"Don't you call yourself a tie?" laughed Esther.
"I believe you would go," Sydney repeated with a note of regretful admiration. "Now I pray I should have grace to reply: 'Thank you kindly, sir, but I'm bespoke.' I mean, if you had broken your back, for instance, or gone blind."
In an old oval mirror on the opposite wall Esther Lawes regarded for an instant her own fair strength, and the large grey eyes a little too clear and bright and round; from year to year they used to give out.
"I believe you would," she echoed, gazing down with her usual pleased sense of Sydney's beauty. Never did girl better match than Sydney Lodge her gracious name, radiant, the very sound of it, with sylvan and romantic suggestions. Her slimness had the graceless grace of Shakespeare's disguised heroines; her curls, of hair the most golden red, prompted the quaint Elizabethan epithet of "gold wires"; and her academic gown sat as straightly on her as the Oread's coat of sycamore bark.
"God forbid," said Sydney Lodge solemnly. "The Powers have a trick now and then of taking us at our word, and our answered prayers are fruit bitter in the eating."
While she spoke they became conscious that the great bell was ringing, with strokes that sounded now near, now far distant, from every quarter, rhythmic in their pulse; the first distinct enough yet echoing familiarly, as though it were the second or third, the last in like manner seeming a faint intermediate one, whose successors the ear had lost. And like the wind awhile before, so the bell had a tang of darkness and the great spaces outside.
III
In the house there were movements, and voices cut short by banging doors. Sydney had picked up a lamp and disappeared into her bedroom in a sphere of radiance, like a glow-worm. The dimmed room, which seemed yellower, took a new look: the whole Italian Renaissance, very adequately represented by the pictures on the walls, withdrew into itself and darkness. Esther stared absently from the long steamer chair at the faintly yellowed walls, at the pink bed of coals, and two Tanagra figurines above,—the lady who binds up her hair and the other lady carrying a wide basin in her slender hands, who forever bends over it to watch her own reflected face.
The girl was disturbed more by this fellowship business than even to her close friend she could betray. Not wanting the fellowship for herself, she did crave it for Sydney. Moreover, they could then go abroad together. She had longed that day to hint as much to a professor that was, she thought, disposed to overvalue her own rather advanced work along a very narrow line as against Sydney's all-round brilliancy. And while she heard the other opening drawers and rustling in her wardrobe, Esther pursued her misgiving a step further than it had ever before taken her, although at no time was she a fancier of illusions.
Their alliance, hers and Sydney's, ran back at least a dozen years, away into childhood, and was rooted in all sorts of mutual dependencies. Both moreover were fastidious and constant in their personal affections, making indeed few acquaintances but giving up fewer, and although Sydney had besides what the other called the goose-brigade, a succession of waddling and hissing creatures of both sexes that passed for swans, yet these never got farther than, so to speak, the common outside her windows. Esther herself, without near relatives and secure of a tiny income on which one could starve at least comfortably, having come to college in the interest less of culture than of pedantry, had in the interest of amusement supplemented her Greek with English, and her Hebrew, by way of serious study, with Assyrian and kindred tongues. But Sydney, positively, had gone through as many stages and as well-defined as a silk-worm. Once her violin was the be-all and the end-all; her masters had advised a professional training, urged the expediency of having a career up one's sleeve. Esther felt that it was she who had unconsciously lopped off that possibility, in her own enthusiasm for the college which she was then about to enter, to which she whirled off her friend, plumping her down mentally breathless in a field of Latin and Greek. For the past year or two years, however, the classical prepossessions had been yielding to a keener preoccupation with English and a kindling ambition along the line of what the Sunday papers call literary work. This was furthered partly by Esther's own growing delight in the same matters and partly by the influence of other members of their class, notably Hilda Railton.