A Houseful of Girls

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"Stop!" cried Annie, peremptorily, with an evident storm raging in her
gentle breast, to which she was too proud and self-restrained to give
free expression, "you are a greater baby than May is. You are not fit to
be left to yourself--a girl who would speak to any man she might meet in
the streets of London, and tell him all about herself and her family."

The accusation was too outrageous to be received with anything save
indignant silence.

"And then, I suppose, the next thing was you took him to Mrs. Jennings
and arranged between you that he and his sister should board there."

"I did not," Rose was goaded to speak. "When he had walked so far with
me in the rain I could not do less than invite him into the house. Then
I believe he gave his name, and Mrs. Jennings, who has a great deal of
knowledge of the world and a great deal of discrimination," put in poor
Rose with much emphasis, "seemed to like him immensely. She found that
one of her sons knew relations of his in Manchester, and they had other
friends in common. He spoke of his sister, who is with him, and of their
not liking living in lodgings, and who glad he would be if there ever
happened to be a vacancy in Mrs. Jennings's establishment which she
would permit them to fill. She referred him to Susan to see if there
were rooms which the Ironsides could have. It all came about quite
naturally, and was settled in less time than I have taken to tell it,
and I had nothing whatever to do with it. I should not dream of taking
it upon me to interfere with Mrs. Jennings's or anybody else's domestic
affairs."

"I do not know," said Annie, gloomily, "after the mess you have got
yourself and other people into. But there is one thing I can tell you
for your satisfaction, I shall not put my foot within Mrs. Jennings's
door so long as he--as Dr. Ironside and his sister are staying there.
You may keep your friends to yourself and do without your sister. You
can take them instead of me; perhaps you will not miss me or care for
the loss of an occasional hour or two of my society."

"Oh! Annie, how can you say so?" Rose was reduced to expostulation and
pleading. "What has come over you? You must not stay away; it would be
so unkind to me, so rude to everybody, and such a marked slight. We are
all so happy when you come to Welby Square, and I am sure the change is
good for you too. How can you be so cross?"

"No," said Annie with unbending decision, "it shall not be said of me
that I went and struck up a friendship, apart from our intercourse in
the wards, with any doctor at St. Ebbe's--one of the medical students,
the other day! I am not going to make his sister's acquaintance and get
up an intimacy with her, because you have chosen to introduce them to
Mrs. Jennings. A fine story to be circulated, and tittered over, about a
girl; a fine example to the working nurses, who are always seeking to
evade the rules, to become on familiar terms with their patients and to
gossip and philander with them, when they ought to have a great deal
more to do. I call it disgusting trifling, and it was not for that I
came up to London to be trained as a nurse."

Annie kept her word to Rose's and other people's deep chagrin. She made
no further ferment about what had happened. She did not write home and
complain of Rose's thoughtlessness, or take a single step to prevent
Mrs. Jennings securing a profitable pair of boarders--as a matter of
fact, she dropped the subject, perhaps she felt a little ashamed of the
animus she had shown. But for nearly three months, if Rose wished to see
her sister, the only plan was for her to go to St. Ebbe's, or to make an
appointment with Annie at the Academy or the British Museum, or to eat
their lunch together at some convenient restaurant.

In whatever manner Annie disposed of her few spare moments, not one of
them was now spent in Welby Square--just at the time, too, when the
boarding-house was particularly social and cheerful (for the new-comers
found special favour with the old, and promoted much good fellowship).
At least Dr. Harry Ironside did. He was a young fellow born to be
popular whether he would or not; handsome, with pleasant manners,
kind-hearted, possessed of a respectable competence independent of his
profession, to which he brought considerable abilities and great
singleness of purpose. Everybody "took" to him, from crusty Mr. Foljambe
to jaunty Mr. Lyle; from Miss Perkins, whose ear-trumpet he improved
upon, to old Susan, into whose gold-rimmed spectacles he put new glasses
which made her see like a girl again. The one drawback to his success in
everything he aimed at was, that he was always tremendously in earnest,
so that his very earnestness overweighted him, rendering him incapable
of measuring obstacles, and marshalling his forces, as a more
indifferent man might have done.

His sister Kate, apart from such importance as might be implied in her
finding herself presently in the enjoyment of a very pretty little
income for a young lady, was a simple, good-natured school-girl, in the
echoing and imitative stage of school-girl life. She looked up to her
brother in everything, and was disposed to regard whatever was by his
decree as infallibly best.

Yes, Annie kept her word after the fashion of most of us, till she saw
good reason to break it. She announced herself changeless till she
changed, which, to do her justice, was when the interests of others,
still more than her own, cried out against her maintaining her
resolution.

CHAPTER XVII.

MAY HAS TO FIGHT HER OWN BATTLE.

All May's frantic efforts at resistance were useless; her destiny was
too strong for her. She had to go away from her mother and father, Dora,
and Tray, and face life all by herself as one of the girl-graduates at
Thirlwall Hall, St. Ambrose's. Dr. Millar had learnt that she would just
be in reasonable time for one of the earlier examinations at the close
of the term. Having passed it without difficulty, she might compete for
one of the Thirlwall scholarships. If she got that--as he allowed
himself to think she had a fair chance of doing--it would greatly
increase her status, as well as aid in defraying the expenses of her
residence at St. Ambrose's. The little Doctor was feverishly anxious to
compass both ends for his pet and scholar. In her own interest no notice
must be taken of her heart-broken looks, though it wrung a manly heart,
in addition to the tender hearts of Mrs. Millar and Dora, to witness
May's desperate unwillingness to depart.

It will be better to throw a veil over the anguish of that leave-taking,
including the final closeting with Tray and the torrents of tears shed
on his irresponsive hairy coat. We shall draw up the curtain on a new
scene--St. Ambrose's, in its classic glory and stately beauty, and
Thirlwall Hall, in its youthful strong-mindedness.

Poor May felt horribly forlorn when her father left her behind, and she
realized that she was for the first time in her life compelled to play
her part without the support of kith or kin. Nobody was in the least
unkind to her, any more than the conservative Miss Stones had been to
Rose, unless in calling "little May" "Miss Millar," a promotion which
somehow cut her to the heart.

The lady principal, Miss Lascelles, was an excellent intellectual woman,
of mingled aristocratic and _spirituelle_ antecedents. In another
country and nation she might have been a distinguished _dame de salon_.
As it was, she was sufficiently harassed and overworked in her double
office of decorous, authoritative chaperon and qualified guide,
philosopher, and friend to the girls under her charge. These might be
vestal virgins or nymphs of Minerva, but they were also girls, so long
as the world lasted--the most of them half curious, half friendly where
May was concerned. This was true even of the wonderful young American
who came and stayed with no other object in view than to say she had
kept her terms at St. Ambrose's, according to what was the sum total of
the ambition of many a young man at the great University. She _would_
call the Atlantic "the herring pond," and speak of "fixing" her hair;
still she was a girl like the rest of them. Miss Lascelles, with all the
other ladies in residence at Thirlwall Hall, the American included,
could not help wondering what the friends and guardians of a budding
beauty and helpless baby like Miss Millar intended by sending her to
live among a set of self-reliant, amply-occupied young women, who, as a
rule, knew exactly what they wanted to do and did it.

The whole place and system overwhelmed May. The hoary dignity of the old
colleges, receptacles of the concentrated learning of ages, the crowds
of capped and gowned tutors and professors, potent representatives of
the learning of the present, even the shoals of young men who were able
to care for none of these things, and to carry their responsibilities
lightly, all to be encountered in the course of a morning walk, struck
May with a sense of inadjustable disproportion, and of intolerable
presumption on her part in pretending to be a scholar. She was still one
of a household largely composed of women, as she had been at home, but
here the household was planted where it was an innovation, in the midst
of a colony of men, which constantly threatened to sweep over it and
submerge it.

The grown-up, independent, yet disciplined routine of Thirlwall Hall,
founded as closely as possible on the venerable routine of the men's
colleges, was widely, crushingly different from life in the Old Doctor's
House at Redcross. Morning chapel, the steady business of individual
reading, the attendance on the selected courses of lectures, with the
new experience of being spoken to, and expected to take notes like men;
the walks and talks, which even with the interruptions of tennis and
boating were apt to be academically shoppy; the very afternoon tea after
evening chapel had an impressively scholastic flavour utterly foreign to
the desultory proceedings of an ordinary family circle. So had the
further reading by one's self, for one's self, to get up a particular
branch of study; the "swell dinner," as May persisted in calling it in
her own mind, though it was simple and social enough--beyond certain
indispensable forms and ceremonies--to the initiated; the withdrawal
once more to the dreary retirement of her own room, since a new girl had
neither the requisite familiarity nor the heart to go and tap at her
neighbours' doors, where no substitute for "sporting the oak" had as
yet been found, and drop in for a little purely human chatter.

May was so "hard hit," as people say--not with love, but with
home-sickness--that she did not believe she could live to the end of the
summer term. She felt as if she must die of strangeness, fright, and
pining; and that was hard, for they would be very sorry at home, and so
would Annie and Rose in London, though both of them had been able to go
and stay away quite cheerfully like the girls at Thirlwall Hall. Perhaps
May and Dora were not like other girls. There was something wanting or
something in excess about them. Perhaps they were not fit to go through
the world, as she had once heard somebody say of her--May. Perhaps they
were meant to die young--like their Aunt Dolly--and not destined to live
long and struggle helplessly with adverse circumstances. In that case,
Dora was the happy one to be left to spend her short life at home,
though, save for father and mother, she too was all alone, and poor dear
Dora would feel that, and was, perhaps, crying in another empty room as
May was crying in hers at this very moment; but at least, Dora would
pass her last days with father and mother in the old familiar places.

This isolated doom for herself and Dora fascinated May's imagination.
She could not get it out of her head. She dreamt about it, and sat up
in her bed crying and shivering in the silence and solitude of night,
where even by day all was silent and solitary. She began to think
that she would never see Redcross or her mother again. With the
morbid sentimentality of early youth, and its lively capacity for
self-torture, in which to be sure there is that underlying luxury of
woe, she commenced to rehearse the loving farewells she would take on
paper, and the harrowing last messages she would send to every member
of her family.

Occasionally May's hallucination took the form of conjuring up a series
of disasters which should suddenly descend on her absent friends. If she
did not die herself, one or all of those she loved might die while she
was separated from them. Her father might fall down in a fit; her mother
might be seized with small-pox or typhoid fever; and what more likely
than that Dora should catch the infection waiting on her mother?

This distempered frame of mind was hardly calculated for the rapid
reception and assimilation of these particles, terminations, and cases
of philological nicety in which May began to recognize that she was
inaccurate and deficient.

If Tray could but have come to her, and laid his shining black nose in
her lap, barked in her face, and invited her to take a turn in the
grounds of Thirlwall Hall, he would have ceased to be the doleful,
shadowy phantom of a Tray she was constantly seeing now, along with
other phantoms. A game of romps with her four-footed friend would have
done something to dissipate the mental sickness which was prostrating
May's powers. But Thirlwall Hall was moulded on the men's colleges, and
there were no dogs for the girl any more than for the boy graduates.

Miss Lascelles was at once conscientious and kind, with considerable
natural sagacity; but she led a busy, rather over-burdened life, and had
little time to spare. Naturally she was tempted, in spite of the logical
faculty which made her a capital principal of Thirlwall Hall, to leap at
conclusions like many of her weaker-minded sisters. She had taken it for
granted that Miss Millar was simply a spoilt child, without more ability
and information than had just served her to surmount the preliminary
test of admission to Thirlwall Hall, where, nevertheless, she had no
business to be. Her time would be completely wasted; she would only be
wretched, and serve to make other people uncomfortable. However, as she
had stood the preliminary test, and was at Thirlwall Hall for the rest
of the term, the most humane thing to do was to set some other girl who
was not particularly engaged on her own account, who could be safely
trusted with such a charge, who had plenty of acquaintances at St.
Ambrose's to render the charge lighter, to make friends with the poor
girl, take her about, cheer and entertain her, as far as possible, till
the end of her stay.

Miss Lascelles, in default of better, fixed on Miss Vanhansen, the
American young lady, as a friend for May. Miss Vanhansen had plenty of
time on her hands, plenty of confidence, plenty of money. She had
taken even exclusive St. Ambrose's by storm, for Athens itself would
have found it difficult to resist her racy indifference, her shrewd
mother-wit, her superb frocks, and her sublime heaps of dollars. At
the same time she was perfectly good-natured and quite trustworthy in
her own free and easy way. She had scandalized Miss Lascelles in the
earlier days of their acquaintance by her energetic determination to
have "a good time of it." She had made the lady principal's hair stand
on end by calmly suggesting nice rides and rows and luncheons at
village inns, _tete-a-tete_ with the "mooniest" young fellows who
could be laid hold of and crammed with stories about America and the
doings of American girls.

But practically Miss Vanhansen had the good sense to do at Rome as the
Romans did; she confined her independence to those sallies of the
tongue, which were not without a rousing charm in a place grown partly
languid, partly esoteric, by dint of a superabundance of culture and of
college statutes elaborate, involved and irreversible as the laws of the
Medes and the Persians.

Keturah Vanhansen rather liked the task imposed upon her. It appealed
at once to her kindliness of nature and her love of creating a
sensation; she would rouse this drooping young beauty who showed such
a sinful disregard of her complexion and eyes. Miss Vanhansen was
herself as sallow as a nabob, her small eyes, by an unkind perversity
on the part of her fairy god-mother, were of a fishy paleness, yet she
managed to her great satisfaction, by dint of dress and carriage, to
be a striking-looking and all but a handsome girl, so that she had no
overpowering reason to be jealous of her better-endowed neighbours.
She would astonish Miss Millar's weak nerves, and give her "a wrinkle
or two," before she had done with her.

At first May shrank back a good deal from the advances of the conquering
princess from the Far West; but here the English girl's humility and
good feeling stood her in better stead than her judgment. May was
grateful to Miss Vanhansen, and went so far as to be flattered by her
attentions even when they gave the recipient no pleasure. That frame of
mind could not last at seventeen. May, the most unsophisticated and
easily pleased of human beings, was won from her sad dreams of Redcross.
She was deeply obliged, she was faintly amused. At last she was fairly
launched on such a mild course of St. Ambrose gaieties as two girls in
a college could with grace pursue. This included tennis parties, rowing
parties, water-lily and fritillary hunts, "strawberries," concerts
instead of lectures in the afternoons as well as in the evenings,
afternoon teas--not _tete-a-tete_, not confined to a party of three,
but under what even Miss Lascelles would have considered sufficient
surveillance in the rooms of liberal heads of houses, hospitable young
dons, social, idle undergraduates. These had no more business on their
hands than could be summed up in cricket-matches or boat-races, and in
meeting Miss Vanhansen and listening to her queer unconventional
remarks.

At all these gatherings, May Millar in the budding beauty of seventeen
and the simplicity of her youthful dress, with her modesty and
_naivete_, was made very welcome. Soon she began to feel herself ashamed
of the extent to which she was enjoying herself, as she was swept along
by the stream.

She was able to write home now long letters full of girlish enthusiasm
over the kindness of Miss Vanhansen, and the beauties and delights of
St. Ambrose's. Dora, though greatly relieved in her ungrudging devotion
to May, to find that Tom Robinson's words were fulfilled, was still a
little puzzled to understand how May could find time for so many gay
doings, and her studies into the bargain. But Dr. and Mrs. Millar could
only be happy in the happiness of their child, and hug themselves on
having thought more of her welfare than of her feelings at the moment of
parting. It was right she should see all the charming sights which were
to be seen, and enter a little into the special attractions of the great
University town--_that_ would not prevent her from settling down and
doing her proper work presently. You might trust the lady principal and
a studious young creature like May, who liked to be busy with her books
far before any other occupation, with a great deal more license than
that came to.

Then a new turn was given to the dissipation in which May was dipping.
The longing in which she had indulged, ever since she had first heard of
its possible fulfilment, was granted--a Greek play was to be acted by
the young women who stood for the "Grecians" of the year at Thirlwall
Hall, and May was there to see. From the moment the play was decided
upon to the hour of the first rehearsal, May spoke, thought, and dreamed
of nothing save "Alcestis."

Miss Vanhansen gave her up in disgust. "The ungrateful, soft-spoken
wretch!" cried the forsaken fair one; "the hypocritical young blue-grass
Penelope Blue! she has been bluer than the blue clouds all the time she
has been imposing on me as a pining, bread-and-butter, home-sick miss
among us Titanesses and daughters of the gods. Here I am ready to
collapse with trotting her about among the few girls in St. Ambrose's
who are sensible enough not to know the Empire of the East from the
Empire of the West, and would not care which was which if they did know,
and the still wiser young men who spend the long summer days lying on
their backs in their own canoes, reading Mark Twain. Oh! she is a
brazen-faced impostor. 'Molasses!' and 'Great Scott!' are not enough to
say to her. I should like to try her with the final polite remarks of
the last chief of the Dogs' Noses."

But contemporaneously with May's being thus dropped by her first friend,
she was peremptorily claimed and appropriated by the actresses. They had
not failed to notice her interest in their enterprise, and some of the
cleverest of them had already mastered an astonishing problem.

They had been guilty of nicknaming Miss Millar "Baby," because she had
been so lachrymose and shiftless when she came to Thirlwall Hall, and
had never looked up till she was handed over to Miss Vanhansen, who had
given her "airings" and "outings" all very well for a baby, and much to
Baby's taste as it seemed, but not exactly severe study. Yet in spite of
it all, and in spite of the halting inaccuracy of the training in a
private ladies'-school, May Millar knew more by sheer instinct, as it
sounded, of Alcestis, and felt more with her and for her, than the best
of those who professed to be her interpreters.

It was therefore not with wisely repairing the breaches in her Latin and
Greek, and laying these foundations afresh, as Rose was doing with her
art under Mr. St. Foy in London, that May was engrossed. It was with
becoming a bond-slave to those ambitious players. She lent herself to
the minutest details of their attempt, coached herself in them day and
night, till she could coach everybody in turn, and figured behind backs
as universal prompter, dresser, stage-manager--the girl who had been so
lifeless and incapable of looking after herself when she first came
among them that they had styled her the baby of the establishment!

Miss Lascelles, who was deeply interested in the play, both in her
highly-finished scholarship, and for the credit of Thirlwall Hall,
was electrified when she discovered the efficient coadjutor whom
the performers had found. "I am afraid there has been a mistake
made, and time lost," she said to herself ruefully. "How could I be
so shortsighted, when there is the making of the finest scholar in
the Hall in Miss Millar, who threatened to hang so heavily on my hands
that I was fain to send her to play with our generous 'Barbarian.'
What discrimination, what taste and feeling with regard to the
selection and fit declamation of these passages which we were doubtful
whether to retain or reject, or what to do with them! With what pretty
girlish shyness and timidity she made the suggestions! Nothing but her
passionate love of the subject, and her jealousy for its honour, as it
were, with her intense craving to have it fitly expressed, would have
induced her to come forward. I should like to hear what Professor
Hennessy," naming a great name among classical authorities, "thinks
of this young girl's interpretation of several parts of the play when
he comes to hear them. I should like to introduce Miss Millar to him
if she were not so frightened, and if she had taken the place which
she ought to have held to begin with. It is too late to rectify the
mistake and set her to work this term, and she had much better not go
in for the Markham scholarship which her father spoke of--that would
be worse than useless. But we'll turn over a new leaf next term. After
all, she is very young; and I suppose it is of no great consequence
that she has wasted her first half. Her family are professional
people, and these are generally well off." (Miss Lascelles was the
portionless daughter of the impecunious younger son of a poor
nobleman.)

When the play was performed nearly all the classical scholars of St.
Ambrose's--and what was a man doing at St. Ambrose's if he were not a
classical scholar, unless, to be sure, he happened to be a philosopher
of the first water, or a profound expounder of Anglo-Saxon, or a
strangely and wonderfully informed pundit?--came with their wives
and daughters, and graciously applauded the daring deed.

As for Keturah Vanhansen, she wore her _riviere_ of diamonds, dripping,
dancing, flashing like water that was perpetually flowing, and yet, by
some enchantment, arrested in its flow in glorious suspension. Set in
the middle of the enchanted water was such a breast-knot of rare,
exquisite, uncannily grotesque orchids as no queen or princess had ever
been seen to wear in St. Ambrose's. Indeed, it might have suited the
Queen of Sheba.

Miss Vanhansen announced that she wore her war-paint to do honour to the
Thirlwall Hall play, and to May Millar, whom she had forgiven, for
rancour never yet dwelt in the Yankee breast. "Alcestis" was a little
long, and "real right down funny," as her Aunt Sally would have said,
though it was a tragedy, and she, Keturah Vanhansen, did not understand
a word of it, notwithstanding this was her last year at Thirlwall Hall.
One good joke was the man who was in cats' skins, and carried a kitchen
poker for a club, and was half a head shorter than she was, and she was
not big; they should see her Aunt Abe if they wanted to know what a big
woman was like. Another joke was the sacks for the ladies' frocks, with
holes for the head and feet, and holes for the arms, so nice and simple,
and so graceful; Worth ought to get a hint of the costume. Only it was
not very distinctive, when one regarded the corresponding sacks for the
gentlemen. There was really nothing to mark out the ladies except the
large towels which they wore hanging down their backs, while the
gentlemen had Inverness capes over their sacks, fastened on the
shoulders with Highland brooches. How came the Greeks, in the time of
Euripides, to know about Inverness capes and Highland brooches? She,
Keturah Vanhansen, had been so startled by what she feared might be a
frightful anachronism that all her false hair had fallen off, and she
had been left like one of her Aunt Abe's moulting fowls.

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