Smith College Stories / Ten Stories by Josephine Dodge Daskam

by Josephine Daskam Bacon

Theodora had "ushed," in classical phrase, in her day, and the bustle of last year, so much more exciting somehow than this one, came back to her. Her little, white-ribboned stick was packed now—in fact, everything was packed: she was going away for good! Some one else would lounge on the window-seat in her room in the Nicest House, and light the cunning fire....

Who was this? Oh, this was Sallie Wilkes Emory, responding to "The Faculty." Kitty Louisa, whose soul knew not reverence, had attached to this toast the pregnant motto, That we may go forward with Faculties unimpaired, an excerpt from one of the President's best-known chapel prayers, and Sallie was developing the theme in what she assured them was a very connotative manner. Theo saw them pass in review before her, those devoted educators, from her dazed freshman Livy to her despairing senior Philosophy—that was over, at least! Theodora was not of a technically philosophical temperament. Sallie was quoting liberally from a recent famous essay of her own: The Moral Law, or the End-Aim of Human Action According to Kant, apropos of which she had remarked to the commendatory professor that she was glad if somebody understood it! Sallie was a great girl—how grand she had been in the play! Theo had been in the mob herself, having first tried for every part, and had enjoyed every minute of it, from the first rehearsal to the last dab of make-up. She had been an attendant and hadn't an idea how pretty she looked, nor how many people spoke of her and called her graceful.

It may have been because Theo had so few ideas about herself that she had so many friends. And how many she had! She took great pride in them, those fine, strong, good-looking girls that hailed her from all directions, and always wanted a dance or a row or a skating afternoon with her. She wondered if anybody so ordinary—for Theo knew she wasn't clever—ever had so many jolly good friends. There was the Mandolin Club, now—all friends of hers. She got on late in junior year and played in the spring concert. Her father came up and said he'd never seen such a pretty house in his life—packed from orchestra circle to balcony with fluffy girls alternated with dapper, black-coated youths. He gave Theo such a darling white gown for it, all ruffled with white ribbon, and she had her picture taken in it, holding the mandolin, and sent it to him in a big white vellum frame covered with yellow chrysanthemums, with "Smith" scrawled in yellow across one corner. He kept it on his desk and was tremendously proud when his friends asked about it.

Here were the class histories. Theodora thought she listened, but though she laughed with the rest and applauded the grinds, it was her own history that she was reading as face after face recalled to her some joke or mistake or good luck. Not that it was sad—oh, dear, no! If any member of the class of Ninety-yellow dared to be sad that night there was a fine, and more than that, the studied coldness of the class directed toward her: it was an orgy, not an obsequy, as Virginia elegantly put it. Just as the junior history, which is always the best for some unexplained reason—perhaps because of the Prom—was finished, there was a loud knock, and a big bunch of yellow roses from the class that was having a decennial supper somewhere was brought in by a useful sophomore. They clapped it and sent some one back to thank them—a point of etiquette that some self-centred classes have been known to omit—and then they remembered that Ninety-green was supping at its first reunion in the Old Gym, and sent over some of the table flowers to them. Virginia motioned to Theo, and proud of the mission and blushing a little at the eyes that turned to her as she went, she took them over. They clapped and sang to her:

Oh, here's to Theodora,

And we're very glad we sor her!

Martha Sutton waved to her and the toast-mistress thanked her for the class, and she went back—alone, because, being an older class, Ninety-green didn't need a delegate. On the way, two juniors met her, and they condoled with her cheerfully: "How do you feel, Theo dear? Isn't it kind of dreadful? Do you keep thinking it's the last time? Goodness—I should!" One of them threw a sympathetic arm over her shoulder and looked at the moon, but Theo grinned a little and said that she was tired as a dog and that if there was one place in the world she wanted it was her room At Home. And as the juniors gaped at this matter-of-fact attitude, Theodora added, pausing at the Gym door, "Of course I've had a perfectly grand time here, and all that, but I've been here four years and that's about long enough, you know. And they want me, of course, and—I want to come! I think it gets a little—well, toward the end, you know—"

But Theo was tired, and so are seniors all, and until three or four generations of them have learned how to do it easily, so will they be.

They were doing stunts upstairs: Clara Sheldon had seen Cissie Loftus who had seen Maggie Cline who sang Just tell them that you saw me, and Clara, who was the most tailor-made and conventional creature imaginable to the outward eye, was forced by those from whose farther-reaching scrutiny she was never free, to imitate the imitator at all social functions that admitted song. She used stiff, absurd gestures and a breathy contralto that never palled upon her friends. Cynthia Lovering danced her graceful little Spanish dance for them, and Leslie Guerineau told them her best darkey story in her own delicious Southern drawl. And then there was a murmur that grew to a voice that swelled into a shout as they drummed on the table and called, "We want Dutton! We want Dutton! We want Dutton, Dutton, Dutton!"

She said no; that she'd had a toast; that they knew all her stunts by heart—but they hammered on her name with the regularity of a machine till she got up at last with a sigh and, "Well, what do you want?" They wanted a temperance lecture, and she drooped her head to one side, and with an ineffably sickly smile and a flat nasal drawl she told them "haow she'd been a-driving 'raound your graounds, and they're reel pleasantly situated, too, dears, and your President, such a nice, gentlemanly man, accompanied me, and pointed aout to me your beeyutiful homes and I said to him, 'Oh, what a beeyutiful thought it is that all these hundreds of young souls are a-drinking water, nothing but water, all the time and every day!'"