A don’s daughter at Oxford has plentiful opportunities for becoming an old maid. Undergraduates are too adventurously young and graduates are too importantly in earnest for marriage; whether too young or too earnest, they are all too occupied. To bring a man to the point of matrimony, you must catch him unaware and invade his idleness. Love, in its initial stages, is frivolous.
This tragic state of affairs was frequently discussed by Jehane with her best friend, Nan Tudor. Were they to allow themselves to fade husbandless into the autumn of girlhood? Were they too ladylike to make any effort to save themselves from this horrid fate?—In the gray winter as they returned from a footer match, on the river in summer as the eights swung by, in the old-fashioned rectory-garden at Cassingland, this was their one absorbing topic of conversation. Ye gods, were they never to be married!
They watched the privileged male-creatures who had it in their power to choose them: that they did not choose them seemed an insult. When term commenced, they would dash up to their colleges in hansoms and step out confident and smiling. They would saunter through the narrow Oxford streets to morning lectures, arm-in-arm, in tattered gowns, smoking cigarettes, jolly and lackadaisical. In the afternoon, with savage and awakened energy, they would strive excessively for athletic honors. At night they would smash windows, twang banjoes, rag one another, assault constables and sometimes get drunk. At the end of term they would step into their hansoms and vanish, lords of creation, in search of a well-earned rest.
Jehane contrasted their lives with Nan’s and hers. “They’ve got everything; our hands are empty. We’re compulsory nuns and may do nothing to free ourselves. When he comes to my rescue, if he ever comes, how I shall adore him.”
Then together they would fall to picturing their chosen lover. Unfortunately the choice was not theirs—their portion was to wait for him to come.
They knew of lean, striding women in North Oxford who had waited—women whose hair had lost its brightness, who fondled dogs and pretended to hate babies.
Jehane and Nan adored babies. They loved the feel of little crumpled fingers against their throats and the warmth of a tiny body cuddled against their breasts. They never missed an opportunity for hugging a baby. They never passed a young mother in the streets without a pang of envy.
Why was it that no man had chosen them? Gazing at their own reflections, they would tell themselves that they were not bad-looking—Jehane with her cloudy brown eyes and gipsy mane of night-black hair, Nan all blue and flaxen and fluffy. The years slipped by. Where was he in the world?
For eight years, since she was seventeen, Jehane had never ceased watching. Every New Year and birthday she had whispered to herself, “Perhaps, by this time next year he will have come.” Marriage seemed to her the escape to every happiness.
Now that she was twenty-five she grew desperate; from now on, with every day, her chance of being one of the chosen would diminish. As she expressed it to Nan, “We’re two girls adrift on a raft and we can’t swim. Over there’s the land of marriage with all the little children, the homes and the husbands; we’ve no means of getting to it. Unless some of the men see us and put off in boats to our rescue, we’ll be caught in the current of the years and swept out into the hunger of mid-ocean. But they’re too busy to notice us. Oh, dear!”