Eleanor, leaning over and spanning Marjorie's forehead with her hands, murmured "Undue cerebral enlargement——"
"Lee—you idiot!" cried Marjorie, "do you imagine for one moment that I would have spent a laborious, uncomfortable, self-conscious evening to make any living person like me on my own account? I didn't care what Mr. Ballantyne thought of me—I wanted to make him like the college girl in me, and show him how utterly he was mistaken in his baseless notions of what college makes a woman."
Marjorie was roused now, and in earnest, and the light carelessness was gone out of her manner. Her wide grey eyes, Eleanor could see by the fire-glow, were shining with an eager light and her usually pale cheeks were richly flushed. She rose from the hearth rug, and leaning with one arm along the mantel, forcefully punctuated her words by tapping her finger-tips upon it.
"Lee," she said in her clear voice, "we're at a sort of crisis now, I think—not the same ring that there was, well, about twenty years ago, when the question was, shall women go to college? That has been answered, and the answer is, yes, because they will. But now there are quantities of people, just like Mr. Ballantyne who think the fact that women will do it adds a most unfortunate complexity to modern life; and the burden of proof that college is the right thing for us lies with us. I don't mean that we are to claim more for it than it can do, or pretend to more than we have, but to be so broad-spirited and alert and interested in everything, that we shall simply convince these people that college training is the best thing that ever happened to women—especially Bryn Mawr training. I'm going on a crusade against all infidels of the genus Ballantyne. Will you go along?"
Eleanor took Marjorie's outstretched hand and laid her other on her roommate's shoulder. "Of course I will, Marge, as far as I can. But I'm not capable like you, and can't do half——"
"Yes you are—yes you can," was Marjorie's confused answer. And she went on dilating upon Eleanor's being "a shark at Major English" and many other delightful things, until that embarrassed young woman sought a brief respite in a tour of investigation for the match box, an article of furniture which seemed bent upon disproving the theory of the conservation of matter, for it was rarely to be found. This evening, by some strange chance, it was discovered on the bookcase, and Eleanor seized it with alacrity. Just then it was useful to her as a diversion rather than as a light-producing agent, but she struck a match from it, lighted a candle, and handed it to Marjorie, saying, "There, take that and go to your room. Your hair looks frumpish with so much excitement, and if you don't hurry to do it you will be locked out, for the bell rang ages ago. Think what it would be to miss Sunday evening supper!"
Marjorie vanished behind the portière and continued her flow of flattery, which Eleanor by singing "Ancient of Days," rendered inaudible. Then they discovered they had but one minute in which to get to the dining-room, and fled down the corridor with other late stragglers to reach the goal of their desires before a dark and cruel hand should bar them thence.
Marjorie's cause could have found no better champion, no one more fitted to illustrate her theory of the influence of college training on women, than herself. She was one of those healthy inspiring people, becoming ever more numerous especially among college women, who do everything well, if not all things equally well; and who show how invaluable is the discipline which has given them largeness of view and a certain ready grasp of affairs often lacking in those who have missed the same training. She saw life steadily, this senior of twenty-two, (though she could not as yet see it whole) and therefore she was neither scatter-brained nor priggish. The ideals of balance, proportion, symmetry, self-control, had been growing clear and attractive to her all her four years, but they had crystallized in her thought only in the last.
As she had said to Eleanor, they had "threshed it all out before," and the occasion of their so doing had been this:
Marjorie, aspirant for athletic as well as academic and social success, practiced basket-ball at every opportunity; and after winning her class numerals by playing as substitute in a match game in junior year, was in a fair way to make the senior team. One rainy November afternoon, Marjorie, in default of an outdoor game, was throwing and catching ball in the gymnasium with the senior captain and a junior. As she ran across the floor after a muffed ball (which brought down upon her much reviling by the captain) she noticed a spellbound freshman standing in the doorway—a freshman whom she knew slightly. It was a friend's friend whom Marjorie had been asked, as upper classmen are every year, to "look up"; and when she had done so had found a rather repressive young person, of serious-minded intent to study, and do nothing else. When Marjorie saw her "little freshman friend," as Eleanor called Marian Coale, with her eyes glued to the white numerals on Marjorie's dark basket-ball suit, she nodded to her, and later, when they all stopped playing, walked off with Marian, as she had to stop at Radnor Hall, where the latter lived.