“She says she was told to go, by the new man who had been assistant master and who probably, in that menial position, had learned to hate her. I am convinced she could never have found another school to tolerate her original ideas of the duties of an English teacher. But she did not try. She insists she could have won over another principal, had she been forced to. It is highly probable. Certainly, Dr. Tomley had agreed with none of her views. And yet, he kept her there. At all events, the boast never went to the proof.”
“Well?” Quincy was impatient.
“Well, one fine day, she married Deering—bless his great soul. That’s all. And came up here.”
Here, somehow, with the entrance of the Professor upon the scene, Quincy’s real interest began. But his friend’s news ended.
“I know nothing about that, Quint,” he smiled. “One never really asks Julia Deering anything. One inclines toward a subject. And if she inclines back, one gets something. On the subject of her personal life, she has always declined, with a firm sweetness. I have no idea, even of where they met or how. No one else has, either. I suppose,” the upperclassman threw a cigarette out of the window and reached for a pipe, “I suppose they were married and will live happily ever after. Julia Deering is so damned exceptional that it will be just like her to do that most commonplace of things.”
“Is living happily ever after really commonplace?”
“Well,” Garsted laughed, “if it is rare, she is all the more sure to do it. So I’ve got you, either way.”
On the campus, however, there was a legend about this pair. College men have myths for their distinguished teachers. But like all myths, this one expressed exclusively the myth-makers; and it was Garsted’s conviction that there was no truth in it save as a commentary on the undergraduate state of mind.
It was this: that the big, gentle man who was over forty when the marriage happened, had been proposed to by correspondence. The letter was so brilliantly couched, its choice of phrases was so concise, so just, so Greek, that the scholar wired to the writer to appear at once. Julia Cairn came on the following train and they were married that afternoon by the college president, who was a minister of the gospel. The legend went on to relate that the writer of the happy letter was not Mrs. Deering at all, but one of her girl pupils. This beautiful but anonymous victim had been caught by her teacher writing in class. Her letter was detected and confiscated; later on employed with slight corrections, to fit the purpose of Miss Cairn. Since the Professor’s discovery of his wife’s plagiarism, the myth concluded, the pair’s lot had been a miserable one. But Mrs. Deering was too dominant to be got rid of.
Of course, Quincy laughed at this legend. But its conclusion—that the marriage was unhappy, that the great man had been betrayed, that he needed sympathy and rescue—stuck attractively in his mind. For this very reason, perhaps, he failed to see how the myth reflected the student body’s general emotional condition. As Garsted told him, since his state also was reflected by the myth, there was no mystery in his failure to psychologize it.