Chapter 20: Juniors

To follow all the happenings in the college course would take more time than may well be given now. The beginning of the Junior year found Julia and her friends all so accustomed to college life that they could hardly imagine themselves existing without a well-planned scheme of work. As Juniors, they were more constantly deferred to by the girls in the two lower classes, and they could not but realize that they were near the Senior class, and that at the end of another year they would be almost at the end of their college course. Many new girls wandered about the halls of Fay House, and among them Julia was delighted to have Nora included, for Ruth and Julia had not fully made up their misunderstanding of the spring. If they had spent the summer together, things might have been different. But they had been separated for a longer time than ever before since their friendship began; and while neither reproached the other, both realized the coolness between them.

Nora was only a Special student, and she always referred to her studies in rather humble tones. But she worked zealously, and confided to Julia that she might possibly enter the regular course, and end by studying medicine, if her parents would only consent. But Julia, though she did not doubt Nora’s sincerity, still realized that there were many things that might prevent her carrying out these rather impossible plans.

Polly, in sombre black and somewhat quieter in manner, was still Polly, and she and Clarissa were constantly together. With Julia and Lois she was always cordial, and she still continued to tease Pamela whenever the occasion presented. But at sight of Ruth her flow of words always ceased. It was plain that she found it very hard to forgive.

This year Annabel and Ruth were a little less intimate than formerly. Yet this did not bring Julia and Ruth any nearer. They still roomed together, still went back and forth to Fay House together. Those who knew them best did not realize that anything had come between them. But they themselves, while realizing the change, would not touch on the subject that lay so near their hearts. The spot on the apple, the rift in the lute, of these and many other similes Julia often thought, but she would not take the first step to mend the breach. She waited for Ruth’s explanation, and Ruth waited for Julia’s apology, and each day the two moved farther away from each other.

As to Polly, in some way she and Ruth contrived never to meet face to face, a feat not impossible, since they happened to have none of the same courses, and since Polly’s mourning for her father kept her from taking an active part in the social life of the college.

There were various changes in the grouping of those girls who had been most together in their first two years.

Pamela alone, among those whom we have known the best, went on her way undisturbed. She had not been present at the little outbreak at the close of the operetta. In a general way she knew that there had been trouble, but she had asked no questions about it. In any case, she would have been sure that Julia was entirely right. Her summer, spent as before in tutoring, had helped greatly to free her from care. The scholarship, again awarded to her, the two Boston boys whom she was to tutor twice a week in Greek, had made her third year at Radcliffe a certainty. She continued to live at Miss Batson’s; and although her duties were lighter and she had a room to herself, the good boarding-house keeper declined the weekly payment that Pamela conscientiously offered.

“If you had a room twice as big as that little attic, and on the first floor front, it would just be a comfort to have you here, without your paying a cent. All my young ladies say they have just been getting culture ever since you came here, and that’s worth more than money to all of us.”

So Pamela felt herself to be almost rich, as she gathered her treasures about her in the little French-roofed chamber. Chief among them was a Tanagra figurine, a replica of the lady with the hat that Julia had insisted on her accepting the year before. On the shelf below were her Dante books, and near them some of her father’s Greek books, as well as those that she used in her own classes.