big Locomobile.”
“The son of the house? The son of the house?” Isobel interrupted.
“Aha!” said Carney. “Do I see a gleam in your eye? I seem to remember that those Hutchinsons have a son, not too ancient. We’ll never meet him, though. I don’t run with that set.”
“Oh, dear!”
“Never mind,” said Carney. “The boys in our Crowd are very cute. Three or four of them have been to the U and Tom will be home from West Point.”
“I’ll manage,” Isobel said. “I’m awfully glad to come, Carney. You’re kind to have me.” Something in her tone made Carney think Isobel was aware that she had had misgivings.
“That’s all right. Glad to have you,” said Carney, jumping up. She began to sort and stack the dishes which had been used at the spread. Carney would never go to bed after a party without washing the dishes. Isobel thought it was foolish and long ago had made her position clear. She didn’t mind washing the dishes if Carney would leave them until morning, but Carney refused.
“My New England ancestors would haunt me,” she had said. “And I don’t mind doing it. I sort of like it.”
So Isobel went to bed, and Carney filled a small pan with soapy water in the bathroom. She carefully washed the china, rinsed it and wiped it, and put the little tea table in its usual immaculate order.
&nbs
p; Ready for bed herself, in a long-sleeved cotton night gown, her dark hair in two smooth pigtails, she went to turn out the green-shaded Welsbach lamp. But she paused, as she usually did, to look at Larry’s picture.
Larry wasn’t handsome in the Gibson-man style of Howard Sedgwick, but he was attractive. He had thick hair and a crooked, somewhat quizzical smile. Betsy Ray had said he always seemed to be laughing at you, but Carney didn’t think she would mind his laughing at her.
It didn’t seem four years since he had gone away, their letters had kept them so close. And he had sent her so many things, gifts and souvenirs, which had brought California to her room.
In the closet was his crimson football sweater with the big S which she adored wearing for mystified Vassarites. In her jewel case was his last Christmas gift, a pendant made from an abalone shell. She wore it sometimes just to give herself confidence, that quality which she had had without knowing it at home and which, in the East, had been so hard to hold.
“I’ll bet he’s a lot nicer than Isobel’s Howard Sedgwick,” she thought, turning out the light.
The next day juniors and freshman departed, vacating their rooms for alumnae, and leaving just the sister class behind to companion the graduates.
Class Day began to occupy all energies. That Daisy Chain! Would there be daisies enough? Would the weather be rainy, or poisonously hot, or reasonably cool for picking them?
On the great day the sophomores were up at dawn, wearing middies, old skirts, and straw hats. They piled into wagons and went off to distant fields seeking daisies, and more daisies.
Returning with their snowy loads, they went to the gym. They put the daisies into tubs of water and started bunching them. Men from Saltford’s, the Poughkeepsie florist, came out to help twine the chain.
When it was finished it was thick and white and luscious. The sophomores were very tired as they bathed and dressed. But when the Chain was forming, out on the lawn behind Main, their pride and pleasure banished fatigue.
The twenty-four, selected for their pulchritude, were dressed in long white gowns. They were lined up in a double row, and Saltford’s men were looping the chain from shoulder to shoulder. The shoulders were padded with tiny pillows, for the daisy chain was heavy.