Bryn Mawr (Pa.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Bryn Mawr College -- Fiction; College stories, American; Women college students -- Fiction
"And I do want to think it my masterpiece," said Ellen, rising to follow
her. Then she turned to the Major with a humorous diffidence that hid a
feeling too strong to show itself. "Perhaps it is just as well that I
have to stand on my attainment. If it were down in black and white some
critical person would be sure to discover how much I owe to the eloquent
ears of my audience."
_Marian T. MacIntosh, '90._
_IN MAYTIME_
I
Timothy Trask was an eminently correct young man. His dress, his speech,
his manners were all the most correct of their kind. If he discovered
that anything was the proper thing to do, he always did it, even to the
extent of playing very poor golf in an irreproachable pink coat. He was
a great lover of the antique, which is in itself a very correct thing to
be at the present time, and he possessed a collection of ancient armour,
which was hung about on the walls of his wide front hallway, a grim line
of swords and battle-axes, and great round shields.
Large as this collection was, in the mind of the fastidious Timothy it
was incomplete without a certain Crusader's dagger, exposed to view in a
New York dealer's window. Timothy had stood looking at this dagger with
longing contemplation, for once unconscious of his pose before the
public gaze. His imagination had conjured up an enticing scene in which
Timothy Trask figured as the centre of an admiring throng of
acquaintances, all watching with breathless eagerness while he told the
story of the ancient dagger and pointed out its jewelled hilt and the
fine gold chains attached to each end. Then he had counted over his
railway stocks, his mortgages and government bonds, and had sadly taken
the train back to Philadelphia.
The dagger continued to fill an unobtrusive place in the New York
window, and an altogether too prominent place in the mind of poor
Timothy. All his antiques grew tiresome and commonplace in comparison
with this one little jewelled hilt. At last one evening he decided that
he must have it if it ruined him. With a sudden burst of confidence he
told the whole story to three friends in his smoking room, and announced
his intention of going to New York the next day.
Unlucky confidence for Timothy! A look of subtle meaning passed from one
to another of the friends. One of them, in spite of warning glances from
the others, picked up a copy of the _Ledger_ from the table, and
nonchalantly pointed to a full-page account of a May-day fête, reviving
the Elizabethan plays and dances, to be given the next day at Bryn Mawr.
"Here's a lot about the learned ladies. Going to give some sort of show
or other. Elizabethan! Hm! Reading extracts from history, I suppose,
perhaps all dressed up, like a Dickens reading. It says something about
'correct costumes.' I wonder if Tim's cousin is to be in it. Look here,
Tim, when are you going to take us out to see that pretty cousin of
yours?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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