Chapter 16 - Page 2

words again.

"The things he might do, the great things he might do. He is able, he
is dogged, he is strong. And then comes a pretty face! Oh God! _Why_
was I made with heart and brain?" She sprang to her feet, with her
hands clenched and her face contorted. But she shed no tears.

Her attitude fell limp in a moment. One hand dropped by her side, the
other rested on a fossil on the mantel-shelf, and she stared down into
the red fire.

"To think of all we might have done! It maddens me!

"To work, and think, and learn. To hope and wait. To despise the
petty arts of womanliness, to trust to the sanity of man....

"To awake like the foolish virgins," she said, "and find the hour of
life is past!"

Her face, her pose, softened into self-pity.

"Futility ...

"It's no good...." Her voice broke.

"I shall never be happy...."

She saw the grandiose vision of the future she had cherished suddenly
rolled aside and vanishing, more and more splendid as it grew more and
more remote--like a dream at the waking moment. The vision of her
inevitable loneliness came to replace it, clear and acute. She saw
herself alone and small in a huge desolation--infinitely pitiful,
Lewisham callously receding with "some shop girl." The tears came,
came faster, until they were streaming down her face. She turned as if
looking for something. She flung herself upon her knees before the
little arm-chair, and began an incoherent sobbing prayer for the pity
and comfort of God.

* * * * *

The next day one of the other girls in the biological course remarked
to her friend that "Heydinger-dingery" had relapsed. Her friend
glanced down the laboratory. "It's a bad relapse," she said. "Really
... I couldn't ... wear my hair like that."

She continued to regard Miss Heydinger with a critical eye. She was
free to do this because Miss Heydinger was standing, lost in thought,
staring at the December fog outside the laboratory windows. "She looks
white," said the girl who had originally spoken. "I wonder if she
works hard."

"It makes precious little difference if she does," said her friend. "I
asked her yesterday what were the bones in the parietal segment, and
she didn't know one. Not one."

The next day Miss Heydinger's place was vacant. She was ill--from
overstudy--and her illness lasted to within three weeks of the
terminal examination. Then she came back with a pallid face and a
strenuous unavailing