Not until Professor ——, smiling more graciously than ever, reached the close of his speech, not until he referred to her for the third time as having reached “the stars through difficulties,” did she realize that she who had looked on, she who had listened, she who had wanted so to laugh, was a person quite different from the uncouth girl with the shabby sweater and broken shoes whom the higher-ups were toasting and flattering.
“I’ve never made a talk yet in my life,” she said in answer to the calls for “Speech! speech!” “But these are grand words from the professor, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She looked around on these stars of the college world whom, after all her struggles, she had reached. “Yes, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She nodded with a queer little smile, and sat down amidst a shower of applause.
§ 6
In a daze Sophie left the heated banquet-hall. She walked blindly, struggling to get hold of herself, struggling in vain. Every reality, every human stay, seemed to slip from her. A stifled sense of emptiness weighed her down like a dead weight.
“What’s the matter with me?” she cried. “Why do the higher-ups crush me so with nothing? Why is their smiling politeness only a hidden hurt in my heart?”
The flattering voices, the puppet-like smiles, the congratulations that sounded like mockery, were now so distant, so unreal as was the girl with her nose in the air. What cared these people wrapped in furs that the winter wind pierced through her shabby sweater? What cared they if her heart died in her from loneliness?
An aching need for human fellowship pressed upon her, a need for someone who cared for her regardless of failure or success. In a sudden dimming of vision she saw the only real look of sympathy that had ever warmed her soul. Of them all, this man with the understanding eyes had known that what she wanted to say was worth saying before it got into print. If she could only see him—him himself!
If she could only pass the building where he was she would feel calm and serene again! All her bitterness and resentment would dissolve, all her doubts turn to faith. Who knows? Perhaps he had come back already. Her feet seemed winged as they flew without her will, almost without her consciousness, towards the place where she thought he might be.
As she ran up the steps she knew he was there without being told. Even as she sent her name in, the door opened, and he stood there, the living light of the late afternoon glow.
He wasn’t a bit startled by her sudden appearance. He merely greeted her, and led her in silence to his inner study. But there was a quality about the silence that made her feel at ease, as though he had been expecting her.