English drama -- 20th century; English fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, English
After a month of painful indecision, Dick, who was a real Englishman,
arrived at a satisfactory compromise. He started work on his new
Synthetic Philosophy, and at the same time joined the staff of the
_Weekly International_, to which he contributed both money and
articles. The weeks slipped pleasantly and profitably along. The
secret of happiness lies in congenial work, and no one could have
worked harder than Dick, unless it was the indefatigable Pearl
Bellairs, whose nightly output of five thousand words sufficed to
support not only Dick but the _Weekly International_ as well. These
months were perhaps the happiest period of Dick's life. He had
friends, money, liberty; he knew himself to be working well; and it
was an extra, a supererogatory happiness that he began at this time to
get on much better with his sister Millicent than he had ever done
before. Millicent had come up to Oxford as a student at St. Mungo Hall
in Dick's third year. She had grown into a very efficient and very
intelligent young woman. A particularly handsome young woman as well.
She was boyishly slender, and a natural grace kept on breaking through
the somewhat rigid deportment, which she always tried to impose upon
herself, in little beautiful gestures and movements that made the
onlooker catch his breath with astonished pleasure.
"Wincing she was as is a jolly colt,
Straight as a mast and upright as a bolt:"
Chaucer had as good an eye for youthful grace as for mormals and
bristly nostrils and thick red jovial villainousness.
Millicent lost no time in making her presence at St. Mungo's felt.
Second- and third-year heroines might snort at the forwardness of a
mere fresh-girl, might resent the complete absence of veneration for
their glory exhibited by this youthful bejauna; Millicent pursued her
course unmoved. She founded new societies and put fresh life into the
institutions which already existed at St. Mungo's to take cocoa and
discuss the problems of the universe. She played hockey like a
tornado, and she worked alarmingly hard. Decidedly, Millicent was a
Force, very soon the biggest Force in the St. Mungo world. In her
fifth term she organized the famous St. Mungo general strike, which
compelled the authorities to relax a few of the more intolerably
tyrannical and anachronistic rules restricting the liberty of the
students. It was she who went, on behalf of the strikers, to interview
the redoubtable Miss Prosser, Principal of St. Mungo's. The
redoubtable Miss Prosser looked grim and invited her to sit down,
Millicent sat down and, without quailing, delivered a short but
pointed speech attacking the fundamental principles of the St. Mungo
system of discipline.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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