his laugh is very pleasant,” reflected Mrs. Pasmer. “Does Alice dislike it so much?” She repeated aloud, “If it can be prevented?”
“They think I might spoil a great lawyer in the attempt.”
“Oh, I see. And are you going to be a lawyer? But to be a great painter! And America has so few of them.” She knew quite well that she was talking nonsense, but she was aware, through her own indifference to the topic that he was not minding what she said, but was trying to bring himself into talk with Alice again. The girl persistently listened to Professor Saintsbury.
“Is she punishing him for something?” her mother asked herself. “What can it be for. Does she think he's a little too pushing? Perhaps, he is a little pushing.” She reflected, with an inward sigh, that she would know whether he was if she only knew more about him.
He did the honours of his room very simply and nicely, and he said it was pretty rough to think this was the last of it. After which he faltered, and something occurred to Mrs Saintsbury.
“Why, we're keeping you! It's time for you to dress for the Tree. John”—she reproached her husband—“how could you let us do it?”
“Far be it from me to hurry ladies out of other people's houses—especially ladies who have put themselves in charge of other people.”
“No, don't hurry,” pleaded Mavering; “there's plenty of time.”
“How much time?” asked Mrs. Saintsbury.
He looked at his watch. “Well, a good quarter of an hour.”
“And I was to have taken Mrs. Pasmer and Alice home for a little rest before the Tree!” cried Mrs Saintsbury. “And now we must go at once, or we shall get no sort of places.”
In the civil and satirical parley which followed, no one answered another, but young Mavering bore as full a part as the elder ladies, and only his father and Alice were silent: his guests got themselves out of his room. They met at the threshold a young fellow, short and dark and stout, in an old tennis suit. He fell back at sight of them, and took off his hat to Mrs. Saintsbury.
“Why, Mr. Boardman!”
“Don't be bashful, Boardman?” young Mavering called out. “Come in and show them how I shall look in five minutes.”
Mr. Boardman took his introductions with a sort of main-force self-possession, and then said, “You'll have to look it in less than five minutes now, Mavering. You're come for.”
“What? Are they ready?”
“We must fly,” panted Mrs. Saintsbury, without waiting for the answer, which was lost in the incoherencies of all sorts of au revoirs called after and called back.
VII.
“That is one thing,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, looking swiftly round to see that the elder Mavering was not within hearing, as she hurried ahead with Mrs. Pasmer, “that I can't stand in Dan Mavering. Why couldn't he have warned us that it was getting near the time? Why should he have gone on pretending that there was no hurry? It isn't insincerity exactly, but it isn't candour; no, it's uncandid. Oh, I suppose it's the artistic temperament—never coming straight to the point.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Pasmer eagerly.
“I'll tell you sometime.” She looked round and halted a little for Alice, who was walking detached and neglected by the preoccupation of the two elderly men. “I'm afraid you're tired,” she said to the girl.
“Oh no.”
“Of course not, on Class Day. But I hope we shall get seats. What weather!”
The sun had not been oppressive at any time during the day, though the crowded building had been close and warm, and now it lay like a painted light on the grass and paths over which they passed to the entrance of the grounds around the Tree. Holden Chapel, which enclosed the space on the right as they went in, shed back the sun from its brick-red flank, rising unrelieved in its venerable ugliness by any touch of the festive preparations; but to their left and diagonally across from them high stagings supported tiers of seats along the equally unlovely red bulks of Hollis and of Harvard. These seats, and the windows in the stories above them, were densely packed with people, mostly young girls dressed in a thousand enchanting shades and colours, and bonneted and hatted to the last effect of fashion. They were like vast terraces of flowers to the swift glance, and here and there some brilliant parasol, spread to catch the sun on the higher ranks, was like a flaunting poppy, rising to the light and lolling out above the blooms of lower stature. But the parasols were few, for the two halls flung wide curtains of shade over the greater part of the spectators, and across to the foot of the chapel, while a piece of the carpentry whose simplicity seems part of the Class Day tradition shut out the glare and the uninvited public, striving to penetrate the enclosure next the street. In front of this yellow pine wall; with its ranks of benches, stood the Class Day Tree, girded at ten or fifteen feet from the ground with a wide band of flowers.
Mrs. Pasmer and her friends found themselves so late that if some gentlemen who knew Professor Saintsbury had not given up their places they could have got no seats. But this happened, and the three ladies had harmoniously blended their hues with those of the others in that bank of bloom, and the gentlemen had somehow made away with their obstructiveness in different crouching and stooping postures at their feet, when the Junior Class filed into the green enclosure amidst the 'rahs of their friends; and sank in long ranks on the grass beside the chapel. Then the Sophomores appeared, and were received with cheers by the Juniors, with whom they joined, as soon as they were placed, in heaping ignominy upon the freshmen. The Seniors came last, grotesque in the variety of their old clothes, and a fierce uproar of 'rahs and yells met them from the students squatted upon the grass as they loosely grouped themselves in front of the Tree; the men of the younger classes formed in three rings, and began circling in different directions around them.
Mrs. Pasmer bent across Mrs. Saintsbury to her daughter: “Can you make out Mr. Mavering among them, Alice?”
“No. Hush, mamma!” pleaded the girl.
With the subsidence of the tumult in the other classes, the Seniors had broken from the stoical silence they kept through it, and were now with an equally serious clamour applauding the first of a long list of personages, beginning with the President, and ranging through their favourites in the Faculty down to Billy the Postman. The leader who invited them to this expression of good feeling exacted the full tale of nine cheers for each person he named, and before he reached the last the 'rahs came in gasps from their dry throats.
In the midst of the tumult the marshal flung his hat at the elm; then the rush upon the tree took place, and the scramble for the flowers. The first who swarmed up the trunk were promptly plucked down by the legs and flung upon the ground, as if to form a base there for the operations of the rest; who surged and built themselves up around the elm in an irregular mass. From time to time some one appeared clambering over heads and shoulders to make a desperate lunge and snatch at the flowers, and then fall back into the fluctuant heap again. Yells, cries, and clappings of hands came from the other students, and the spectators in the seats, involuntarily dying away almost to silence as some stronger or wilfuler aspirant held his own on the heads and shoulders of the others, or was stayed there by his friends among them till he could make sure of a handful of the flowers. A rush was made upon him when he reached the ground; if he could keep
