“That depends upon my talk with her in the morning. Just now, in so far as Mount Hadley is concerned, you’ve broken down as a result of the final exams, and the excitement of Commencement.”
“Oh, Madge! Madge!” Bernice went down suddenly on her knees with her feverish head in Madelaine’s lap. She covered Madelaine’s cool, capable hands with kisses. Her tears came in such a flood they dripped from her dimpled chin. “Tell me, Madge—you know everything—tell me what’s ahead for me. I don’t know, Madge. I never knew. Those things were always ‘shocking! shocking!’”
In the next half-hour Madelaine simplified the great fundamentals of life into words of one syllable. Bernie clung to her convulsively when Madelaine came to leave.
“There’s a God,” whispered the tanner’s daughter thickly, reverently, “because He made you, Madelaine Theddon!”
At ten-thirty that same evening Madelaine was back in Hathaway Hall, Mount Hadley, perfect in an evening gown of gold satin and cobweb lace, dancing divinely with a clean-cut young fellow from Boston “Tech” who was going to Buenos Aires in August as an architect for the Argentine Government.
The clean-cut young fellow decided Miss Theddon the cleverest girl he had ever met, as well as the most beautiful. She discussed architecture with him as though she had already qualified for an architect’s position herself.
II
The following evening Madelaine sat in her room and from her ivy-bordered window looked down upon the little town she was leaving on the morrow. Behind her the lights had been extinguished. Now and then a trio of white figures moved across the lawn or the Common below, in and out of the shadows made by the lordly elms. Happy laughter died on the summer night. Somewhere down the street piano keys were tinkling and the rich tenor of a man’s voice was softened by the distance.
Madelaine was thinking of Bernie’s problem. Yet not altogether. She was also thinking of her own. Life was coming to her now as a responsibility. She owed much to her mother, far more to the world that had been so good to her, and the poor, perplexed, fog-groping men and women—especially young men and women—in it. What should be her life work? How should she try to repay that debt mounting with each passing month and year to overwhelming proportion?
Marriage did not seem her end and aim. Not then! She had an intuition that marriage would come afterward, after she had paid the debt, or tried to pay it. What then?