A Reversion To Type | Page 2

content. She had wanted quicker, busier, more individual life. And now her heart said, "O fool!"
Was it too late? Suppose she should go, after all? Suppose she should go, and all should be as it had been, only a little older, a little more quiet and peaceful? The very fancy filled her heart with sudden calm. A love so deep and sure, so broad and sweet--could it not dignify any woman's life? And she had been thought worthy and had refused this love! O fool!
Suppose she went and found--her heart beat too quickly, and her face flushed. She called on the bright girl in the front row.
"And what have you learned?" she said.
The girl coughed importantly. "It is a poem of Goethe's," she announced in her high, satisfied voice. "Kennst du das Land"
"That will do," said the German assistant. "I fear we shall not have time for it to-day. The hour is up. You may go on with the translation for to-morrow." And as the class rose with a growing clamor she realized that though she had been thinking steadily in German, she had been talking in English. So that was why they had comprehended so well and answered so readily! And yet she was too glad to be annoyed at the slip. There were other things: her life was not a German class!
As the girls crowded out, one stopped by the desk. She laid her hand with the pearl band on the third finger on the teacher's arm. "You look tired," she said. "I hope you're not ill?"
"Ill?" said the woman at the desk. "I never felt better. I've been neglecting my classes, I fear, in the study of your green gown. It is so very pretty."
The girl smiled and colored a little.
"I'm glad you like it," she said. "I like it, too." Then, with a sudden feeling of friendship, an odd sense of intimacy, a quick impulse of common femininity, she added:
"I've had some good times in this dress. Wearing it up here makes me remember them very strangely. It's queer, what a difference it makes--" She stopped and looked questioningly at the older woman.
But the German assistant smiled at her. "Yes," she said, "it is. And when you have been teaching seven years the difference becomes very apparent." She gathered up her books, still smiling in a reminiscent way. And as she went out of the door, she looked back at the glaring, sunny room as if already it were far behind her, as if already she felt the house-mother's kiss, and heard the 'cello, and saw Klara's tiny daughter standing by the door, throwing kisses, calling, "Da ist sie, ja!"
Lost in the dream, her eyes fixed absently, she stumbled against her fellow-assistant, who was making for the room she had just left.
"I beg your pardon--I wasn't looking. Oh, it's you!" she murmured vaguely. Her fellow-assistant had a headache, and forty-five written papers to correct. She had just heard, too, a cutting criticism of her work made by the self-appointed faculty critic; the criticism was cleverly worded, and had just enough truth to fly quickly and hurt her with the head of her department. So she was not in the best of tempers.
"Yes, it's I," she said crossly. "If you had knocked these papers an inch farther, I should have invited you to correct them. If you go about in that abstracted way much longer, my dear, Miss Selbourne will inform the world (on the very best authority) that you're in love."
"I? What nonsense!"
It was a ridiculous thing to say, and she flushed angrily at herself. It was only a joke, of course.
The other woman laughed shortly.
"Dear me! I really believe you are!" she exclaimed. "The girls were saying at breakfast that Professor Tredick was ruining himself in violets yesterday--so it was for you!" and she went into the lecture-room.
A chattering crowd of girls closed in behind her. One voice rose above the rest:
"Well, I don't know what you call it, then. He skated with her all the winter, and at the Dickinson party they sat on one sofa for an hour and talked steadily!"
"Oh, nonsense! She skates beautifully, that's all."
"She sits on a sofa beautifully, too." A burst of laughter, and the door closed.
The German assistant smiled satirically. It was all of a piece. At least, the younger women were perfectly frank about it: they did not feel themselves forced to employ sarcasm in their references; it was not necessary for them to appear to have definitely chosen this life in preference to any other. Four years was little to lend to such an experiment. But the older women, who sat on those prim little platforms year after year--a sudden curiosity possessed her to know how many of them were really satisfied.
Could it be that they