so heavy for me—and our old-fashioned silver water pitcher with four high goblets to match. I didn't even unlock my enormous chest of silver. Alec had let me take from the safe at home the forks and darling thin spoons and knives that had always been in our family. It was like sheltering old friends under my roof to care for them again.
Edith would have hated the life I drifted into. She would have called it "a mere existence" or "worse than the frontier." From September to February, I didn't go to a single luncheon, tea, or bridge! People had called—members of the faculty, I suppose, I'm sure I don't know, for the cards were mere names to me and I was always out when they were left. You see one evening I had run across something in a pamphlet of Will's on our living-room table that set me to thinking. The pamphlet was a sort of bulletin of lectures given by different professors in the college. There was a star after several of the announcements and at the bottom of the page it said, "Open to the Public." I hadn't a notion whether it was the right thing for me to go to them or not, but one rainy afternoon I hunted up Tyler Hall and Room twenty-one on the second floor and slunk into one of the back chairs at five minutes to three, very much frightened and wondering if I would be turned out. The lecture was the second or third of a series given by a Dr. Van Breeze on something in philosophy. I didn't understand more than about two sentences, but no one seemed to question my right to sit there, and I felt ten times more comfortable than I ever had at bridge parties in Hilton.
You see I have never been to college. Although I
