“No,—oh, no. It’s just a letter from college,” said Barbara. She got up from her chair suddenly, and made her way back to the kitchen.
“If you’re through with it, may I read aloud now?” called David; but his sister did not hear him. She stepped inside the pantry and sat down on a tin cracker-box to think it over.
The Eastman Scholarship! The highest honor which Vassar had to offer, and which carried with it a year of post-graduate study, had been the ambition of Barbara’s life. Nobody but herself could dream what that letter meant to her. Nobody but herself ever suspected how bitter the disappointment had been the spring before, when Miss Culver, who was less brilliant, but more of a student than Barbara, had taken the scholarship almost out of her hands. Every one in college had expected her to win it, and though she had been outwardly dubious about her prospects, she had been inwardly self-confident. It had taken courage to offer congratulations to Miss Culver, on that dreadful day when the decision had been announced. Everybody—that is, everybody but the faculty—knew that it belonged, by right, to her. She had made light of her defeat at home,—she had never dared think much about it, herself,—and nobody had suspected how deep a tragedy it was.
And now the chance had come, now, when everything in the world was upside down; when a sick mother and a forlorn household needed her; when an empty kitchen called her; and when a pair of hands, awkward though they were, meant as much to her family as a brilliant brain meant to her college. Barbara closed her eyes, and tried to think.
David, in the next room, had taken up his reading again, at the Isle of the Sirens:—
“And all things stayed around and listened; the gulls sat in white lines along the rocks; on the beach great seals lay basking and kept time with lazy heads; while silver shoals of fish came up to hearken, and whispered as they broke the shining calm. The wind overhead hushed his whistling as he shepherded his clouds toward the west; and the clouds stood in mid-blue, and listened dreaming, like a flock of golden sheep.
“And as the heroes listened, the oars fell from their hands and their heads drooped on their breasts, and they closed their heavy eyes; and they dreamed of bright, still gardens, and of slumbers under murmuring pines, till all of their toil seemed foolishness, and they thought of their renown no more.”
BARBARA SANK DOWN WEARILY