IV
Is there any place in the world, Esther Lawes often in graduate days asked her friends, where the evening light lies so long and so delicate as at Bryn Mawr? The campus, snow-piled, prolongs a pale dusk at tea-time; in spring the afternoons grow longer slowly until they are forgotten in the softness of the lengthening evenings; the great cherry-tree, black against grey Pembroke but afoam and aflutter with exquisite whiteness, merges its sharp perfume into the softer odour of the crowded flushed apple-trees and the pungent flavour of their neighbours the green-tufted larches. The misty woods back of Merion become denser aloft and under foot; and beyond the Roberts Road the meadow fills up across the brook with pale shapely violets striped at the heart by threads of purple; the long avenue of maples shakes out its heavy leafage under which all day the girls with their rugs and cushions make yellow and scarlet splashes. After dinner, on the dense short turf in front of Denbigh, she would watch the undergraduates quadrilling—comely figures in faint blues and lavenders, ribbons and ruffles all afloat. She stopped awhile on one of these bland nights in a late and sudden spring, to scan the half-familiar types, the sleek heads and white arms, in the waxing twilight, smiling to herself at her content with them and with the swirl of voiceless swallows about one of the high stone chimneys of Taylor Hall. Gathering up her own filmy dress she moved through the deep-green grass that began to dull and chill her slippers, to the shadowed postern door in the graduate wing and up to her own study. She had not dreamed of such content, she remembered, her first night in the room.