"I have to take that very early train." Catherine descended the steps and climbed into the waiting taxi—the same one which had brought her. "The Commercial House," she said.
The early February twilight lay over the fields, as if the smoke had settled more closely on the earth. She leaned back, letting the day float past her, in unselected, haphazard bits. All that zeal and honest industry poured into medieval patterns. The very best of the old patterns, no doubt, with that stern righteousness, that obligation in them. Something infinitely pitiful, touching, in those young things she had watched, awkward, serious, patient, most of them.
"Of course, most of our girls teach only a few years, and then marry," Miss Snow had said. She couldn't have had more finality if she had said, "and then die!"
Luncheon, a hurried half hour in a chilly, bare dining hall, with grace helping the creamed codfish grow cold. The other faculty members, serious and threadbare, like farm horses, thought Catherine, with bare spots chafed by the harness of inadequate salary, of monotony. As untouched by any modern thought as if centuries of time separated them. And each year, young people turned into that hopper.
If I can put that feeling down on paper, she thought, it should move even this mountain of age and tradition. To-morrow, my day will be different; the large colleges are somewhat awake. But there are hundreds of these.
At the desk of the hotel she asked hopefully for mail. Perhaps she had given this address to Charles and Miss Kelly, and not the college. The clerk poked through a pile of letters and shook his bald, red head. Three days without a word, for Henrietta's letter had been written days ago. After a moment of hesitation—amusing, how old habits of economy hung on!—she wrote out a telegram.
"Night letter?" The clerk counted the words.
"No. I want it to go the quickest possible way. I want an answer before that morning train."
In the bare little hotel room, she sat down under the light, her writing pad balanced on her knee. A note to Dr. Roberts.
"There seems no limit to the things we may accomplish," she wrote, "when I see, at first hand, what the catalogue discrepancies really mean, in flesh and blood and buildings."