III
In the house there were movements, and voices cut short by banging doors. Sydney had picked up a lamp and disappeared into her bedroom in a sphere of radiance, like a glow-worm. The dimmed room, which seemed yellower, took a new look: the whole Italian Renaissance, very adequately represented by the pictures on the walls, withdrew into itself and darkness. Esther stared absently from the long steamer chair at the faintly yellowed walls, at the pink bed of coals, and two Tanagra figurines above,—the lady who binds up her hair and the other lady carrying a wide basin in her slender hands, who forever bends over it to watch her own reflected face.
The girl was disturbed more by this fellowship business than even to her close friend she could betray. Not wanting the fellowship for herself, she did crave it for Sydney. Moreover, they could then go abroad together. She had longed that day to hint as much to a professor that was, she thought, disposed to overvalue her own rather advanced work along a very narrow line as against Sydney's all-round brilliancy. And while she heard the other opening drawers and rustling in her wardrobe, Esther pursued her misgiving a step further than it had ever before taken her, although at no time was she a fancier of illusions.
Their alliance, hers and Sydney's, ran back at least a dozen years, away into childhood, and was rooted in all sorts of mutual dependencies. Both moreover were fastidious and constant in their personal affections, making indeed few acquaintances but giving up fewer, and although Sydney had besides what the other called the goose-brigade, a succession of waddling and hissing creatures of both sexes that passed for swans, yet these never got farther than, so to speak, the common outside her windows. Esther herself, without near relatives and secure of a tiny income on which one could starve at least comfortably, having come to college in the interest less of culture than of pedantry, had in the interest of amusement supplemented her Greek with English, and her Hebrew, by way of serious study, with Assyrian and kindred tongues. But Sydney, positively, had gone through as many stages and as well-defined as a silk-worm. Once her violin was the be-all and the end-all; her masters had advised a professional training, urged the expediency of having a career up one's sleeve. Esther felt that it was she who had unconsciously lopped off that possibility, in her own enthusiasm for the college which she was then about to enter, to which she whirled off her friend, plumping her down mentally breathless in a field of Latin and Greek. For the past year or two years, however, the classical prepossessions had been yielding to a keener preoccupation with English and a kindling ambition along the line of what the Sunday papers call literary work. This was furthered partly by Esther's own growing delight in the same matters and partly by the influence of other members of their class, notably Hilda Railton.
It was in the argot of their own vanishing here and now, of course, that they had been talking, using counters precisely as the poker-player does, to stand for an immense amount, or at any rate for an indefinite amount. Sydney was wonderful at catching not merely the turn of a phrase, but a turn of thought: she was simpatica.
"Do you know," said the voice from the inner room, "I can't get that Japanese thing of Hilda's out of my head. Don't you think I might look for one at that same Fifth Avenue place when I am at home at Easter, and try it over my table?"
Hilda's Japanese print! There you were. After all, one did recognize the type; it wasn't the superficial nor yet the parasite, but there was about it something of the chameleon nature. It was the ominous unruffled pool that brought Narcissus to his death. With all her brilliancy, all her charm, she was in essence simply the magical mirror.
Esther was convinced that neither Sydney herself knew this, nor any of her neighbours. She was far and away too clever. There was just one pathetic chance that somebody in the Faculty might be of so inconceivable a cleverness as to have spied the unscholastic fact.
For the third time that evening steps came to the door, and a knock. Esther waited for Sydney and the girls moved together to the threshold, opening on the mistress who held out an envelope. She offered it to Esther.