She wrote in pencil on the blank form,
"Will meet you and Aunt Susan on Monday. Very happy here."
Then she handed both to the young professor.
"I am taking it for granted that your father and mother do not want to get rid of me."
"Have we not got beyond conventional phrases? I shall not answer that, except to remind you that Sunday is the only day I can pass here. To-morrow my mother has promised to bring you over to lunch at Cambridge, where I will ask a few of our prominent men to meet you, and afterwards show you Harvard College."
That programme for the following day was carried out very satisfactorily to all concerned. The distance by rail was short; the day, though intensely cold, was fine; the atmosphere, through which the brown skeletons of the trees stood up against the pale blue background, was clear. Perspectives of possible beauty when the gracious spring should clothe these skeletons with tender green, and carpet, with blade and blossom, the iron-bound earth, arose before Grace's eyes. Hitherto she had been disappointed. She had looked for bigger trees, higher hills, less tameness and monotony than she found in the New England landscape. I know not on what grounds she had built her expectations, but the reality certainly fell short of them. This short railway journey, however, carried her past spots of undeniable picturesqueness, where little streams, like silvery trout, twirled and darted through the red logwood and yellow reeds and sedges. She could conceive how pretty much of it must be in summer.
At the station, of what the guide-book calls "the great academic city," Saul met them. Their walk through the main street and villa-fringed highways to the small house where the young professor and a friend lived together gave Grace rather the impression of a suburb, an accretion of well-to-do residences that have grown and spread out from some great centre. And, though "well-to-do," those residences, as a rule, did not convey to English eyes much idea of comfort. The impossibility of any privacy in dwellings standing in "yards," unseparated from each other, and undefended even by the conventional grove of laurel, was a shock to her insular, and no doubt un-Christian, prejudices. When Grace passed the homes of the great men whose names were household words to her, she marvelled, until she remembered that genius is never dependent on its surroundings.
The luncheon-party was most agreeable—the five men asked to meet the ladies being not only very able in different ways, but knowing how to make their abilities serviceable to social use, as is not always the case even with the cleverest Englishmen. After luncheon most of them had to hurry off; one, however, agreed to accompany the ladies and Saul round the university. Mrs. Barham naturally fell to him; Saul and Grace walked on in front, through the grand Memorial Hall, the University Library, the fine architectural gymnasium. Grace was properly enthusiastic.
"Harvard surpasses my expectations," she said. "I can understand your being very happy here."
"I do not think I said I was very happy," he replied. "But if I am not, the fault, no doubt, is in myself."