"It always needs Ellen to give the finishing touch," said Edith.
"If it had not been for you and Marjorie," insisted Ellen, "I should still have taken counsel of the cynical outsiders."
"Listen a moment," interrupted Marjorie, "that's it after all."
A band of girls was coming toward them through the moonlight and as they came they sang:
"Thou Gracious Inspiration
Our Guiding Star,
Mistress and Mother, All Hail Bryn Mawr."
V
One morning some days later, Ellen was looking out upon a delightful garden in Indianapolis. The day was fine, if warm, and in the garden the roses were in full bloom. She was in the highest spirits; but her gayety of mood was a thing of the past five minutes and had nothing to do with the sunshine or the flowers. She was reviewing the occurrences of the last week and entertaining herself greatly.
Her speech had been made the day before with really brilliant success. It had been the most important event in a series of notable meetings and had been received in a way that might well have roused her to fresh endeavour. Yet in the moment of her greatest success she had shown herself strangely indifferent to her manifest duty. This was the result of her having discovered, just as she had begun to accept the fact of her triumph and the rewards that lay before her, that it was all due to a surprising mishap, something altogether beyond her control. She showed that she felt the importance of the occurrence by thinking of it steadily for the rest of the day and well on into the night. This was not because she wanted to think of it particularly; indeed she had made every effort to dismiss her preoccupation; but she could not rid herself of the idea that an accident was responsible for her triumph. In her perplexity she went over the whole thing time and again.
There had been an inspiring audience, so much she acknowledged, casting her mind over it. She had observed it in the moments before the meeting was called to order. Looking at the impressive throng she had been annoyed to think that she might have to use her notes. As she rose and moved toward the desk there had been a sudden hush and concentration of attention upon the platform, of so much she had been distinctly conscious. She had felt too that after she laid her notes on the table and began to speak, the intelligent interest which had greeted her opening sentences soon gave way to an eager, fixed intentness and breathless silence. Then all was a blank, till the restrained enthusiasm broke forth.