Miss Bishop by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Author:Bess Streeter Aldrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Reading Essentials
Published: 1933-10-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXIV

School went on. Classes met and recited. Students passed and flunked. The blackbirds shrilled their “tchack-tchack” in the big trees. The reading circle members came together and listened to John Stevens’ attractive interpretations of the modern writers. Ella had her fortieth birthday. Everything was just as it had been, everything but one. Ella Bishop had found a certain peace of soul in the situation.

If John Stevens had been free, she would have given up everything for him. John Stevens was not free. Therefore, she could not continue to think of him in any way but as a friend and coworker. Q.E.D. To Ella Bishop’s uncomplicated code of life the problem was as simple as that.

“That’s one thing about me,” she said to the image in the mirror on that anniversary of her fourth decade. “I can always get the better of my emotions in time. I may fight windmills, but after awhile I have them too scared even to turn in the wind.”

She stared for a moment at the face in the glass, admitting with accustomed candor that she did not look the years with her well-kept skin, her dark hair, deep blue eyes with humorous crinkles at their outer edges, red-lipped, generous mouth. For some little time she looked at the woman in the mirror who stared unabashedly back. “Forty,” she said aloud to herself. “Well,” she shrugged her shoulder and grinned to the apparition who grinned cheerfully back, “abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

It was noised about on the campus in the spring that Professor Stevens was leaving. Ella heard it first from Miss Hunter of the training school. For a moment the solidity of the trees and bushes and the green sloping lawn seemed wavering in a liquid mist. The college without John Stevens dropping into her classroom, without his springy boyish step down the corridors, without his voice at the reading circle—! All the weeks without John Stevens! Beyond the day of his going lay the bleakness of nothing,—all the to-morrows would be gray. Then she was herself,—calm, poised, unshaken by the news. It was better so. No more watching herself for any betrayal of her feelings. Life would be easier and more simple.

Just before Commencement he came into her office in the tower room to say good-by.

She was bending over a low drawer of supplies when, startled, she grew aware that some one was behind her. She stood up hurriedly and for a long moment they stood facing each other. Then he put out his hand.

“Everything to make you happy and successful,” he was making an attempt at gayety.

“Thank you. And to you.”

He held her hand a moment, looked at it as though not quite sure of its identity, dropped it and walked out of the office.

The bell overhead tapped and the pigeons with a great whirl of wings brushed past her window.

She was standing just as she had been, when suddenly he stepped back in. His face was drawn and he was biting nervously at his lip.

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