"We can't help feeling a little proud that after so few years of existence it should begin to be impressive as well as beautiful," said Ellen, who hardly welcomed the return to the subject that had engrossed her thoughts so long, though she could not resist the enthusiasm of one familiar with the English universities.
"Of course, in this country one never wonders at rapidity of growth, but I must confess that æsthetic charm does not always accompany it. That delightful president of yours has secured both."
"She is a worker of wonders. She has plans for the place now that exceed all our dreams."
"Of course years may mellow the ugliest spot and association endear it, but after all 'virtue is loveliest in lovely guise.' The gift of beauty is not to be despised. Even the most casual visitor must acknowledge a spell in that college of yours altogether independent of the mysterious charm that you who know it intimately find for yourselves,—to some degree what I am sure people would find in my own university were they to go there ignorant of its wealth of history. But they are outsiders," he continued musingly, almost as though he had forgotten the existence of the girl to whom he was talking, "they see only the outward show, they are forever shut out from a share in that spirit that is the immortal part of the university, that persists in spite of change."
The old man's memories awoke at these words, and in his reminiscences he unfolded for Ellen picture after picture of that old world school, and flattered her with a sight of the thing her Alma Mater might become. For she listened to tales that made distant things seem real and present to her, stories of the frailties of men whose names had been beacons to her intellect. Her emotions were stirred by the tender humour that summoned up for her the personalities that had touched his own boyhood, and had left their impress on the life of Oxford.
The bishop's attention was challenged by a gentleman across the table with a question on South Africa, and for the rest of the evening Ellen shared her friend with the other guests.
Before she left she found a chance to tell Mrs. Boughton how delightful her companion had been. "Well, Ellen, to be candid," with an indulgent smile at the girl whom she liked in spite of her brains, "I should not have honoured you so much had he not asked to have you for a neighbour. But you needn't lay the credit to your attractions. I was running over the people he would meet this evening and when I came to you, that he might not expect an angel, I mentioned your only faults,—that you had been to college and spelled woman with a large W. But I told him that as a rule you kept these peculiarities in the background. However it was your having been to college that interested him, for he wanted to see what sort of women Bryn Mawr turned out. Of course I told him he couldn't judge by you—you were an exception—that he would have to see a few specimens like your friend Miss Christie or Augusta Barneson Coles."
As she drove home Ellen's thoughts turned to Marjorie Heywood and her plans for the next day. The talk at dinner had decided Ellen to go with the others. Though she lived so near, she found little pleasure in going out to Bryn Mawr nowadays, for everything seemed changed and she felt nothing but resentment that the past should have been so easily forgotten, its ways so quickly superseded.
Her careless reading of Marjorie's letter had made her arrival a surprise, and Ellen experienced a sense of relief at Marjorie's appearance. Her relief showed how apprehensive she had been of the changes possible in ten years' time, and above all in a ten years so trying as those that Marjorie had passed through. Just when she had seemed well started in her chosen work she had had to give up everything and care for a worthless brother. She had had to fight poverty for herself and him, and for him disease and evil. The cheerful letters that had come to Ellen now and then, had brought her little satisfaction, they were so impersonal. It had been in vain that Edith reminded her that Marjorie had always been impersonal, reticent. Putting herself into everything she did and said was her way of talking about herself. It had been in vain too that Edith contended that Marjorie's enthusiasm for righteousness and humorous freshness of mind were her safeguard against old age. "Marjorie will be just the same," she maintained, "when she is a hundred years old." To-night for the first time, Ellen believed her. Ten years! Could it be ten years? And Marjorie still the same, the old spirit of raillery gleaming in her eyes, the irresistible quiver at the corners of the mouth?