During his fourth year the problem of a life-work forced itself upon him.
He told Professor Freeman his troubles as they smoked together. The historian seemed to appreciate the confidence.
“Well, Mauney,” he said seriously, “The logical thing for you to do is to find out what you are best fitted for, and take up that work. You will be graduating next spring. The world is before you. No one but yourself can decide the question.”
Hours when Mauney might have been cogitating on the subject, were usually spent in delightful loneliness in his room, writing down his thoughts on history in his ledger, which had now grown to be a considerable volume of literature. He took it out of its long privacy one evening to show to Lorna. He read her snatches of things he had written, consciously opening the somewhat sacred recesses of his being to her. When he asked her for an opinion she had little to say.
“Oh, it’s pretty stuff!” she admitted coolly—“a sort of effervescence from a student’s mind!”
She was right. He mentally applauded her judgment. Surely, after all, it was nothing else. All the nights he had spent on it! All the impassioned moments he had worked to express his personal ideas of history! Nothing but a sort of effervescence! Surely, she was right. Cold, frank, truthful Lorna! How his admiration was wrung from him by her bald statement! He had wanted her to like it tremendously and praise it and acclaim it as worthy writing. But now he felt like thanking her for categorizing it with accurate appraisal. How accurate she was! “Effervescence!” When he returned home he threw the ledger down on his desk.
“Damn this effervescence!” he cursed with ruffled feelings. “Damn my student’s mind! If this isn’t real then I’m not real.”
Of course, the situation in the class, with only two of them, always the same two, was provocative of a strain between them. He never felt that they had discovered the very thing that she had recommended in the stilted language of her first year—a modus vivendi.
She consistently defeated him at the examinations, although he was quite indifferent to the fact. He noticed a peculiar jealousy in her that came to the surface at odd moments, when their respective intelligences were compared by the challenge of academic demands. He knew that, often enough, he could have answered a tutor’s question first, but that he refrained in order to give her the advantage of priority.
She had become a beautiful woman, a blonde goddess of severely classical line and color. When he looked at her he favored her intelligence, and continued to accord her priority. But he felt that she was overshadowing and hindering him, and that a modus vivendi could be discovered only by some spiritual change in their relationship.