Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 -- Childhood and youth
Perhaps I sacrifice myself in vain by my effort to impart the sense of
that past which faded so long ago; perhaps some readers will hold me
cheap for the fondness which recurs to it and lingers in it. But I
believe that I prize its memories because they seem so full of honor and
worship for the girlhood and womanhood which consecrate it in my
remembrance. Within this gross world of ours as it now is, women are
still so conditioned that they can lead the life of another and a better
world, and if they shall ever come to take their rightful share of the
government of the world as men have made it I believe they will bring
that other and better world of theirs with them and indefinitely
advance the millennium. I have the feeling of something like treason to
the men I knew in that time, when I own that I preferred the society of
women to theirs, but I console myself with the reflection that they
would probably have said the same as to mine. Our companionship could
hardly have chosen itself more to my liking. It was mainly of law
students, but there was here and there one engaged in business, who was
of a like joking and laughing with the rest. We lived together in a
picturesque edifice, Gothic and Tudor, which had been meant for a
medical college, and had begun so, and then from some financial
infirmity lapsed to a boarding-house for such young men as I knew,
though we were not without the presence of a young married pair, now and
then, and even a young lady, a teacher or the like, who made us welcome
when we ended a round of evening calls outside by calling on them from
room to room. In my boyhood days at Columbus I was sometimes hustled off
the sidewalk by the medical students coming from the College, then in
its first prosperity, and taking up the whole pavement as they swept
forward with interlinked arms. This was at noontime, when they were
scarcely less formidable than the specters which after dark swarmed from
the dissecting-room, and challenged the boy to a trial of speed in
escaping them. Now the students had long been gone from the College and
I dwelt in its precincts with such other favorites of fortune as could
afford to pay three dollars and a half a week for their board. The table
was even super-abundant, and the lodging was almost flatteringly
comfortable after experience of other places. I can only conjecture that
the rooms we inhabited had been meant for the students or professors
when the College was still a medical college. They were large, and to my
untutored eye, at least, were handsome, and romantically lighted by
windows of that blend of Tudor and Gothic which I have mentioned, but
their architecture showed more on the outside than on the inside, and of
course the pinnacles and towers of the edifice were more accessible to
the eye without. It was the distinction of people who wished to be known
for a correct taste to laugh at the architecture of the College, and
perhaps they do so still, but I was never of these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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