The very girls who had scoffed at the idea before were naturally the ones to take it up immediately, and they were hastily gathering the things together, when the bell rang. They could not hope to get there and back before ten, and most of them were already deep in the matron's black list for reported lights; so they gave it up, and put the flowers in the tub, where a sudden frost over night struck them and they perished miserably.
To Susan it was the bitterest thing of all; it took the sweetness from her success; it dulled the piquancy of her sudden position. She could not possibly know how little it meant to Sue; that it was only one of many spreads, and by no means the triumphal feast she imagined; that after the first they forgot why they had planned it, almost. To her it was her chance at life, her long-delayed birthright, and Sue had taken it, too, along with everything else. "She might have left me that!"—it was her thought for more than one unhappy night.
Before she went home in June she had written a Chaucer paper that became vaguely confounded in the matter of literary rank with the works of its famous subject, in her class-mates' simple minds, so great was the commendation of Another High Authority in regard to its matter and style. It came out in the May Monthly, in which were some pretty little verses of Sue's. They were paraphrased from the French—Sue had taken any amount of French before she came up—and Susan spent her time at chapel in looking harder than ever at her namesake as she laughed and chattered and took her part in the somewhat crudely conceived jokes that seem to amuse girls so perennially. Less flexible, as she afterwards considered, less hypocritical, as she irritably felt then, she marvelled at the mental make-up of a girl capable of appreciating the force and pathos of De Musset's best work and expressing it so accurately, and able at the same time to find content in such tiresome, half-grown nonsense.
When the Monthly came out, she was amazed to receive a dozen copies with a hasty note:
DEAR Miss Jackson: Here are the copies you wanted—never mind the money. There are always a lot left over since we enlarged the edition. If you want more, after we've sent out the Alumnæ list, we'll give them to you.
H. Stuart.
It was only one of the many notes intended for Sue that had been coming to her since the beginning. But none of the invitations to dinner, to Alpha and Phi Kappa, to walk, to ride, to wheel, to eat a box from home, had the effect of this one. For Sue came after her Monthlies and in a ten minutes' conversation wrought more ruin than she would have believed possible.
"Did you get all mine and your own, too?" she asked laughingly. "I should send away a hundred, more or less, if I did 'absolutely satisfactory' Chaucer papers! I should be that proud....
"You see, Papa has to have the Monthly, if there's anything of mine in it, tout de suite—directly—now. He was wild with rage at me because he learned about that little fool story I had in, once before, from Cousin Con, 'long afterwards,' he said—it was only a week! And then, other people, you know....
"Did you get any of these off, before I came? Because it's all right if you did—I don't need a dozen. Isn't it funny I don't get any of your things? You must be somewhat cloyed with my notes and stuff—I should think you'd be bored to death. It's very wearing on me, Miss Jackson, explaining all the time, 'No, I'm not the one! I assure you I didn't write it.' You've no idea....