Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
It wasn't, apparently, an effect she tried for. He had to acquit her of
that. Not even, perhaps, one that she was conscious of. When she came
early to one of his lectures--it didn't happen often--the men, showed a
practical unanimity in trying to choose seats near by, or at least where
they could see her. But while this didn't distress her at all--they were
welcome to look if they liked--she struck no attitudes for their
benefit. A sort of breezy indifference--he selected that phrase finally
as the best description of her attitude toward all of them, including
himself. When she was late, as she usually was, she slid
unostentatiously into the back row--if possible at the end where she
could look out the window. But for three minutes after she had come in,
he knew he might as well have stopped his lecture and begun reciting the
Greek alphabet. She was, in the professor's mind, the final argument
against coeducation. Her name was Rosalind Stanton, but his impression
was that they called her Rose.
The bell rang out in the corridor. He dismissed the class and began
stacking up his notes. Then:
"Miss Stanton," he said.
She detached herself from the stream that was moving toward the door,
and with a good-humored look of inquiry about her very expressive
eyebrows, came toward him. And then he wished he hadn't called her. She
had spoiled his lecture--a perfectly good lecture--and his impulse had
been to remonstrate with her. But the moment he saw her coming, he knew
he wasn't going to be able to do it. It wasn't her fault that her teeth
had hypnotized him, and her hair tangled his ideas.
"This is an idiotic question," he said, as she paused before his desk,
"but did you get anything at all out of my lecture except my bit of
facetious advice to young girls about to marry?"
She flushed a little (a girl like that hadn't any right to flush; it
ought to be against the college regulations), drew her brows together in
a puzzled sort of way, and then, with her wide, boyish, good-humored
mouth, she smiled.
"I didn't know it was facetious," she said. "It struck me as pretty
good. But--I'm awfully sorry if you thought me inattentive. You see,
mother brought us all up on the Social Contract and The Age of Reason,
things like that, and I didn't put it down because ..."
"I see," he said. "I beg your pardon."
She smiled, cheerfully begged his and assured him she'd try to do
better.
Another girl who'd been waiting to speak to the professor, perceiving
that their conversation was at an end, came and stood beside her at the
desk--a scrawny girl with an eager voice, and a question she wanted to
ask about Robespierre; and for some reason or other, Rosalind Stanton's
valedictory smile seemed to include a consciousness of this other
girl--a consciousness of a contrast. It might not have been any more
than that, but somehow, it left the professor feeling that he had given
himself away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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