“Then I suppose that you will go up to Vermont for the summer?”
Pamela received this question in silence, and Julia saw that it had been ill-advised. Thus for several minutes they rode on without speaking. The cool air was refreshing; the electric lights here and there at the side of the road threw strange shadows from the trees. There was a certain pleasant weirdness in the scene.
Pamela was the first to speak. “I do not really wish to go up to Vermont. They think that I ought to teach. They think that it is foolish for me to continue at college when I might be earning. Besides, my aunt’s house is crowded now, and there isn’t a room that I could have. If I knew what I ought to do next year, I could tell better about this summer.”
“Do next year?” repeated Julia. “Why, you wouldn’t think of doing anything but come back to college—with your record.”
If Julia had noticed Pamela’s smile, she would have known that its wanness was not entirely the result of the flickering electric light. Her voice, however, betrayed her.
“It may not be wholly a matter of choice.”
“But you’ve applied for a scholarship?” Julia realized now that the question was a question of money.
“Yes, but I can’t know about it until the autumn. There are so few scholarships and so many applicants.”
“I suppose that we ought to turn our faces homeward. It’s getting late,” said Julia.
Then as they waited by the side of the road for the car bound Cambridge-ward, Julia saw what she ought to do. During the ride she had been pondering, and had it been any one but Pamela she would have made an offer of direct help for the next college year. This would have meant so little to her, and so much to the Vermont girl. But there was something in Pamela—an independence of spirit in spite of her shrinking demeanor—that prevented her doing this. Yet now as from a clear sky she seemed to hear the echo of a speech that had actually fallen unheeded on her ears a week or two before. It was the lamentation of a friend of Mrs. Barlow’s who bewailed her young son’s deficiencies in Greek.