The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
CATHERINE’S INSPIRATION

“Alma Mater, Dexter darling, do re mi–O dear! It’s much harder to write than I supposed. I wonder why! When your heart is full of love, why should it be hard to express it?”

Catherine Smith, sitting on the top step of the porch of her home, Three Gables, bent her red-gold head over the pad of paper on her knee and wrote painfully, her forehead puckered earnestly. She had been a year at college and was just beginning her summer vacation. All through the busy year, full of delightful new experiences, she had looked forward to the leisure of summer, in which she might adequately declare her devotion to the college which had been her mother’s and was now her own. From the day, the June before, when she had gone there to visit her friend, Hannah Eldred, she had felt a keen sense of “belonging,” especially pleasant because her frail health had compelled her to lead a somewhat secluded life at home, and she had not felt really acquainted with the young people in the little town of Winsted, where she had always lived.

Now all that was changing. At college she had been forced to conquer her shyness, and, to her delight, she soon found that the boys and girls at home were more than glad to receive her into their circle upon equal terms. Her physician parents were everybody’s friends, and Catherine, who adored her father and mother, was eager to show herself worthy to be their daughter. In order to do so, she reasoned, she must be of real service to the town and to her college. The only way she had thought of so far was to write an Alma Mater song, expressive not only of the rapturous loyalty of undergraduates, but of the graver love of alumnæ like her mother.

“It is very hard,” she sighed. “It must be stately and yet not heavy. O me! And here comes Algernon.”

With a resigned air she folded her scribbled papers and thrust her pencil into the coil of red braids encircling her head. Algernon Swinburne, ever since his foolish mother had christened him for the poet, had, by turns, amused and wearied his fellow-citizens. While Catherine had lived apart, she had been spared his lengthy visits, but with the pleasures of social life had come its penalties and she was now on Algernon’s list and obliged to spend frequent hours in his really trying society. He came up the long walk now with a curious springing gait, and Catherine tried to summon a hospitable smile to her lips.

Algernon refused a chair. He always appeared to be just going, “and yet,” as Polly Osgood said with a groan, “he almost never goes!” He perched uncomfortably upon the railing and opened fire at once.

“Have you seen the last North American Review?”

Catherine confessed that she had not.

“There was a corking article in it on municipal corruption, comparing San Francisco, New York and Pittsburg as to graft, police efficiency and so on. They say Pittsburg spends two million dollars a year–”

“My upper legs is going barefoot.”

Catherine lifted her eyes with a flash of pleasure. Elsmere Swinburne was the occasional relief from his big brother’s monotony. Catherine loved little folk, and though Elsmere was known to be a rascal who would have tried the patience of Job, she somehow always found forgiveness for his enormities, and a delighted appreciation for his funny sayings. Just now he stood proudly before her, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed upon his fashionably clad little legs, with bruised brown knees showing above new half-hose.

“My mamma buyed ’em for me. Her buys me everything.”

Catherine smiled, but shook her head a little. Mrs. Swinburne was a source of grief to all her neighbors, because of her persistent refusal to allow Algernon the chance at college that he desired, and even more because of her unwise indulgence of her younger son’s lightest wishes.

Algernon cleared his throat and took up the thread of his narrative. “Pittsburg, this fellow Chapman in the Review says, spends two million dollars a year on–”

“Talking, talking, all the time Algy talking,” Elsmere broke in....