Chapter: AT the University I had the good fortune to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as
head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course was
arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the Freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln
all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I
shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the
happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;
when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all
that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had
come up to the University from the farms and the little towns scattered
over the thinly settled State. Some of those boys came straight from the
cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through
the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really
heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few
enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an
atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the
young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years
before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no
college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms
with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their
children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near
the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and
on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,
originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to
contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The
dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my
hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the
corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper
was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German
scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at
Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.

When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were
almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,
he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English
poetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative
talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of
personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows
together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the
carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his
face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he
spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,
the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until "the bride of old
Tithonus" rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.

I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the "Commedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweet
teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
AEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.





ONE March evening in my Sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room
after supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and
little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of
old snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through
made me indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down,
the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it.
Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star
hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved upon
the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new
heavens, and waking new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to
shut my window and light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and the
dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place
about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the Georgics
where to-morrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection
that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.
"Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit." I turned back to the beginning of the third
book, which we had read in class that morning. "Primus ego in patriam
mecum {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} deducam Musas"; "for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the
Muse into my country." Cleric had explained to us that "patria" here
meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood
on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope,
at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately
come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the
palatia Romana, but to his own little "country"; to his father's fields,
"sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops."

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have
remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to
leave the AEneid unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded
with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him
unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of
the Georgics, where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to
the furrow; and he must have said to himself with the thankfulness of a
good man, "I was the first to bring the Muse into my country."

We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the
wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately
enough to guess what that feeling was. In the evening, as I sat staring at
my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the
page before me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New
England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.
Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock. I hurried
to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.

"I expect you hardly know me, Jim."

The voice seemed familiar, but I did not recognize her until she stepped
into the light of my doorway and I beheld--Lena Lingard! She was so quietly
conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the
street without seeing her. Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and
a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her
yellow hair.

I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had,
questioning her confusedly.

She was not disconcerted by my embarrassment. She looked about her with
the naive curiosity I remembered so well. "You are quite comfortable here,
are n't you? I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim. I'm in business for myself.
I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street. I've made
a real good start."

"But, Lena, when did you come?"

"Oh, I've been here all winter. Did n't your grandmother ever write you?
I've thought about looking you up lots of times. But we've all heard what
a studious young man you've got to be, and I felt bashful. I did n't know
whether you'd be glad to see me." She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that
was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.
"You seem the same, though,--except you're a young man, now, of course. Do
you think I've changed?"

"Maybe you're prettier--though you were always pretty enough. Perhaps it's
your clothes that make a difference."

"You like my new suit? I have to dress pretty well in my business." She
took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft,
flimsy silk. She was already at home in my place, had slipped quietly into
it, as she did into everything. She told me her business was going well,
and she had saved a little money.

"This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked about so
long. I won't be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to have it
before she is too old to enjoy it. Next summer I'll take her down new
furniture and carpets, so she'll have something to look forward to all
winter."

I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well cared-for, and
thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the
snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the
cornfields. It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well
in the world. Certainly she had no one but herself to thank for it.

"You must feel proud of yourself, Lena," I said heartily. "Look at me;
I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to."

"Tony says you're going to be richer than Mr. Harling some day. She's
always bragging about you, you know."

"Tell me, how _is_ Tony?"

"She's fine. She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now. She's
housekeeper. Mrs. Gardener's health is n't what it was, and she can't see
after everything like she used to. She has great confidence in Tony.
Tony's made it up with the Harlings, too. Little Nina is so fond of her
that Mrs. Harling kind of overlooked things."

"Is she still going with Larry Donovan?"

"Oh, that's on, worse than ever! I guess they're engaged. Tony talks about
him like he was president of the railroad. Everybody laughs about it,
because she was never a girl to be soft. She won't hear a word against
him. She's so sort of innocent."

I said I did n't like Larry, and never would.

Lena's face dimpled. "Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't
do any good. She'd always believe him. That's Antonia's failing, you know;
if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."

"I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia," I said.

"I think you had." Lena looked up at me in frank amusement. "It's a good
thing the Harlings are friendly with her again. Larry's afraid of them.
They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad people.
What are you studying?" She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my
book toward her. I caught a faint odor of violet sachet. "So that's Latin,
is it? It looks hard. You do go to the theater sometimes, though, for I've
seen you there. Don't you just love a good play, Jim? I can't stay at home
in the evening if there's one in town. I'd be willing to work like a
slave, it seems to me, to live in a place where there are theaters."

"Let's go to a show together sometime. You are going to let me come to see
you, are n't you?"

"Would you like to? I'd be ever so pleased. I'm never busy after six
o'clock, and I let my sewing girls go at half-past five. I board, to save
time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to cook one
for you. Well,"--she began to put on her white gloves,--"it's been awful
good to see you, Jim."

"You need n't hurry, need you? You've hardly told me anything yet."

"We can talk when you come to see me. I expect you don't often have lady
visitors. The old woman downstairs did n't want to let me come up very
much. I told her I was from your home town, and had promised your
grandmother to come and see you. How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!" Lena
laughed softly as she rose.

When I caught up my hat she shook her head. "No, I don't want you to go
with me. I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug-store. You would n't care for
them. I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but I
must tell her how I left you right here with your books. She's always so
afraid some one will run off with you!" Lena slipped her silk sleeves into
the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it
slowly. I walked with her to the door. "Come and see me sometimes when
you're lonesome. But maybe you have all the friends you want. Have you?"
She turned her soft cheek to me. "Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my
ear. In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.



When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than
before. Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I
loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and
appreciative--gave a favorable interpretation to everything. When I closed
my eyes I could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the
three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over
me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and
the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across
the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an
actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.





IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in "Rip Van Winkle," and to a war play called "Shenandoah." She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business
now, and she would n't have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked
to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything
was true. It was like going to revival meetings with some one who was
always being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a
kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant
much more to her than to me. She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and
hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh, Promise Me!"

Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in
those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which
two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an
actress of whom I had often heard, and the name "Camille."

I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked
down to the theater. The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a
holiday humor. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people
come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the "incidental
music" would be from the opera "Traviata," which was made from the same
story as the play. We had neither of us read the play, and we did not know
what it was about--though I seemed to remember having heard it was a piece
in which great actresses shone. "The Count of Monte Cristo," which I had
seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I
knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family
resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not
have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody
Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there
was a new tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theater lines
that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those which
passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her
friends entered. This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most
enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen champagne
bottles opened on the stage before--indeed, I had never seen them opened
anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it
then, when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me, was
delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged
hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling
whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the
reddest of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing
young men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or
less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I
saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world
in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every
pleasantry enlarged one's horizon. One could experience excess and satiety
without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a
drawing-room! When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of
the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery. I strained my
ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.

The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though
historic. She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and
afterward a "star" under his direction. She was a woman who could not be
taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried
with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not
squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique
curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty--I think she was lame--I
seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was
disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the
extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to
fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent,
reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I
wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the
frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in
the world. Her sudden illness, when the gayety was at its height, her
pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she
smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano
lightly--it all wrung my heart. But not so much as her cynicism in the long
dialogue with her lover which followed. How far was I from questioning her
unbelief! While the charmingly sincere young man pleaded with
her--accompanied by the orchestra in the old "Traviata" duet, "misterioso,
misterioso!"--she maintained her bitter skepticism, and the curtain fell on
her dancing recklessly with the others, after Armand had been sent away
with his flower.

Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing away
at the "Traviata" music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so
clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking. After the second act I left Lena in
tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to
smoke. As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not
brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the Junior
dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth. Lena was at least
a woman, and I was a man.

Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept
unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of
idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable
happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.

I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and
temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran actress who
first acquainted me with her. Her conception of the character was as heavy
and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the
consonants. At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse.
Lightness of stress or behavior was far from her. Her voice was heavy and
deep: "Ar-r-r-mond!" she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the
bar of Judgment. But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them.
They created the character in spite of her.

The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never
been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered in
Olympe's salon for the fourth act. There were chandeliers hung from the
ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men
played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made
their entrance. After all the others had gathered round the card tables,
and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the
staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels--and her
face! One knew at a glance how it was with her. When Armand, with the
terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the
gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside
me and covered her face with her hands.

The curtain rose on the bedroom scene. By this time there was n't a nerve
in me that had n't been twisted. Nanine alone could have made me cry. I
loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow! The
New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now. I
wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for
elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund
woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.

When we reached the door of the theater, the streets were shining with
rain. I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's useful Commencement
present, and I took Lena home under its shelter. After leaving her, I
walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived. The
lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the
rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with
a sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and under the
showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only
yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and
which had reached me only that night, across long years and several
languages, through the person of an infirm old actress. The idea is one
that no circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and whenever that piece is
put on, it is April.





HOW well I remember the stiff little parlor where I used to wait for Lena:
the hard horsehair furniture, bought at some auction sale, the long
mirror, the fashion-plates on the wall. If I sat down even for a moment I
was sure to find threads and bits of colored silk clinging to my clothes
after I went away. Lena's success puzzled me. She was so easy-going; had
none of the push and self-assertiveness that get people ahead in business.
She had come to Lincoln, a country girl, with no introductions except to
some cousins of Mrs. Thomas who lived there, and she was already making
clothes for the women of "the young married set." She evidently had great
natural aptitude for her work. She knew, as she said, "what people looked
well in." She never tired of poring over fashion books. Sometimes in the
evening I would find her alone in her work-room, draping folds of satin on
a wire figure, with a quite blissful expression of countenance. I could
n't help thinking that the years when Lena literally had n't enough
clothes to cover herself might have something to do with her untiring
interest in dressing the human figure. Her clients said that Lena "had
style," and overlooked her habitual inaccuracies. She never, I discovered,
finished anything by the time she had promised, and she frequently spent
more money on materials than her customer had authorized. Once, when I
arrived at six o'clock, Lena was ushering out a fidgety mother and her
awkward, overgrown daughter. The woman detained Lena at the door to say
apologetically:--

"You'll try to keep it under fifty for me, won't you, Miss Lingard? You
see, she's really too young to come to an expensive dressmaker, but I knew
you could do more with her than anybody else."

"Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Herron. I think we'll manage to get a
good effect," Lena replied blandly.

I thought her manner with her customers very good, and wondered where she
had learned such self-possession.

Sometimes after my morning classes were over, I used to encounter Lena
downtown, in her velvet suit and a little black hat, with a veil tied
smoothly over her face, looking as fresh as the spring morning. Maybe she
would be carrying home a bunch of jonquils or a hyacinth plant. When we
passed a candy store her footsteps would hesitate and linger. "Don't let
me go in," she would murmur. "Get me by if you can." She was very fond of
sweets, and was afraid of growing too plump.

We had delightful Sunday breakfasts together at Lena's. At the back of her
long work-room was a bay-window, large enough to hold a box-couch and a
reading-table. We breakfasted in this recess, after drawing the curtains
that shut out the long room, with cutting-tables and wire women and
sheet-draped garments on the walls. The sunlight poured in, making
everything on the table shine and glitter and the flame of the alcohol
lamp disappear altogether. Lena's curly black water-spaniel, Prince,
breakfasted with us. He sat beside her on the couch and behaved very well
until the Polish violin-teacher across the hall began to practice, when
Prince would growl and sniff the air with disgust. Lena's landlord, old
Colonel Raleigh, had given her the dog, and at first she was not at all
pleased. She had spent too much of her life taking care of animals to have
much sentiment about them. But Prince was a knowing little beast, and she
grew fond of him. After breakfast I made him do his lessons; play dead
dog, shake hands, stand up like a soldier. We used to put my cadet cap on
his head--I had to take military drill at the University--and give him a
yard-measure to hold with his front leg. His gravity made us laugh
immoderately.

Lena's talk always amused me. Antonia had never talked like the people
about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily there was
always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had picked
up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas's dressmaking
shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and
the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became
very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice,
with her caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more
diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a
leg a "limb" or a house a "home."

We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner. Lena
was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh with the world
every day, and her eyes had a deeper color then, like the blue flowers
that are never so blue as when they first open. I could sit idle all
through a Sunday morning and look at her. Ole Benson's behavior was now no
mystery to me.

"There was never any harm in Ole," she said once. "People need n't have
troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the draw-side
and forget about his bad luck. I liked to have him. Any company's welcome
when you're off with cattle all the time."

"But was n't he always glum?" I asked. "People said he never talked at
all."

"Sure he talked, in Norwegian. He'd been a sailor on an English boat and
had seen lots of queer places. He had wonderful tattoos. We used to sit
and look at them for hours; there was n't much to look at out there. He
was like a picture book. He had a ship and a strawberry girl on one arm,
and on the other a girl standing before a little house, with a fence and
gate and all, waiting for her sweetheart. Farther up his arm, her sailor
had come back and was kissing her. 'The Sailor's Return,' he called it."

I admitted it was no wonder Ole liked to look at a pretty girl once in a
while, with such a fright at home.

"You know," Lena said confidentially, "he married Mary because he thought
she was strong-minded and would keep him straight. He never could keep
straight on shore. The last time he landed in Liverpool he'd been out on a
two years' voyage. He was paid off one morning, and by the next he had n't
a cent left, and his watch and compass were gone. He'd got with some
women, and they'd taken everything. He worked his way to this country on a
little passenger boat. Mary was a stewardess, and she tried to convert him
on the way over. He thought she was just the one to keep him steady. Poor
Ole! He used to bring me candy from town, hidden in his feed-bag. He could
n't refuse anything to a girl. He'd have given away his tattoos long ago,
if he could. He's one of the people I'm sorriest for."

If I happened to spend an evening with Lena and stayed late, the Polish
violin-teacher across the hall used to come out and watch me descend the
stairs, muttering so threateningly that it would have been easy to fall
into a quarrel with him. Lena had told him once that she liked to hear him
practice, so he always left his door open, and watched who came and went.

There was a coolness between the Pole and Lena's landlord on her account.
Old Colonel Raleigh had come to Lincoln from Kentucky and invested an
inherited fortune in real estate, at the time of inflated prices. Now he
sat day after day in his office in the Raleigh Block, trying to discover
where his money had gone and how he could get some of it back. He was a
widower, and found very little congenial companionship in this casual
Western city. Lena's good looks and gentle manners appealed to him. He
said her voice reminded him of Southern voices, and he found as many
opportunities of hearing it as possible. He painted and papered her rooms
for her that spring, and put in a porcelain bathtub in place of the tin
one that had satisfied the former tenant. While these repairs were being
made, the old gentleman often dropped in to consult Lena's preferences.
She told me with amusement how Ordinsky, the Pole, had presented himself
at her door one evening, and said that if the landlord was annoying her by
his attentions, he would promptly put a stop to it.

"I don't exactly know what to do about him," she said, shaking her head,
"he's so sort of wild all the time. I would n't like to have him say
anything rough to that nice old man. The Colonel is long-winded, but then
I expect he's lonesome. I don't think he cares much for Ordinsky, either.
He said once that if I had any complaints to make of my neighbors, I must
n't hesitate."

One Saturday evening when I was having supper with Lena we heard a knock
at her parlor door, and there stood the Pole, coatless, in a dress shirt
and collar. Prince dropped on his paws and began to growl like a mastiff,
while the visitor apologized, saying that he could not possibly come in
thus attired, but he begged Lena to lend him some safety pins.

"Oh, you'll have to come in, Mr. Ordinsky, and let me see what's the
matter." She closed the door behind him. "Jim, won't you make Prince
behave?"

I rapped Prince on the nose, while Ordinsky explained that he had not had
his dress clothes on for a long time, and to-night, when he was going to
play for a concert, his waistcoat had split down the back. He thought he
could pin it together until he got it to a tailor.

Lena took him by the elbow and turned him round. She laughed when she saw
the long gap in the satin. "You could never pin that, Mr. Ordinsky. You've
kept it folded too long, and the goods is all gone along the crease. Take
it off. I can put a new piece of lining-silk in there for you in ten
minutes." She disappeared into her work-room with the vest, leaving me to
confront the Pole, who stood against the door like a wooden figure. He
folded his arms and glared at me with his excitable, slanting brown eyes.
His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and was covered with dry,
straw-colored hair that fuzzed up about his pointed crown. He had never
done more than mutter at me as I passed him, and I was surprised when he
now addressed me.

"Miss Lingard," he said haughtily, "is a young woman for whom I have the
utmost, the utmost respect."

"So have I," I said coldly.

He paid no heed to my remark, but began to do rapid finger-exercises on
his shirt-sleeves, as he stood with tightly folded arms.

"Kindness of heart," he went on, staring at the ceiling, "sentiment, are
not understood in a place like this. The noblest qualities are ridiculed.
Grinning college boys, ignorant and conceited, what do they know of
delicacy!"

I controlled my features and tried to speak seriously.

"If you mean me, Mr. Ordinsky, I have known Miss Lingard a long time, and
I think I appreciate her kindness. We come from the same town, and we grew
up together."

His gaze traveled slowly down from the ceiling and rested on me. "Am I to
understand that you have this young woman's interests at heart? That you
do not wish to compromise her?"

"That's a word we don't use much here, Mr. Ordinsky. A girl who makes her
own living can ask a college boy to supper without being talked about. We
take some things for granted."

"Then I have misjudged you, and I ask your pardon,"--he bowed gravely.
"Miss Lingard," he went on, "is an absolutely trustful heart. She has not
learned the hard lessons of life. As for you and me, noblesse oblige,"--he
watched me narrowly.

Lena returned with the vest. "Come in and let us look at you as you go
out, Mr. Ordinsky. I've never seen you in your dress suit," she said as
she opened the door for him.

A few moments later he reappeared with his violin case--a heavy muffler
about his neck and thick woolen gloves on his bony hands. Lena spoke
encouragingly to him, and he went off with such an important, professional
air, that we fell to laughing as soon as we had shut the door. "Poor
fellow," Lena said indulgently, "he takes everything so hard."

After that Ordinsky was friendly to me, and behaved as if there were some
deep understanding between us. He wrote a furious article, attacking the
musical taste of the town, and asked me to do him a great service by
taking it to the editor of the morning paper. If the editor refused to
print it, I was to tell him that he would be answerable to Ordinsky "in
person." He declared that he would never retract one word, and that he was
quite prepared to lose all his pupils. In spite of the fact that nobody
ever mentioned his article to him after it appeared--full of typographical
errors which he thought intentional--he got a certain satisfaction from
believing that the citizens of Lincoln had meekly accepted the epithet
"coarse barbarians." "You see how it is," he said to me, "where there is
no chivalry, there is no amour propre." When I met him on his rounds now,
I thought he carried his head more disdainfully than ever, and strode up
the steps of front porches and rang doorbells with more assurance. He told
Lena he would never forget how I had stood by him when he was "under
fire."

All this time, of course, I was drifting. Lena had broken up my serious
mood. I was n't interested in my classes. I played with Lena and Prince, I
played with the Pole, I went buggy-riding with the old Colonel, who had
taken a fancy to me and used to talk to me about Lena and the "great
beauties" he had known in his youth. We were all three in love with Lena.

Before the first of June, Gaston Cleric was offered an instructorship at
Harvard College, and accepted it. He suggested that I should follow him in
the fall, and complete my course at Harvard. He had found out about
Lena--not from me--and he talked to me seriously.

"You won't do anything here now. You should either quit school and go to
work, or change your college and begin again in earnest. You won't recover
yourself while you are playing about with this handsome Norwegian. Yes,
I've seen her with you at the theater. She's very pretty, and perfectly
irresponsible, I should judge."

Cleric wrote my grandfather that he would like to take me East with him.
To my astonishment, grandfather replied that I might go if I wished. I was
both glad and sorry on the day when the letter came. I stayed in my room
all evening and thought things over; I even tried to persuade myself that
I was standing in Lena's way--it is so necessary to be a little noble!--and
that if she had not me to play with, she would probably marry and secure
her future.

The next evening I went to call on Lena. I found her propped up on the
couch in her bay window, with her foot in a big slipper. An awkward little
Russian girl whom she had taken into her work-room had dropped a flat-iron
on Lena's toe. On the table beside her there was a basket of early summer
flowers which the Pole had left after he heard of the accident. He always
managed to know what went on in Lena's apartment.

Lena was telling me some amusing piece of gossip about one of her clients,
when I interrupted her and picked up the flower basket.

"This old chap will be proposing to you some day, Lena."

"Oh, he has--often!" she murmured.

"What! After you've refused him?"

"He does n't mind that. It seems to cheer him to mention the subject. Old
men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they're
in love with somebody."

"The Colonel would marry you in a minute. I hope you won't marry some old
fellow; not even a rich one."

Lena shifted her pillows and looked up at me in surprise. "Why, I'm not
going to marry anybody. Did n't you know that?"

"Nonsense, Lena. That's what girls say, but you know better. Every
handsome girl like you marries, of course."

She shook her head. "Not me."

"But why not? What makes you say that?" I persisted.

Lena laughed. "Well, it's mainly because I don't want a husband. Men are
all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky
old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible
and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer
to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody."

"But you'll be lonesome. You'll get tired of this sort of life, and you'll
want a family."

"Not me. I like to be lonesome. When I went to work for Mrs. Thomas I was
nineteen years old, and I had never slept a night in my life when there
were n't three in the bed. I never had a minute to myself except when I
was off with the cattle."

Usually, when Lena referred to her life in the country at all, she
dismissed it with a single remark, humorous or mildly cynical. But
to-night her mind seemed to dwell on those early years. She told me she
could n't remember a time when she was so little that she was n't lugging
a heavy baby about, helping to wash for babies, trying to keep their
little chapped hands and faces clean. She remembered home as a place where
there were always too many children, a cross man, and work piling up
around a sick woman.

"It was n't mother's fault. She would have made us comfortable if she
could. But that was no life for a girl! After I began to herd and milk I
could never get the smell of the cattle off me. The few underclothes I had
I kept in a cracker box. On Saturday nights, after everybody was in bed,
then I could take a bath if I was n't too tired. I could make two trips to
the windmill to carry water, and heat it in the wash-boiler on the stove.
While the water was heating, I could bring in a washtub out of the cave,
and take my bath in the kitchen. Then I could put on a clean nightgown and
get into bed with two others, who likely had n't had a bath unless I'd
given it to them. You can't tell me anything about family life. I've had
plenty to last me."

"But it's not all like that," I objected.

"Near enough. It's all being under somebody's thumb. What's on your mind,
Jim? Are you afraid I'll want you to marry me some day?"

Then I told her I was going away.

"What makes you want to go away, Jim? Have n't I been nice to you?"

"You've been just awfully good to me, Lena," I blurted. "I don't think
about much else. I never shall think about much else while I'm with you.
I'll never settle down and grind if I stay here. You know that." I dropped
down beside her and sat looking at the floor. I seemed to have forgotten
all my reasonable explanations.

Lena drew close to me, and the little hesitation in her voice that had
hurt me was not there when she spoke again.

"I ought n't to have begun it, ought I?" she murmured. "I ought n't to
have gone to see you that first time. But I did want to. I guess I've
always been a little foolish about you. I don't know what first put it
into my head, unless it was Antonia, always telling me I must n't be up to
any of my nonsense with you. I let you alone for a long while, though, did
n't I?"

She was a sweet creature to those she loved, that Lena Lingard!

At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss. "You are
n't sorry I came to see you that time?" she whispered. "It seemed so
natural. I used to think I'd like to be your first sweetheart. You were
such a funny kid!" She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely
sending one away forever.

We said many good-byes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to
hinder me or hold me back. "You are going, but you have n't gone yet, have
you?" she used to say.

My Lincoln chapter closed abruptly. I went home to my grandparents for a
few weeks, and afterward visited my relatives in Virginia until I joined
Cleric in Boston. I was then nineteen years old.

 Book III: Lena Lingard Parts I - IV Part I Jim begins his studies at the University of Nebraska, and he falls under the care of Gaston Cleric, an inspiring Latin scholar. The University is only a few years old at the time, and there are no dormitories. Jim rents a room from an old couple in Lincoln, and his bedroom is a converted closet. The University itself has a kind of ramshackle assortment of students and professors. Jim stays through the summer after his first year, finishing a Greek requirement. His mentor, Cleric, stays behind in Lincoln as well because of health concerns, and the two spend a great deal of time together. While Jim greatly admires his teacher, he realizes that cannot lose himself in ideas like his teacher can. He knows that he will never be a scholar. Part II In his sophomore year, while he is musing on Virgil's thoughts about bringing the Muse into his neglected corner of the Italian countryside, Lena Lingard comes to see him. She has established herself as a dressmaker in Lincoln, and has been there for several months. She is dressed well, and she says that her business is doing well. She says that she plans to build a new house for her mother this summer, and that she hopes to furnish it the following summer. When Jim remarks how proud of herself she must be for her success, Lena brings up Antonia and how she brags about Jim. Antonia has found a position working for Mrs. Carpenter at the hotel, and has re-started her relationship with Larry Donovan. In fact, they are engaged. Lena and Jim make arrangements to go to the theatre together, and she hurries out, worried about Jim's landlord disapproving of the visit. She says that she wants to write to Antonia to say that she has come to see him, and to be able to tell her that she found Jim studying, and left him studying. Part III  Jim and Lena attend several plays together, but one particular play makes a strong impression--Camille, an old French story about an aristocratic young man who falls in love with a peasant woman, who, on the advice of her lover's father, leaves him, only to find herself hated and scorned by her lover, and eventually dying, alone, of consumption. Part IV Jim and Lena start having breakfast together on the weekend, and he becomes familiar with her home and her neighbors. He starts to appreciate her success, though he doesn't completely understand it. She seems to have a natural ability for clothing, though she tends to charge more than planned and takes longer than planned. She talks about Ole Benson, and how harmless he was. Jim starts to cause conflict in Lena's boarding house with his regular visits. Lena lives across the hall from a Polish violin-teacher named Ordinsky, who leaves his door open so that Lena can hear him. Her landlord is a widowed Southerner named Colonel Raleigh, who was making occasional improvements to Lena's apartment as an excuse to come over and talk to her. One night, Ordinsky came to her door and offered to get rid of the Colonel if he was causing Lena problems. While she thought the Colonel was a little long-winded, she didn't want to start conflict. When Jim was having dinner with Lena, Ordinsky knocked and asked if he could borrow some safety pins. He has torn his dress shirt, and Lena offers to fix it for him quickly. While she is doing this, Jim and Ordinsky are forced to make small talk. Ordinsky starts to hint that Jim might be taking advantage of Lena, and he tells Ordinsky that they are old friends, and that there is nothing more to their simple dinner together. Ordinsky apologizes, and treats him differently after that. Ordinsky writes an editorial for the local paper about the degenerate musical tastes in the town, and asks Jim to take it to the paper for him, which he does. Jim starts to notice that his studies have become less important, and he is losing interest and not getting anything done. His professor, Cleric, notices, and invites him along to Harvard, where Cleric has just been offered a job. Cleric doesn't feel that Jim can recover from the distraction and thinks he should start over at Harvard. He agrees. Jim goes to see Lena, and he brings up her future. He tells her that he doesn't want her to marry someone like Raleigh or Ordinsky. She tells Jim that she will never marry, and she explains that she doesn't like the idea of having a husband, partly because of her experience in a difficult family as a child. Jim eventually confesses why he came, and tells Lena that she is the reason. She feels a little remorse for having distracted him, but they part on good terms.

