The University campus was a huge square of green, elm dotted, that was
bordered on one edge for a quarter of a mile by the lake. The other
three sides were enclosed by the college buildings, great Gothic piles
of gray stone, ivy grown, with swallow haunted eaves. One entered the
campus through wide archways, that framed from the street ravishing
views of lake and elm, with leisurely figures of seniors in cap and
gown in the foreground.
College life was not much unlike High School life for Lydia. She of
course missed the dormitory living which is what makes University
existence unique. The cottage was nearly three miles from the campus.
Lydia took a street-car every morning, leaving the house with her
father. She was very timid at first: suffered agony when called on to
recite: reached all her classes as early as possible and sat in a far
corner to escape notice. But gradually, among the six thousand
students she began to lose her self-consciousness and to feel that,
after all, she was only attending a larger High School.
It was curious, it seemed to her, in how short a time the real High
School dropped out of her life. Miss Towne and the cooking teacher who
had had so much to do with her adolescent development, became more or
less dreamlike. And though Lydia did try to call on Miss Towne at the
High School, her days were very full and little by little she slipped
away entirely from the old environment.
Except for flying visits home, John Levine spent the year at
Washington. He was returned to Congress practically automatically, at
the end of his term. Kent throve mightily as a real estate man. He
dashed about in a little "one lung" car with all the importance of
nineteen in business for the first time. He continued to call on Lydia
at irregular intervals in order to boast, she thought, of his real
estate acumen and of his correspondence with Margery and Olga, both of
whom were now at boarding-school.
Lydia was taking a general course in college. In a vague way, she was
planning to become a teacher and partly because she had no aptitude for
foreign languages, and partly because of the deep impression Miss
Towne's little lecture on slang had made on her, she decided to teach
English. She therefore took not only the required course in Freshman
Composition, but an elective in Shakespeare, and was herded with fifty
others into the classroom of a young instructor fresh from Harvard. He
was a frail looking young man, smooth shaven and thin, with large,
light brown eyes behind gold rimmed eyeglasses.
Lydia was deeply impressed from the very first by the young man's
culture. He could quote Latin and Greek quite as freely as he could
French and German and his ease in quoting the latter seemed as great as
in quoting Palgrave's Lyrics, which Lydia was sure he could quote from
cover to cover.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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