THE WIDE AWAKE GIRLS IN WINSTED

3CHAPTER 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 4 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. 5 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.”

6Catherine 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. “I want to talk. Tell Caffrin ’bout my cat-pussy. Her awful sick. Her–”

Catherine sprang up. Elsmere’s conversation often needed to be suppressed.

“Let’s play tennis. Algernon, will you get the balls and rackets? You know where they are,–just inside the hall there. And Elsmere may run after balls for us. He can, so nicely!”

Algernon obeyed the unexpected request patiently, and when he was gone, Catherine averted her face for the space of a minute. What she had hoped for came to pass, and when Algernon returned, his small brother had quietly vanished. “The older one may be monotonous, but the younger one is positively dangerous,” Catherine thought to herself, as she took the balls from Algernon, saying:

“Let’s not play, after all. It’s so very warm 7 and Elsmere thought he didn’t want to run after balls. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why, no, I wasn’t keen about playing,” and Algernon, unconscious of the maneuver he had helped to execute, dropped back upon the railing and continued his résumé of the North American article.

Catherine, meanwhile, having slipped the balls one by one into the pocket of her steamer chair, rested her long white hands upon the chair arms and sat quietly, hearing nothing of Mr. Chapman’s statistics, her brown eyes dreamily fixed upon the sloping lawn, but seeing instead the Dexter campus, across which girls were moving, as she loved best to see them, in pretty light gowns on the way to evening chapel. Among them all her thought rested most lovingly upon a little girl with a plain face and big round glasses. “You dear old Alice!” she murmured, almost aloud, and roused herself guiltily to hear Algernon saying:

“There are a lot of wide-awake men in Pittsburg.”

“Wide-awake girls in Winsted!”

This time Catherine really did speak aloud, and Algernon looked up in surprised inquiry.

“I beg your pardon,” she said contritely. “It was very rude of me, but you set me off, yourself. The Wide Awake Girls are really going to be in Winsted this summer. Don’t you know about them?” as Algernon still looked puzzled.

8“Why, no. All the Winsted girls seem wide-awake enough, I should say.”

“But I’m the only one who has a right to be called so in capital letters. I’ll tell you all about it, but it has been such an important part of my life for the last year and more, that I forget every one who knows me doesn’t know about it all.

“You see, about two years ago, when I was fifteen and Hannah Eldred, who lives in Massachusetts, was not quite fourteen, she wrote a letter to Wide-Awake, the magazine, you know, asking for correspondents. And I answered it. Several other girls did, too. One was Alice Prescott, who lives out in Washington, and another was Frieda Lange, of Berlin, whose mother had known Mrs. Eldred in Germany years ago. Hannah kept on writing to the three of us, and before the end of the year she had met us all and really lived with each of us in turn. It doesn’t sound probable, but it came about naturally enough. The Eldreds went to Berlin for a few months and boarded at the Langes’. Then Mrs. Eldred’s mother was taken ill, and they had to come back to this country. The grandmother lived over here at Delmar, and Father was called in consultation and brought Hannah back to stay with me a