The following day an astounding thing came to pass. The president of the college and the dean of the musical faculty called on Miss Trench. They wanted to offer her a position in the conservatory. Naturally it could not be an actual professorship. A seventeen-year-old girl ... without a degree. They thought she might give recitals in the neighbouring towns, and take pupils in advanced technique. It would mean much to the college to announce an instructor who had studied with the great Ysaye. No one need know how young she was. Indeed she was altogether different from the immature girl they remembered—quite dignified and impressive. Marvellously changed.
“If they knew what changed her,” Mrs. Trench reflected, her gorge rising, “they wouldn’t be flattering her this way.” It was a mistake to tell that about the King of Belgium. She hadn’t thought about the effect on Eileen. Of late she blundered at every turn. Somehow things were slipping out of her grasp.
After they had gone, Eileen ran breathless to Vine Cottage to tell Judith. She could not contemplate any step without that guidance or approval.
“Lary will be pleased. This will put an end to your mother’s plan of having you enter the freshman class next Monday. But ... Eileen, I have an idea. You are not going to stop studying. I wonder if you and I couldn’t—I’m a horribly uneducated person.”
“With Lary for tutor, you mean? Well, in the first place, my brother’s no salesman when it comes to the things he knows. He can lay them out on the counter and let you pick what you want. What I want most is Latin. And he thinks it is bald and plebeian, compared with Greek. Syd reads Horace, in the original, to rest him when he’s tired and can’t get his mind off of the sick babies and their fool mothers. I’m crazy to translate Ovid and—”
“Syd’s just the thing. Don’t tell Lary, but I foundered on the Greek alphabet. It simply wouldn’t stick in my memory. I substituted organic chemistry. My classicist husband would be disgusted.”
“Lary’s a prig—and I love him! Judith, it was worth it—just to get acquainted with my brother.”
III
From Vine Cottage she went to the office for David’s stamp of approval. She had once called her father a rubber stamp. She thought of it now, with stinging chagrin. Would not he serve as her anchor, as Judith had been her pilot? Had she anything to fear? As she walked past the clump of shrubbery on the campus, where Hal Marksley had kissed her that first time, she thought with a thrill of exultation that her craft had outrun the storm.
From her father’s arms she hurried to Dr. Schubert’s office to tell the joyful and as yet half apprehended news. And the man who had heard her first shrill cry of protest against the life that was not of her choosing, drew her to him and kissed her. The act was paternal. She had always been more at home with him than with those of her own blood.