by Stephen Crane
MARJORY walked pensively along the hall. In the coolshadows made by the palms on the window ledge, her facewore the expression of thoughtful melancholy expected on thefaces of the devotees who pace in cloistered gloom. She haltedbefore a door at the end of the hall and laid her hand on theknob. She stood hesitating, her head bowed. It was evidentthat this mission was to require great fortitude.
At last she opened the door. " Father," she began at once.There was disclosed an elderly, narrow-faced man seated at alarge table and surrounded by manuscripts and books. Thesunlight flowing through curtains of Turkey red fell sanguinelyupon the bust of dead-eyed Pericles on the mantle. A littleclock was ticking, hidden somewhere among the countlessleaves of writing, the maps and broad heavy tomes thatswarmed upon the table.
Her father looked up quickly with an ogreish scowl.
Go away! " he cried in a rage. " Go away. Go away. Get out "" He seemed on the point of arising to eject the visitor. It wasplain to her that he had been interrupted in the writing of oneof his sentences, ponderous, solemn and endless, in which wanderedmultitudes of homeless and friendless prepositions, adjectiveslooking for a parent, and quarrelling nouns, sentences which nolonger symbolised the languageform of thought but which had aboutthem a quaint aroma from the dens of long-dead scholars. " Get out,"snarled the professor.
Father," faltered the girl. Either because his formulatedthought was now completely knocked out of his mind by hisown emphasis in defending it, or because he detectedsomething of portent in her expression, his manner suddenlychanged, and with a petulant glance at his writing he laid downhis pen and sank back in his chair to listen. " Well, what is it,my child ? "
The girl took a chair near the window and gazed out uponthe snow-stricken campus, where at the moment a group ofstudents returning from a class room were festively hurlingsnow-balls. " I've got something important to tell you, father,"said she,but i don't quite know how to say it."
"Something important ? " repeated the professor. He wasnot habitually interested in the affairs of his family, but thisproclamation that something important could be connectedwith them, filled his mind with a capricious interest. "Well,what is it, Marjory ? "
She replied calmly: " Rufus Coleman wants to marry me."
"What?" demanded the professor loudly. "Rufus Coleman.
What do you mean? "
The girl glanced furtively at him. She did not seem to be ableto frame a suitable sentence.
As for the professor, he had, like all men both thoughtlessand thoughtful, told himself that one day his daughter wouldcome to him with a tale of this kind. He had never forgotten thatthe little girl was to be a woman, and he had never forgottenthat this tall, lithe creature, the present Marjory, was a woman.He had been entranced and confident or entranced andapprehensive according' to the time. A man focussed uponastronomy, the pig market or social progression, maynevertheless have a secondary mind which hovers like a spiritover his dahlia tubers and dreams upon the mystery of theirslow and tender revelations. The professor's secondary mindhad dwelt always with his daughter and watched with a faithand delight the changing to a woman of a certain fat andmumbling babe. However, he now saw this machine, this self-sustaining, self-operative love, which had run with the ease of aclock, suddenly crumble to ashes and le