“I want to explain,” she repeated, defiantly this time. “You had no right to come between myself and my father! I wish with all my heart you had never seen him, but since you have seen him I must explain. I am not entirely the hypocrite and the coward you take me for.” She stopped suddenly and gave a low cry. “Ah! what shall I say to make you understand? It began so long ago—I did not mean to deceive him. It was because I loved him and he thought me so clever. He thought because I was quick and bright, and because I was having a college education, that I was—different. In his ignorance how could he guess the great difference between a superficial aptitude and real talents? How could I tell him—how could I,” with a despairing gesture, “that I was just like thousands of other girls, and that there are hundreds right here in this college who are my superiors in every way? It would have broken his heart.” Her breath came in short gasps and the pallor of her face had changed to a dull red.
Miss Arnold leaned forward on the table.
“You have grossly deceived him,” she said, in cold, even tones.
“Deceived him?—yes—a thousand times and in a thousand ways. But I did it to make him happy. Am I really to blame? He expected so much of me—he had such hopes and such dreams of some great career for me. I am a coward. I could not tell him that I was a weak, ordinary girl, that I could never realize his aspirations, that the mere knowledge that he depended and relied upon me weighed upon me and paralyzed every effort. When I loved him so could I tell him this? Could I tell him that his sacrifices were in vain, that the girl of whom he had boasted to every man in the mining camp was a complete failure?”
She went over to the table and leaned her head upon her shaking hand.
“If my mother—if I had had a brother or sister, it might have been different, but I was alone and I was all he had. And so I struggled on, half hoping that I might become something after all. But I confessed to myself what I could not to him, that I would never become a scholar, that my intellect was wholly superficial, that the verses I wrote were the veriest trash, that I was only doing what ninety-nine out of every hundred girls did, and that ninety-eight wrote better rhymes than I. There is a whole drawerful of my ‘poetry’”—she flung open a desk disdainfully—“until I could stand it no longer, and one day when he asked me to write something about the mountains, in desperation I copied those verses of Matthew Arnold’s. I knew he would never see them. After that it was easy to do so again.” She stopped and pressed her hands to her eyes.
“I am the most miserable girl that lives,” she said.
Miss Arnold looked at her coldly.
“And the book?” she said at length.
Miss Oldham lifted her head wearily.