Sidney: her senior year

Front matter

o n c * J » * s S , \ X ' vu y ° * X ^

vf^VlW" °o o° V A o

*7

Chapter One

“ 1%/TY de-ar girls ! ” The speaker flung herself into T-fA a chair and fanned herself with her hat, for she had been down town, and the September sun was warm. “ Have you seen the dromedary? ”

“ The dromedary? ” An answering voice detached itself from the chorus of babble which was focussing itself upon the proper hanging of the pictures.

“ Yes, the dromedary. Nothing else expresses her.” “ What is she? A freshman? ”

The first speaker nodded with slow emphasis.

“ She’s Sidney Stayre’s sister,” she replied alliteratively. “ Have any of you seen her? ”

Amy Pope, mounted on a tall step-ladder, gave a chuckle whose quality was but barely tempered by her loyalty to the absent Sidney.

“ Seen her? ” she echoed then. “ Of course I have, often.”

“ But you never told us.”

“ What was there to tell? ” Amy queried demurely, as once more she faced back to the wall.

There was a little gasp of dissenting wonder that any one, seeing Phyllis Stayre, could have the effrontery to ask the question. Then, —

“ Everything! ” came the comprehensive answer. “ Everything, her height included. She’d dwarf the — the Flatiron Building, if she stopped beside it, and, even then, her feet and her hands and her nose have developed out of all proportion to the rest of her. Really, Amy, she is — ”

“ Preposterously ugly,” Amy assented calmly. “ There, girls, is that right? But about poor Phyllis: she’s not to blame for her looks.”

“ Maybe not,” the other girl said viciously; “ but she is to blame for her clothes.”

Amy turned around once more, and, coming down a step or two, seated herself to argue at her ease.

“ Maybe, maybe,” she assented. “ What did she have on, this time? ”

“ You speak as if she were a chronic problem, Amy,” another of the group interposed.

Amy waved aside the interruption.

" You haven’t seen Phyllis yet,” she said conclusively.

The first speaker took up the theme.

“ Have on? Assorted fragments of all her different costumes, I should judge. Her blouse, from the look of it, was French convent work, the sort of thing we generally save for dinner-time. She wore it with a skirt that looked like withered denim, and she also had on hob-nailed shoes. Then she wears spectacles which appear to pinch her massive brow, for she has wound the legs of them with some sort of black yarn, by way of pad, and her waist measure is — ”

“ Well? ” Amy urged her to her finishing touch.

The touch, when it came, proved to be anticlimax.

“ Just a little capacious,” the other girl said mildly, while she stuck the pins back into her hat, preparatory to rising and going on her way. “ Apparently Miss Phyllis, if that’s her name — she looks like a Maria — has theories of her own regarding costume.”

“ And apparently they don’t agree with yours,” Amy called after her retreating back. And then, with a little sigh, she added to herself, “ Poor old Sidney! It’s too bad.”

But another of the group had overheard the final comment, and cut in with an expression of her own belief.

“ It wouldn’t make any difference with Sidney’s stand, if she had a whole Noah’s ark full of sisters dressed in assorted party frocks and rubber boots. She’s Sidney Stayre, and that’s all that counts here. Do you suppose we’ll get her in for president? ”

Amy drove a tack with a vehemence which sent her left thumb into her mouth.

“ If — we — can — put — her — in,” she asserted, between caressing sucks. “ The Tyler and Haven girls are for her, solid, and all the invitation houses. Still, the Dickinson girls — ” .

“ Their candidate is only Phi Kap,” some one interrupted. “ Sidney is Alpha.”

“ Yes, and Biological, and Colloquium, and German: three clubs and a society. But the other girl is — ”

“Bother the other girl!” Amy responded, with a vindictiveness in part due to her afflicted thumb, and with a phraseology which would have startled her lady mother, fortunately at home and out of hearing. “ The best of the class is for Sidney, and we can count on the help of all the snobs who want to follow the winning side. That ought to give us a fairly solid majority. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to make the best of it, and put Sidney in as chairman of dramatics.”

“ Do you think she’d make a good one? ”

Amy shook her head.

“Not so good as she would president,” she made elliptical reply. “ Still, she just has to be put in as something, even if we have to manufacture an office for her. All the course, she’s been one of the most prominent girls in the class, and she hasn’t had a decent office yet.”

“ Just because we’ve been saving her for senior president,” came bluntly from across the room.

“ Exactly.” Amy nodded at her thumb, which she was examining with anxious care. “ It’s only that, now and then, one’s savings get swept away from them, and then — ”

“ Then? ” the other girl queried.

Amy rose to her feet.

“ Then there generally follows a most awful panic,” she made succinct reply. “ However, I have no intention yet awhile of getting panicky concerning Sidney.”

“ Too bad she’s had such a sister land here,” somebody else murmured sympathetically.

Again Amy shook her head. Again her reply was succinct.

“No monkey ever hurt the chances of any handorgan; it’s the quality of the instrument itself. Sidney is all right.”

“Yes; only it’s too bad, just now — ” The speaker trailed off into indecisive pauses.

“ It’s too badder that she and Day wouldn’t come over here with us,” came another voice. “ What do you suppose was the real reason, Amy? ”

“ Solid conscience, especially on Day’s part,” Amy told her.

“ But they always said they’d go in for invitation houses. Don’t you remember that night in freshman year? ”

“ That was theory, and a long way ahead. When it came to the point, Day balked, and Sidney couldn’t be coaxed or bullied into leaving her, so they both stayed on the campus. Of course, there’s something to be said on their side. It’s a little hard on the college to have all the best seniors going off the campus, and it throws too much responsibility on the best of the juniors. Still, I wish that Day had been a little less endowed with conscience. I had counted on her being over here with all the rest of us.”

“ Perhaps she didn’t want to come.”

Amy frowned. The suggestion, a little too pertly accented for her liking, had come from the girl who had been chosen to fill Day’s vacant place.

“ As it happens, I know for a fact that she did,” she answered quietly. “ With Day Argyle, though, the what she wants isn’t always the final consideration.”

The girl who had spoken from across the room shook her head gloomily at the sofa pillow she was covering.

“ There’s one thing about it,” she observed; “ it’s bound to make a good deal more difference to us than it will to Day and Sidney.”

Day and Sidney, meanwhile, were anything but gloomy, while they settled their belongings in one of the largest, sunniest rooms of the Tyler House. True, as Amy had said, only a stern and conscientious sense of duty to the college as a whole had kept them from going to join a dozen of their closest friends and cronies in the invitation house a few doors down the street, a sense of duty argued out by Day in various discussions with her brother, who brought to bear upon the question all the logic that had come with Harvard seniorhood. Day Argyle’s conscience, coupled with Rob Argyle’s logic, had brought the matter to a swift reversal of Day’s earlier plan. As gently as she was able, midway in her junior year, Day had broken the news of her decision to her roommate, Sidney Stay re; had mentioned to Sidney that, she herself staying on the campus, Sidney would better plan to room with Amy Pope.

To Day’s intense surprise, Sidney mutinied promptly and flatly. It was a fact that she had liked the invitation house idea, had looked forward to the good times their little set would have, quite by themselves and with the matron of their choice. Nevertheless, without discussion of any sort, Sidney had refused to room with any one but Day Argyle; and, her refusal once phrased, she departed on her heels to acquaint the Registrar with their combined decision. In consequence, there was wailing among their especial friends; but the wiser heads among the faculty rejoiced, for Day Argyle and Sidney Stayre, steady and sane and gloriously human, were good to hold on the campus. As for Sidney and Day, their stand once taken and publicly announced, they ceased to waste much thought upon the matter.

It was now a long four years since the September afternoon when Sidney Stayre and Day Argyle had met, and, meeting, had sworn a friendship which bade fair to be perennial. Their New York homes were barely half a mile apart, yet their acquaintance had achieved itself by devious and round-about ways. Sidney Stayre, spending a summer in the Cote de Beaupre, had become good friends with a Quebec family of Leslies. Six months later, when Mr.' Leslie’s death had revealed the bareness of the family treasury, Mrs. Leslie had sought to make both ends meet by taking boarders, and the boarders had been the Argyles. Rob Argyle had been semi-invalided, just then, convalescent from a football injury to his knee. Accordingly, it had come to pass, when his doctor ordered him back to

New York for special treatment, that the younger Leslies had seen to it that he should meet their good friend, Sidney Stayre 0 Rob and Sidney had liked each other from the start, regardless of the fact that Rob was the pampered son of fortune, Sidney the daughter of a home where brains were more plentiful than dollars, or even dimes. Day, however, had had her reservations, had even held back from a suggested meeting. In the end, she had yielded only because she always did yield to every whim of her jovial older brother. She had packed up all her reservations into a bundle and taken them with her, when at last she had gone for her first call on Sidney. In the course of the call, however, she had lost her bundle, and, in the weeks and months to come, she never had been able to find it again. In her judgment, Sidney Stayre was of too large a nature to be judged by the question of whether she did or did not possess certain things that Day, up to that time, had regarded as essentials. She was herself. Being herself, she needed nothing more.

Early in their first year at college, Day’s mother had tried to play the fairy godmother to Sidney, just a little and only now and then. She had been afraid that the other girls in the class would be less clear-sighted than her own young daughter; that, in a crowd of strangers, struggling all for recognition of one sort or another, Sidney might be judged less by what she was than by what she did not have. Mrs. Argyle’s efforts, however, had been wholly needless. Sidney, to be sure, had accepted her gifts with a simple gratitude that had been both sensible and generous. None the less, with or without the gifts, Sidney’s career would have been just the same. Downright as a boy, full of fun, full, too, of kindly sympathy for every one about her, capable of a loyalty that would endure through thick and thin, endure to the very death, Sidney Stayre was as sure to make new friends as she was to hold her old ones.

And Day was loyal and downright, too, albeit quicker of temper and of speech, more vehement in all her moods, and totally unspoiled by her life of only daughter in a luxurious and adoring home. If any one had sought to belittle Day in Sidney’s eyes, that one would have been slowly crushed to death beneath the withering weight of Sidney’s scornful dignity; but any one maligning Sidney in Day’s hearing would have been swiftly scorched by Day’s hot wrath. To each other, they were fast becoming all in all; and yet each one did her level best to keep room in her life for a round dozen of other, lesser friends. Nevertheless, their best times of all were when they were quite alone together, or else with Day’s only brother, Rob.

Chief among these other, lesser girl friends was Amy Pope, who had just confessed to knowing Phyllis Stayre. Another of them was Janet Leslie, and Janet now sat enthroned, Turkwise, on the bed, and offered sage advice about the placing of the desks and tea-table.

“ Of course,” she said, with a scanty regard for the feelings of her companions; “ if you were grinds, or even just plain students, your desks would be the main thing to consider. As it is, though, I’d give that place to the table. It’s the greatest good of the greatest number that you’re after, and you’ll have ten girls in to eat things to every thirster after knowledge.”

Sidney laughed.

“ I prefer my knowledge to be diluted with tea; I always did,” she confessed. “ It’s no use, Janet; I am afraid I don’t take my work enough in earnest.”

“ You don’t have to,” Janet responded flatly. “ Things come to you, without your half trying for them; to Day, too. I have to dig for what I get.”

“ What matter, as long as you get it, dearie? ” Day queried, as she cast aside the books she was sorting and went to rest with Janet on the bed.

“Matter!” Janet echoed grimly. “Nothing; only that the class labels me a grind, and passes me by on the other side.”

“ There are worse things than a grind,” Day said consolingly.

“ Yes, and better. There’s nothing more deadly, though. I’m willing to grind, nine tenths of the time. The other tenth, I’d like to kick my heels and frivol with the rest of you; but nobody seems to think it possible I have any latent tendencies towards skittishness,” Janet grumbled, scowling at her interlocked fingers.

“ How do you want to skit? ” Sidney demanded briefly, above the clatter of the cups she was unpacking.

“ I don’t know. I wish I did,” Janet confessed, still moodily. “ That’s the very worst of the whole situation. I have a vague hankering for frivolity in general; but there’s no one thing I care about, besides tennis and the banjo club. After all, I sometimes think I enjoy my work about as much as anything I’ve ever done, except — ”

“ Except what, Janet? ” Day asked, her eyes upon her companion’s intent face.

Janet looked up, met her eyes, blushed hotly. Then —

“Do you remember the first day I did Madame Champlain? ” she asked crisply. “ That was the very best day for me of all the pageants,” she caught her breath; “ almost of all my life.”

Sidney looked up from her pink and green china cups.

“ Janet,” she asked abruptly; “ why don’t you go in for dramatics? ”

“Me! Hh!” Janet answered. Then she changed the subject.

It was a little while before Sidney spoke again, and it was plain that, during her silence, her mind was not wholly upon her cups.

“ Amy says they have read everything from early Hindu to the works of Mr. Bacon-Shakespeare,” she observed. “ I shall be glad, when it is all settled.”

“ When will be the meeting? ”

“ As soon as they stop fighting over presidential candidates,” Sidney made answer, with a fine unconsciousness of the identity of one of those same candidates. “ They ought to settle that, this next week, and take the play, the week after.”

“ I hope they give Midsummer Night’s Dream Day remarked, from her corner of the bed.

“ Oh, why? I don’t,” Sidney opposed her.

“ Because I yearn to see myself as Bottom,” Day yawned. “ That seems to me a grand climax for one’s college course.”

“ I always felt a mad desire to be a ghost,” Sidney retorted. “ All you have to do is to stalk about and then fade away again. That reminds me, Janet, have you been up to see your mother, this morning? ”

“ Yes, early.”

“ See anything of my small sister? ”

Janet laughed.

“ No. I heard her, though.”

Sidney’s eyes betrayed a passing uneasiness as to what lay back of Janet’s laughter.

“ What was she doing? ”

“ I am not sure. I thought it wasn’t wise to go in, so, like your ghost, I just stalked about and faded away again. She seemed to be engaged in elemental strife with her trunk and a chair or two. However, those old houses are solidly built,” Janet added reassuringly.

“ If a chair was all. But what about the roommate? ”

“ That remains to be seen.”

“ Hasn’t she come yet? ”

Janet shook her head.

“ Not until this afternoon.”

Sidney gave a little sigh.

“Oh, dear! ” she said. “ I do wish I knew how she and Phyllis were going to get along together.”

Chapter Two

T HERE were others who shared Sidney’s wonder, not the least curious among whom was Mrs. Leslie, Janet’s mother.

Mrs. Leslie’s Canadian life, together with the past three years in Northampton, years which had sufficed to build up her household of girls into the most popular and potent freshman colony in all Smith College, not all of Mrs. Leslie’s past experience had given her any standards whereby to judge a girl like Phyllis Stayre. If the poker had a hot end, Phyllis promptly grasped it. If Phyllis could deny herself any of the gentler graces, the denial came with strenuous insistence. If there were ever a totally unpopular side to any question, with unerring instinct Phyllis chose it as her own, alternately hugging its corners to her heart, and brandishing it aloft in sign of battle. Like royalty itself, her lions were always rampant, generally rambustious and occasionally rampaging. She spelt honour and duty in the largest capitals, and omitted graciousness from her vocabulary entirely. Any showing of affection she deemed beneath her dignity. She went her way in lofty isolation, outwardly disdainful, inwardly craving in vain the affection that none dared offer her; none, that is, save her father and her grown-up cousin,

Wade Winthrop. As for her sister Sidney, Phyllis was never able to decide whether her own attitude was of affection, envy, or of total disapproval. Sidney had all the qualities denied herself, she knew. None the less, Phyllis had a smug belief that she herself would never have been content to slide along through life with onetenth of her sister’s irresponsibility, and she gave audible expression to her regrets that Sidney paid so little heed to the effect of her example on the world about her.

In personal appearance, Phyllis was just as Amy Pope’s companion had described her, only a good deal more so. Long since, she had outgrown the physical dimensions of her parents, and still she was shooting upward with a tireless energy. Her long, lanky body was loosely strung together, and her arms and legs seemed swinging off at odd angles, with a curious tendency to get themselves in her way at inconvenient moments. Her hands were knuckly, and her feet were flat. For the rest, her hair was brown and as lank as her body; her nose was long, and her spectacled eyes were pale blue and prominent. Her sole redeeming feature was her sensitive mouth with its hard, even teeth, and even that was injured by its customary look of disdainful discontent.

Nature assuredly had been in a malign mood, when Phyllis Stayre was created. To make the matter worse, she had been endowed with an inborn craving for the beautiful, a longing to achieve it in her person and surroundings; while she had been denied all knowledge that beautiful things about one may not, of necessity, be harmful to one’s moral sense. Phyllis undeniably was ugly. Still, she might have made herself more comely, had she not taken it as a creed that the beauty of intellect, however mediocre, rendered needless any other sort of charm. Once only and for a few months, she had wavered from her gospel of ugliness. She had fluffed out her lanky hair and hunted for becoming colours for her frocks. While the epoch lasted, she was a changed and gracious Phyllis. Then she had cast the effort from her, and returned to her grim and unadorned severity.

Whether she had been antagonized by some careless comment ; whether she had simply become disheartened by her increasing length and boniness: this remained a mystery to all her friends. Phyllis vouchsafed no explanation to any one. She merely resumed her old habit of dragging her lank hair backward into a tight, hard knob, of robing herself in colours whose durability in no way atoned for their exceeding ugliness, of denying herself the softening bits of finery that all girls love to wear. She was always spotless, always trim, always and always presented the appearance of being tightly girt for some sanctified and grimy undertaking. And now Phyllis Stayre, with all her mental and physical and unacsthetic angles, was about to be plunged into a household of fluffy, frilly, gay young girls, gathered from some of the most luxurious homes the country can show. Small wonder that Sidney, three years her senior, both in college and in life, should feel and express some alarm as to the result.

It had been by no means a matter of course that Phyllis went to Smith College.

With Sidney, it had been a fact established in the mind of Mr. Stayre upon the night when he had been allowed to tiptoe across the dim-lit room and peer down at the red and squirming person of his oldest child. However, Stayres were many in the home, and ducats few. The income of an assistant editor could not be expected to send them all to college; and Phyllis, who of them all would have cared for it the most, had not the ingratiating tricks which would have coaxed a higher education out of a hesitating parent. Sidney, they all agreed, was making splendid use of all her chances, was developing into the all-round woman on whom the college tradition had set the seal of its approval. In the steady discipline of work and play, of training by her mates as well as of instruction by the faculty, Sidney’s weak points were becoming strong, her strong points stronger.

All this time, Phyllis was sitting, a silent listener at the family conferences, trying as best she could to down her envy at the praise of Sidney, trying still more to hold in check her smug consciousness that, given the chance, she would do better a good deal than Sidney had ever done, that she would turn her back on spreads and dinners down at Boyden’s, on outdoor sports and indoor frolics, and cause herself to be talked over by the faculty, an ornament to all the classrooms, a living sample package of all the things a college really stood for. She even lay awake at night to picture herself, always with smoothly parted hair and uncompromising sleeves and skirts, marching forward, amid the echoing plaudits of her class, to receive her diploma from the hand of a smiling president, whose unoccupied hand would rest upon her shoulder in wordless benediction. Usually, at this point, Phyllis arose and sought her handkerchief. Usually, too, the upsetting of stray articles encountered in the dark followed by way of anticlimax.

And now Phyllis Stay re, hugging her theories and her ambitions, sternly desirous of reforming the flippant tone of college life, of providing new records for student emulation, above all, of being a torch of duty in the merry path of her senior sister: Phyllis had arrived upon the scene of all her dreams and fancies. The matter had been achieved by Wade Winthrop, the cousin whom Phyllis adored. Wade was a man of thirty, rich, talented and, above all else, human. Years earlier, he had been the first one to see in Phyllis the germs of something other than the family termagant she seemed. Seeing them, he was keen enough to realize that a family of critical, teasing young brothers and sisters was by no means the best soil to promote their growth. Family tradition had it that Phyllis was the odd one, and cranky. It was time, then, that Phyllis should be removed from the influence of the family tradition. Moreover, as Wade was just about to marry a product of Smith College, he was quite naturally convinced that Smith College was the best place in the world for any girl, for even Phyllis. Mr. Stayre, after a futile demurring at so great a favour, had ended by accepting Wade’s generosity, more because he had no notion whatsoever what else to do with Phyllis than for any other reason.

Mrs. Argyle had flung herself into the plan, heart and soul. It was she who had coaxed Mrs. Leslie into taking the crabbed and ungainly girl into her carefully chosen household; it was she who had eked out Phyllis’s slender wardrobe with the pretty, dainty trifles which Phyllis disdained as frivolous and wore at all sorts of mismatched hours and angles. It was she who had laid upon her own young daughter the final charge that she should see to it that Phyllis did not have too bad a time, a charge which Day accepted with an outward meekness and an inward surety of her own futility.

Phyllis’s inevitable mutiny against the established order of things began the night before she left home.

“ What in the world is the sense in going so early? ” she demanded of Sidney. “ College doesn’t open till Thursday.”

Sidney looked up from her trunk.

“ Because — Why, the girls all do,” she answered.

Phyllis sat down on the corner of her own trunk and prepared to argue out the matter.

“ What a habit you have of that, Sidney! ” she began, in a tone of elderly patience.

Sidney continued to stuff tissue paper into the sleeves of her best winter frock.

“ Habit of what? ” she queried absently.

“ Habit of taking what other people do, as your own standard, without seeking to find out why they do it,” Phyllis argued, still patiently.

Sidney laughed.

“ Why not? The mere fact that they do it shows that it is probably the simplest thing to do.”

After an old, old trick of hers, Phyllis smoothed back her hair with the flat of her two hands. The gesture did not in the least improve her comeliness; but it gave her the comforting sense of being in order for the fray.

“Not at all,” she said then. “ Customs are like — like sheep tracks across a country pasture.”

“ Bravissimo, Phil! Encore! Encore a whole lot of times!” And a clapping of hands capped the words.

Phyllis turned her head, to see a great blond boy, jovial, tall, wide-shouldered and limping slightly, come strolling into the downstairs room which, in deference to a winding stairway and the tempers of the porters, Phyllis had ordained for the packing of the go-to-college trunks.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said, and her tone was not exuberant in its cordiality.

Sidney, however, hailed the guest with manifest delight.

“Just in time to sit on my trunk, Rob!” she told him. “ I was wondering how I could get the cover down.”

“ I weigh one hundred and ninety-one and a sixth, and I am all at your service. But, I say, do you generally do your packing in the front parlour? ” he inquired, as he seated himself in the nearest unencumbered chair. “ With Day, it’s a secret rite. Neither Jack nor I are admitted to a view of what goes on, when she’s packing.”

“ How is Day? ”

“ How should I know? She shut herself in, this noon, and she hasn’t been seen since. That’s why I am here, you see.”

“ Thank you,” Sidney told him courteously.

“ Don’t mention it. But do keep still, and give Phil a chance to go at it again. Go it, Phil. The sheep trail was a beauty. What next? Hens; or a lighthouse on a lonesome rock? ”

“ Neither.” Phyllis, her head in her trunk, spoke briefly.

Rob Argyle stretched out his long person quite at his ease, and clasped his hands behind his yellow head. His whole attitude betokened, not only his intention of remaining, but his good right to be there in the first place.

“ What called forth the glorious outburst? ” he demanded then.

Sidney laughed.

“ Phyllis was trying to arouse me to break down the custom of going back to Smith, a day early,” she explained.