CHAPTER XIII
THE STRAY UNIT
WHILE Jessamy and Barbara were tasting the joys of glory and the applause of the public,—at least, a little section of it,—the "Stray Unit," as her aunt called her, was having rather a harder time than even her family suspected. It was not easy to continue in exile, fighting homesickness and longing for all she loved, and know all the while that she had but so to determine to return into the little flat, which looked to her from that distance not only like the Canaan they had jestingly called it, but like Eden itself. Perhaps, however, the knowledge that she was free to turn back from what she had undertaken helped Phyllis stand to her guns; it was not only cowardly but ignoble to relinquish a task set her by her own generosity alone.
Phyllis was so fully occupied all day that there was no time for moping; but at night, when the door to her room was closed and locked, the loneliness became almost unbearable, and the time when Tom's misguided fancy should veer straight and allow her to return looked dubiously uncertain and far off. But Phyllis had the gift of sleep common to healthy youth, and though her pillow was often wet, she slept sweetly on it, and arose refreshed to meet the new day.
Mrs. Dean was as kind as Phyllis's first letter reported her, but she was an old lady of many interests, and after her little companion was fairly installed in her household she gradually ceased to feel responsible for her entertainment. This was rather a matter for congratulation, for Phyllis was fired with ambition to accomplish something worth the doing while she was away, and welcomed the afternoons, which included two or three hours in that glorious library which was to be the center and crown of the city. Nothing less than a historical story, dealing with New York in the Dutch days, was the work the would-be young author aimed to produce, and she devoured everything relating to her subject which the obliging assistants in the library could furnish. The story, which never saw the light of day served its end in helping Phyllis through her exile, and incidentally in teaching her much that she had not known of her own city, for whose noise and cheery bustle she hungered.
One afternoon, when Mrs. Dean omitted her usual after-luncheon drive in favor of the board meeting of a society of which she was president, Phyllis slipped away early to the classic hall, where she had an appointment with Peter Stuyvesant and her beloved Dutch burghers. The first two volumes of the "Memorial History of New York" were brought for her use, and she seated herself to search for material, happy for the time in that delightful feeling of importance born of the consciousness of great plans and the business-like preparations for their fulfilment.
After nearly an hour of reading, she decided that the "Memorial History" was not what she needed just then, but the "Documentary History of New York State," and she started to her feet to get it. Phyllis at home and about domestic things was one person, and Phyllis among books was another. The latter Phyllis was a young person of the greatest impetuosity, acting first, and thinking fully five minutes afterward. It was this Phyllis who gathered up her two large volumes and started toward the desk to exchange them, without waiting for an attendant, in the greatest possible hurry, as if the slow old Dutch of two centuries ago were likely to race off before she could capture the volumes in which they were reposing.
The result of her haste was that she did not see a young man approaching from the opposite direction as slowly as she was hurrying forward. His nose was buried in a volume that looked like Browning, and he did not see the slender girl in gray, laden with her heavy books, bearing down on him like a runaway pack-pony. The collision was tremendous. Phyllis dropped both volumes of Mr. Grant Wilson's careful editing on the unoffending feet of the stranger, who uttered a loud exclamation of mingled surprise and pain, and leaped aside with a vehemence contrary to all traditions of Bates Hall. But Phyllis did worse: she sat down with marked emphasis, and without loss of a moment, on the stone pavement, her hat rolling merrily away, and her pocket-book leaping under a chair, as though it, as well as the money it was made to contain, had wings.