At one of the tables reserved for the alumnæ, near the upper end of the room, sat a girl dressed in deep mourning. Her face was very beautiful and intelligent, with the intelligence that is more the result of experience than of unusual mental ability. There were delicate, fine lines about the mouth and eyes. She could not have been more than twenty-four or five, but there was an air of firmness and decision about her which contradicted her blond—almost frivolous—beauty and lent dignity to the delicate figure.
After awhile she leaned back in her chair a trifle wearily and looked about her curiously as if for changes. The general aspect of the place remained the same, she decided, but there were a great many new faces—new faces in the faculty, too, where one least likes to find them. Here and there she saw an old acquaintance and smiled perfunctorily, but, on the whole, there was no one present she cared very much to see. She had just come to the conclusion that she was sorry she had made the long journey to be present at the dinner when she became conscious that someone was looking intently at her across the room. She leaned forward eagerly and smiled naturally and cordially for the first time. And then she sank back suddenly and blushed like a school-girl and smiled again, but in a different way, as if at herself, or at some thought that tickled her fancy. It certainly did strike her as rather amusing and presuming for her to be smiling and bowing so cordially to Professor Arbuthnot. She remembered very distinctly, in what awe she had stood of that learned lady, and that in her undergraduate days she had systematically avoided her, since she could not avoid her examinations and their occasionally disastrous consequences. She recalled very forcibly the masterly lectures, the logical, profound, often original talks, which she had heard in her lecture-room, though she had to acknowledge to herself reproachfully, that the matter of them had entirely escaped her memory. She had been one of a big majority who had always considered Professor Arbuthnot as a very high type—perhaps the highest type the college afforded—of a woman whose brains and attainments would make her remarkable in any assembly of savants. In her presence she had always realized very keenly her own superficiality, and she felt very much flattered that such a woman should have remembered her and not a little abashed as she thought of the entire renunciation of study she had made since leaving college. She wondered what Professor Arbuthnot might be thinking about her—she knew she was thinking about her, because the bright eyes opposite were still fixed upon her with their piercing, not unkindly gaze. It occurred to her at last, humorously, that perhaps the Professor was not considering her at all, but some question in—thermo-electric currents for instance.
But Miss Arbuthnot’s mind was not on thermo-electric currents; she was saying to herself: “She is much more beautiful than when she was here, and there is a new element of beauty in her face, too. I wonder where she has been since, and why she is in mourning. She was unintelligent, I remember. It’s a great pity—brains and that sort of beauty rarely ever go together. Her name was Ellis—yes—Grace Ellis. I think I must see her later.” And the Professor gave her another piercing smile and settled herself to listen to a distinguished political economist—a great friend of hers—speak.
The Political Economist got upon his feet slowly and with a certain diffidence. He was a man who had made his way, self-taught, from poverty and ignorance to a professorship in one of the finest technical schools of America.
There was a brusqueness in his manner, and the hard experiences of his life had made him old. He spoke in a quiet, authoritative way. He declared, with a rather heavy attempt at jocoseness, that his hearers had had their sweets first, so to speak, and that they must now go back and take a little solid, unpalpable nourishment; that he had never made a witty or amusing remark in his life, and he did not propose to begin and try then, and finally he hinted that the President had made a very bad selection when she invited him to respond to the toast—“The Modern Education of Woman.” As he warmed to his subject he became more gracious and easy in manner. He spoke at length of the evolution of women’s colleges, their methods, their advantages, their limitations; he touched upon the salient points of difference between a man’s college life and that of a girl; differences of character, of interests, of methods of work. And then he went on:
“I believe in it—I believe firmly in the modern education of woman. It is one of the things of most vital interest to me; but my enthusiasm does not blind me. There are phases of it which I do not indorse. I object to many of its results. The most obvious bad result is the exaggerated importance which the very phrase has assumed.” He smiled plaintively around upon the company. “Are we to have nothing but woman’s education—toujours l’éducation de la femme? There is such eagerness to get to college, such blind belief in what is to be learned there, such a demand for a college education for women, that we are overwhelmed by it. Every year these doors are closed upon hundreds of disappointed women, who turn elsewhere, or relinquish the much-prized college education. The day is not far distant when it will be a distinct reproach to a woman that she is not college-bred.” He looked down thoughtfully and intently and spoke more slowly.
“It is this phase of it which sometimes troubles me. Life is so rich in experience for woman—so much richer and fuller for woman than for
man—that I tremble at this violent reaction from nature to art. To-day woman seems to forget that she must learn to live, not live to learn. At the risk of being branded as ‘behind the times,’ of being considered narrow, bigoted, old-fashioned, I must say that until woman re-discovers that life is everything, that all she can learn here in a hundred times the four years of her college course is but the least part of what life and nature can teach her, until then I shall not be wholly satisfied with the modern education of woman.”