The student body strikingly resembled the staff. They were all torpid and bird-like by turns and their humor consisted in such expressions as “I see, said the blind man,” and “Well, laugh, I thought I’d die.” I ate my lunch at a drug-store with five or six of my classmates who discussed silk stockings and serials in the Ladies’ Home Journal. They could talk for three quarters of an hour, without any waning of interest, about the confections peculiar to the Boylston Street Schrafft’s. The intimacy of the group (they referred to one another’s sisters by their given names and inquired after mothers and fathers and aunts) made me suppose that they were old friends and had gone to school together and I felt, therefore, that my exclusion from their talk was not my own fault. I learned in time, however, that they had never met before the first day of classes at what they jokingly called “dear old Back Bay.” The discovery made me feel immature and when I could, I avoided these womanly lunch hours, not through snobbery, but through a sense of maladjustment.

I detested the business college, but at the same time it afforded me a contrast to the rest of my life without which I might have come to regard as habitual those things which gave me keen pleasure. I enjoyed the retreat I made each day from the gray plaster walls, the methodical accent of the typewriters, and Mrs. Hinkel’s dour face in which her acerbity was coagulated in a large, asymmetrical, nose. I went slowly through the Public Gardens at the hour of the exodus of the nursemaids who wheeled out the infant Cabots and the recalcitrant Chandlers. I crossed Charles Street and in traversing the asphalt boundary, entered dissimilar territory: the Common where orators and their satellites and their hecklers yelped and gestured with impotent passion. My own latchkey, fitted to the burnished lock of the white door, admitted me to the silent vestibule, in the dim light of which the mahogany tables, identical and facing one another, gleamed smoothly. Not a sound greeted me. As I pushed open the door to the empty drawing-room, I heard the crackling fire that had just been started. In another hour and a half, this room would be the scene of the comings and goings of Miss Pride’s callers whose voices were carried up the stairwell and into my room.