When she came home from college

“WELL, this is cheerful!” cried the Infant, as she stepped briskly into the room where the rest of the “Set” were dejectedly assembled. “What if this is the last night of college! What if our diplomas are all concealed in the tops of our top trays! Can’t this crowd be original enough to smile a little on our last evening, instead of looking like a country prayer-meeting?”

The Infant cast herself upon the cushionless frame of a Morris armchair, and grinned at the forms on the packing-boxes around her. Her eyes roved round the disorderly room, stripped of the pretty portières, cushions, mandolins, and posters, which are as inevitably a part of a college suite as the curriculum is a part of the college itself. Even the Infant suppressed a sigh as she caught sight of the trunks outside in the corridor.

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean; Tears from the depths of some divine despair, Rise from the heart and gather to the eyes, On looking at the—excelsior—on the floor, And thinking of the days that are no more,”

she chanted.

“It’s all very well to talk in that unfeeling way, Infant,” said Knowledge, separating herself with difficulty from the embrace of the Sphinx and sitting up on the packing-box to address her chums to better advantage. “It’s very well to talk, but the fact remains that to-morrow we are all to be scattered to the four corners of the United States. And who knows whether we shall ever all be together again in our whole lives?” Knowledge forgot the dignity of her new A. B. and gulped audibly; while the Sphinx patted her on the back, and said nothing, as usual.

“Well!” retorted the Infant, rising, “if I am the youngest, I have more sense than the rest of you. I’ve kept my chafing-dish out of my trunk, and I’ve saved some sugar and alcohol and chocolate, and ‘borrowed’ some milk and butter from the table downstairs; because I knew something would be needed to revive this set, and I hadn’t the money to buy enough smelling-salts.”

The Infant ran down the corridor, and came back with her battered dish; and the girls gathered together on the dusty floor around the box, which now served as a table. Their faces, worn from the strain of the week of graduation, relaxed noticeably as the familiar odor began to float upon the air.

“This is comfortable,” sighed Barbara, gratefully. “Let me take the spoon, Infant. Your four years of college life have not yet A. B.’d you in fudge.”

“Oh, you are not quite crushed by the pangs of the coming separation, after all, then,” grinned the youngest member. “Girls, did you hear an awful chuckle when our Barbara finished her Commencement speech yesterday? It was I, and I was dreadfully ashamed.”

“Mercy, no!” cried Atalanta, turning shocked eyes at the offender. “What on earth did you chuckle for, when it was so sad?”

“That’s just it!” said the Irreverent Infant. “When Babbie began to talk of Life and Love and the Discipline of Experience and the Opportunities for Uplifting One’s Environment,—wasn’t that it, Babbie?—I began to wonder how she knew it all. Babbie has never loved a man in her life” (the Infant glanced sharply at Barbara’s clear profile); “Babbie has never had any experiences to be disciplined about; Babbie’s environment, which is we, girls, hasn’t been especially uplifted by any titanic efforts on her part; and as for Life, why, Babbie’s had only twenty-one years of it, and some of them were unconscious. So when her oration ended with that grand triumphant climax, and every one was holding her breath and looking awed and tearful, I was chuckling to think how beautifully Barbara was selling all those people.”

A horrified clamor arose from the girls.

“Why, Evelyn Clinton! It was lovely!”

“Infant, you shameless creature!”

With a whirl of her white skirts, amid the confusion that followed, the House Plant rose to her feet and the rescue of her chum. “Just because you can’t appreciate what a splendid mind Babbie has, Evelyn Clinton, and how much the English professors think of her, and what a prodigy she is, anyway—”

“Hear, hear!” cried Barbara, laughing.

“—And how proud we are of her,” went on the impetuous House Plant “Just because you have no soul is no reason why you should deny its possession by others!”

“Well, I’ve stirred you all up, anyway,” said the Infant, comfortably. “And that is all I wanted.”

Barbara took the spoon out of the fudge dreamily. “You may be right,” she said to the Infant. “You know I didn’t get the Eastman Scholarship.”

“Don’t you ever mention that odious thing again!” cried Atalanta. “You know that the whole class thinks you should have had it.”

Barbara turned her face aside to hide a momentary shadow.

“Well, in any case,” she said, “there is work ahead for me. Every one who anticipates a literary career must work hard for recognition.”

“You won’t have to,” declared the House Plant, hugging her chum, and followed by a murmur of assent from the floor. “Why, Babbie, didn’t you get five dollars from that Sunday-School Journal, and don’t they want more stories at the same rate? I think that is splendid!”

“I shall not write insipid little stories when I go home,” Barbara answered, smiling kindly down at the enthusiastic little devotee who had subsided at her feet “I shall write something really worth while,—perhaps a story which will unveil characters in all their complexity and show how they are swayed by all the different elements which enter into environment—”

“Ouch!” exclaimed the Infant “You are letting the fudge burn, and unveiling your characteristic of absent-mindedness to the set, who know it already. This stuff is done, anyway, and I’ll pour it out Or, no,—let’s eat it hot with these spoons.”

The Infant dealt out spoons with the rapidity of a dexterous bridge-player, and the girls burned their tongues in one second, and blamed their youngest in the next.

“By the way, Babbie,” suggested the Infant with a view to hiding speedily her second enormity, “you never told us the advice that New York editor gave you last week.”

Barbara’s scorn rose. “He was horrid,” she said. “He told me that an entering wedge into literary life was stenography in a magazine office. Imagine! He said that sometimes stenographers earned as much as twenty dollars a week. I told him that perhaps he had not realized that I was of New England ancestry and Vassar College, and that I was not wearing my hair in a huge pompadour, nor was I chewing gum.”

The others looked impressed.

“What did he reply?” asked the Infant.

“He said, ‘Dear me, I had forgotten the need of a rarefied atmosphere for the college graduate. I am sorry that I am no longer at leisure.’ And I walked out.”

“You did just right,” declared the House Plant, warmly, confirmed in her opinion by a murmur of assent from the girls.

“Right!” echoed the Infant. “Babbie, you are the dearest old goose in the world. You will never succeed nor make any money if you take an attitude like that.”

“I shall not write for money,” declared Barbara, beginning to pace the floor. “What is money, compared to accomplishment? I shall go home, shut myself up, and write, write, write—until recognition comes to me. I am sure it will come if I work and wait!”

She flung her head back with her usual independent gesture, and the crimson color rose in her cheeks. And the girls eyed, a little awesomely, this splendid prodigy, in whose powers they believed with that absolute, unquestioning faith which is found only in youth and college. The short silence was broken almost immediately by the Infant.

“Are you going to have a chance to write at home, undisturbed?” she asked. “Our house is a perfect Bedlam all the time. Two young sisters and a raft of brothers keep me occupied every minute.”

“There are four children younger than I, too,” answered Barbara. “But do you suppose that I am going to allow them to come between me and my life-work? It would not be right; and my mother would never permit it.”

“Mine would,” said the Infant, gloomily. “She thinks it is the mission of an elder sister to help manage those who have the luck to be younger and less responsible. I wish your mother could have come to graduation, Babbie. She might have converted my mother to her standpoint.”

“I wish she had come,” said Barbara, wistfully. “It seems as if she might have managed some way.”

Her mind flew back to the quiet little Western town,—a thousand miles away; to the household full of children, presided over by that serene, sweet-faced mother. Why could not that mother have left the children with some one, and have come to see her eldest daughter graduate “with honor”?