CHAPTER I

A POINT OF DEPARTURE

"Indeed," continued the professor, glancing demurely down at his notes,

"if one were the editor of a column of--er advice to young girls, such

as I believe is to be found, along with the household hints and the

dress patterns, on the ladies' page of most of our newspapers--if one

were the editor of such a column, he might crystallize the remarks I

have been making this morning into a warning--never marry a man with a

passion for principles."

It drew a laugh, of course. Professorial jokes never miss fire. But

_the_ girl didn't laugh. She came to with a start--she had been staring

out the window--and wrote, apparently, the fool thing down in her

note-book. It was the only note she had made in thirty-five minutes.

All of his brilliant exposition of the paradox of Rousseau and

Robespierre (he was giving a course on the French Revolution), the

strange and yet inevitable fact that the softest, most sentimental,

rose-scented religion ever invented, should have produced, through its

most thoroughly infatuated disciple, the ghastliest reign of terror that

ever shocked the world; his masterly character study of the "sea-green

incorruptible," too humane to swat a fly, yet capable of sending half of

France to the guillotine in order that the half that was left might

believe unanimously in the rights of man; all this the girl had let go

by unheard, in favor, apparently, of the drone of a street piano, which

came in through the open window on the prematurely warm March wind. Of

all his philosophizing, there was not a pen-track to mar the virginity

of the page she had opened her note-book to when the lecture began.

And then, with a perfectly serious face, she had written down his silly

little joke about advice to young girls.

There was no reason in the world why she should be The Girl. There were

fifteen or twenty of them in the class along with about as many men.

And, partly because there was no reason for his paying any special

attention to her, it annoyed him frightfully that he did.

She was good-looking, of course--a rather boyishly splendid young

creature of somewhere about twenty, with a heap of hair that had, in

spite of its rather commonplace chestnut color, a sort of electric

vitality about it. She was slightly prognathous, which gave a humorous

lift to her otherwise sensible nose. She had good straight-looking,

expressive eyes, too, and a big, wide, really beautiful mouth, with

square white teeth in it, which, when she smiled or yawned--and she

yawned more luxuriously than any girl who had ever sat in his

classes--exerted a sort of hypnotic effect on him. All that, however,

left unexplained the quality she had of making you, whatever she did,

irresistibly aware of her. And, conversely, unaware of every one else

about her. A bit of campus slang occurred to him as quite literally

applicable to her. She had all the rest of them faded.

It wasn't, apparently, an effect she tried for. He had to acquit her of

that. Not even, perhaps, one that she was conscious of. When she came

early to one of his lectures--it didn't happen often--the men, showed a

practical unanimity in trying to choose seats near by, or at least where

they could see her. But while this didn't distress her at all--they were

welcome to look if they liked--she struck no attitudes for their

benefit. A sort of breezy indifference--he selected that phrase finally

as the best description of her attitude toward all of them, including

himself. When she was late, as she usually was, she slid

unostentatiously into the back row--if possible at the end where she

could look out the window. But for three minutes after she had come in,

he knew he might as well have stopped his lecture and begun reciting the

Greek alphabet. She was, in the professor's mind, the final argument

against coeducation. Her name was Rosalind Stanton, but his impression

was that they called her Rose.

The bell rang out in the corridor. He dismissed the class and began

stacking up his notes. Then:

"Miss Stanton," he said.

She detached herself from the stream that was moving toward the door,

and with a good-humored look of inquiry about her very expressive

eyebrows, came toward him. And then he wished he hadn't called her. She

had spoiled his lecture--a perfectly good lecture--and his impulse had

been to remonstrate with her. But the moment he saw her coming, he knew

he wasn't going to be able to do it. It wasn't her fault that her teeth

had hypnotized him, and her hair tangled his ideas.

"This is an idiotic question," he said, as she paused before his desk,

"but did you get anything at all out of my lecture except my bit of

facetious advice to young girls about to marry?"

She flushed a little (a girl like that hadn't any right to flush; it

ought to be against the college regulations), drew her brows together in

a puzzled sort of way, and then, with her wide, boyish, good-humored

mouth, she smiled.

"I didn't know it was facetious," she said. "It struck me as pretty

good. But--I'm awfully sorry if you thought me inattentive. You see,

mother brought us all up on the Social Contract and The Age of Reason,

things like that, and I didn't put it down because ..."

"I see," he said. "I beg your pardon."

She smiled, cheerfully begged his and assured him she'd try to do

better.

Another girl who'd been waiting to speak to the professor, perceiving

that their conversation was at an end, came and stood beside her at the

desk--a scrawny girl with an eager voice, and a question she wanted to

ask about Robespierre; and for some reason or other, Rosalind Stanton's

valedictory smile seemed to include a consciousness of this other

girl--a consciousness of a contrast. It might not have been any more

than that, but somehow, it left the professor feeling that he had given

himself away.

He was particularly polite to the other girl, because his impulse was to

act so very differently.

There is nothing cloistral about the University of Chicago except its

architecture. The presence of a fat abbot, or a lady prioress in the

corridor outside the recitation room would have fitted in admirably with

the look of the warm gray walls and the carven pointed arches of the

window and door casements, the blackened oak of the doors themselves.

On the other hand, the appearance of the person whom Rose found waiting

for her out there, afforded the piquant effect of contrast. Or would

have done so, had the spectacle of him in that very occupation not been

so familiar.

He was a varsity half-back, a gigantic blond young man in a blue serge

suit. He said, "Hello, Rose," and she said, "Hello, Harry." And he

heaved himself erect from the wall he had been leaning against and

reached out an immense hand to absorb the little stack of note-books she

carried. She ignored the gesture, and when he asked for them said she'd

carry them herself. There was a sort of strategic advantage in having

your own note-books under your own arm--a fact which no one appreciated

better than the half-back himself.

He looked a little hurt. "Sore about something?" he asked.

She smiled widely and said, "Not a bit."

"I didn't mean at me necessarily," he explained, and referred to the

fact that the professor had detained her after he had dismissed the

class. "What'd he try to do--call you down?"

There was indignation in the young man's voice--a hint of the protector

aroused--of possible retribution.

She grinned again. "Oh, you needn't go back and kill him," she said.

He blushed to the ears. "I'm sorry," he observed stiltedly, "if I appear

ridiculous." But she went on smiling.

"Don't you care," she said. "Everybody's ridiculous in March. You're

ridiculous, I'm ridiculous, he"--she nodded along the corridor--"he's

plumb ridiculous."

He wasn't wholly appeased. It was rather with an air of resignation that

he held the door for her to go out by. They strolled along in silence

until they rounded the corner of the building. Here, ceremoniously, he

fell back, walked around behind her and came up on the outside. She

glanced up and asked him, incomprehensibly, to walk on the other side,

the way they had been. He wanted to know why. This was where he

belonged.

"You don't belong there," she told him, "if I want you the other way.

And I do."

He heaved a sigh, and said "Women!" under his breath. _Mutabile semper_!

No matter how much you knew about them, they remained incomprehensible.

Their whims passed explanation. He was getting downright sulky.

As a matter of fact, he did her an injustice. There was a valid reason

for her wanting him to walk on the other side. What gave the appearance

of pure caprice to her request was just her womanly dislike of hurting

his feelings. There was a small boil on the left side of his neck and

when he walked at her left hand, it didn't show.

"Oh, don't be fussy," she said. "It's such a dandy day."

But the half-back refused to be comforted. And he was right about that.

A woman never tells you to cheer up in that brisk unfeeling way if she

really cares a cotton hat about your troubles. And a candid deliberate

self-examination would have convinced Rose that she didn't, in spite of

the sentimentally warm March wind that was blowing her hair about. She

was less moved by the half-back's sorrows this morning than at any time

during the last six months. She'd hardly have minded the boil before

to-day.

Six months ago, he had been a very wonderful person to her. There had

been a succession of pleasant--of really thrilling discoveries. First,

that he'd rather dance with her than with any other girl in the

university. (You're not to forget that he was a celebrity. During the

football season, his name was on the sporting page of the Chicago papers

every day--generally in the head-lines when there was a game to write

about, and Walter Camp had devoted a whole paragraph to explaining why

he didn't put him on the first all-American eleven but on the second

instead--a gross injustice which she had bitterly resented.)

There was a thrill, then, in the discovery that he liked her better than

other girls, and a greater thrill in the subsequent discovery that she

had become the basis of his whole orientation. It was her occupations

that left him leisure for his own; his leisure was hers to dispose of as

she liked; his energy, including his really prodigious physical prowess,

to be directed toward any object she thought laudable. Six months ago

she would not have laughed--not in that derisive way at least--at the

notion of his going back and beating up the professor.

There had been a thrill, too, in their more sentimental passages. But at

this point, there developed a most perplexing phenomenon. The idea that

he wanted to make love to her, really moved and excited her; set her

imagination to exploring all sorts of roseate mysteries. The first time

he had ever held her hand--it was inside her muff, one icy December day

when he hadn't any gloves on--the memory of the feel of that big hand,

and of the timbre of his voice, left her starry-eyed with a new wonder.

She dreamed of other caresses; of wonderful things that he should say to

her and she should say to him.

But here arose the perplexity. It was her imagination of the thing that

she enjoyed rather than the thing itself. The wonderful scenes that her

own mind projected never came true. The ones that happened were

disappointing--irritating, and eventually and unescapably, downright

disagreeable to her. There was no getting away from it, the ideal lover

of her dreams, whose tenderness and chivalry and devotion were so highly

desirable, although he might wear the half-back's clothes and bear his

face and name, was not the half-back. She might dote on his absence, but

his presence was another matter.

The realization of this fact had been gradual. She wasn't fully

conscious of it, even on this March morning. But something had happened

this morning that made a difference. If she'd been ascending an

imperceptible gradient for the last three months, to-day she had come to

a recognizable step up and taken it. Oddly enough, the thing had

happened back there in the class-room as she stood before the

professor's desk and caught his eye wavering between herself and the

scrawny girl who wanted to ask a question about Robespierre. There had

been more than blank helpless exasperation in that look of his, and it

had taught her something. She couldn't have explained what.

To the half-back she attributed it to the month of March. "You're

ridiculous, I'm ridiculous, he's ridiculous." That was about as well as

she could put it.

She and the half-back had walked about a hundred yards in silence. Now

they were arriving at a point where the path forked.

"You're elegant company this morning, I must say," he commented

resentfully.

Again she smiled. "I'm elegant company for myself," she said, and held

out her hand. "Which way do _you_ go?" she asked.

A minute later she was swinging along alone, her shoulders back,

confronting the warm March wind, drawing into her good deep chest, long

breaths. She had just had, psychically speaking, a birthday.

She played a wonderful game of basket-ball that afternoon.