The Merivale banks

by Mary Jane Holmes

“If anything ever happens and your father changes his mind, let me know at once.”

Nothing ever could happen, Louie was sure, and, although Paris and Marchesi seemed very alluring, she was happy to stay at home with Herbert, who, since their first quarrel, had been very lover-like in his attentions to her when alone with her, but quite indifferent when in public. He did this, he said, to blind his father, who would give him Hail Columbia if he had a suspicion of their relations to each other. Still the secret weighed heavily on Louie, nor was it made easier because of the exquisite diamond ring Herbert put upon her finger the night before he started for college. She could only wear it in her room, or when alone, and it seemed to her a mockery to call it an engagement ring. Her nature was open as the day, and she rebelled against the secrecy imposed upon her, and told Herbert so in every letter she wrote him. These were not many, for here again his caution came in play. If too many letters passed, the post-office clerks might comment, and the gossip reach his father, of whom he seemed more in fear than when he was a boy.

“If he knew the truth, he would either remove me from college or cut my allowance, and I should not be pleased with either,” he wrote.

He was posing at Yale as a young man of unbounded wealth, and spending money freely, and his father paid the bills without a protest, rather proud than otherwise that they were so large, so long as Herbert was involved in no disgrace. It was his son, and he was glad to have him hand in glove with the high bucks, he said, and glad he was seeing the world. He managed to see a good deal of it in one way and another, and at the close of his first year came home, with a great sense of his own importance, and a still greater sense of the dullness of Merivale.

“A one-horse town every way, and a century behind the times, with nothing going on—nothing to interest a fellow. Everybody at work as if his life depended upon the amount accomplished from sunrise to sunset. Nobody with any leisure—no ball-game, no hops, no anything!” he said to Louie, who did not think him improved by his first year in Yale, and resented his criticisms upon the town generally and her father in particular, because he had refused to send her to a school in New York, where Herbert could see her often and could occasionally show her to his classmates. All this and much more he had written to Louie, who spoke to her father of New York, and expressed a desire to go there. After some inquiries with regard to different schools, Mr. Grey said to her, “Which do you care for most, a thorough education, or knowing how to walk and stand and sit and enter a room?”

Louie laughed, and replied that she would like both—the accomplishments and a thorough education.

“I think, then, Bryn Mawr is the place, rather than a large city, where there are so many attractions and distractions. They turn out splendid scholars there.”

For a moment Louie’s brow was puckered with a frown. New York represented to her everything that was desirable. But with her usual docility she yielded to her father’s judgment, and Bryn Mawr was decided upon greatly to the disgust of Herbert, who said several things not very complimentary to that institution as compared with the New York school which he had in mind.

“Why, if you take the whole course at Bryn Mawr you will be an old maid before you get through, with your head crammed full of musty stuff, which, as my wife, will be of no earthly use to you,” he said.

She ought to see the girls he had met, and whose brothers were in his class—tip-top girls, and up-to-date; wore big hats and tailor gowns and smoked cigarettes, some of them. He didn’t quite like that, of course, but then—well—a lot of girls did it, and one must keep in the swim. The Merivale boys called him a snob, and he mentally called them country clowns and kept mostly to himself so far as they were concerned. He saw Louie often, but did not hesitate to criticise her whenever she failed to come up to the standard of the tip-top girls with tailor gowns and big hats. Sometimes Louie took his criticisms meekly, and sometimes turned upon him furiously, telling him to go to his tip-top girls, who smoked cigarettes, and leave her alone. On the whole, however, she was very happy and very proud of him, and longed to have it known that he belonged to her. But at any suggestion of this kind Herbert resolutely shook his head. One year had passed quickly, he said, and three more would pass quicker, when, if she had had enough of Bryn Mawr and Greek and Latin, she would be his, and his arguments prevailed to quiet Louie, if not to convince her.