Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The SearchlightHolt, Mathew Joseph
General
Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight
Holt, Mathew Joseph
Fiction
When the train pulled up, her cheap, little trunk was put in the baggage
car and she, with a paper shoe box of lunch under her arm and a cheap
handbag in the other hand, boarded the train and took a seat in the day
coach, where she would have remained, except that the agent, seeing her
talking through the window with her mother, pointed her out to the
conductor as a Pullman passenger. After the train started, the conductor
piloted her to her section and, as he went out, whispered to the car
conductor to shoo off the drummers.
In New York the station matron put her aboard her train and sent a
telegram to the college, asking that some one meet her, which Mary
signed and paid for.
She was unable to qualify for the freshman course, but was permitted to
enter on probation. Her natural ability and application were such that
in a few months she had qualified herself to continue in the class and
at the end of the spring term was ranked among the most proficient of
the freshmen.
Upon her arrival she had been given a room with a little snob, the only
child of a newly rich couple who lived in a suburb of Boston. Her
roommate did everything she could to make Mary as miserable as possible.
She made fun of her clothes, ridiculed her local idioms and expressions
and laughed at her inexperience. She would not study and tried to keep
Mary from doing so. She rolled on Mary's bed, keeping her own tidy;
appropriated three-fourths of the closet and most of the drawers of the
dresser and washstand, leaving for Mary the bottom drawer of each and
closet hooks in the dark corner. She reported to the matron that Mary
was not neat and quarrelled all the time. But the matron, wise to the
girls of her day and generation, had her suspicions, and by a careful
and unsuspected surveillance soon became cognizant of true conditions.
Mary was changed to share the room of a girl from Austin, Miss Litton,
whose disposition was more like her own. From then on conditions became
comfortable.
After Dorothy returned home, Cornwall's friends said he was hard hit,
because he turned his back on social diversions. He merely reverted to
his habits preceding her visit. For a while he was invited everywhere,
but declined; finally they discontinued sending invitations and left him
to his hermithood.
His sole recreation was the improvement of the old place, at which he
spent all the time not given up to his law business. That grew steadily,
so that in 1900, six years after he had established himself in Harlan,
he had an income in excess of $5,000.00. This, with his mother's annuity
of $1,800.00, gave them more than three thousand dollars a year in
excess of their actual needs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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