So Big by Edna Ferber (read books for money .txt) 📕

striking a noble attitude and saying, “Won’t stand for it, huh! She’s worth more than the whole caboodle of you put together. And you can all go to hell!”

Instead he said, vaguely, “Oh. Well. Uh⁠—”

Dirk changed his seat in the classroom, avoided Mattie’s eye, shot out of the door the minute class was over. One day he saw her coming toward him on the campus and he sensed that she intended to stop and speak to him⁠—chide him laughingly, perhaps. He quickened his pace, swerved a little to one side, and as he passed lifted his cap and nodded, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Out of the tail of his eye he could see her standing a moment irresolutely in the path.

He got into the fraternity. The fellahs liked him from the first. Selina said once or twice, “Why don’t you bring that nice Mattie home with you again some time soon? Such a nice girl⁠—woman, rather. But she seemed so young and carefree while she was here, didn’t she? A fine mind, too, that girl. She’ll make something of herself. You’ll see. Bring her next week, h’m?”

Dirk shuffled, coughed, looked away. “Oh, I dunno. Haven’t seen her lately. Guess she’s busy with another crowd, or something.”

He tried not to think of what he had done, for he was honestly ashamed. Terribly ashamed. So he said to himself, “Oh, what of it!” and hid his shame. A month later Selina again said, “I wish you’d invite Mattie for Thanksgiving dinner. Unless she’s going home, which I doubt. We’ll have turkey and pumpkin pie and all the rest of it. She’ll love it.”

“Mattie?” He had actually forgotten her name.

“Yes, of course. Isn’t that right? Mattie Schwengauer?”

“Oh, her. Uh⁠—well⁠—I haven’t been seeing her lately.”

“Oh, Dirk, you haven’t quarrelled with that nice girl!”

He decided to have it out. “Listen, Mother. There are a lot of different crowds at the U, see? And Mattie doesn’t belong to any of ’em. You wouldn’t understand, but it’s like this. She⁠—she’s smart and jolly and everything but she just doesn’t belong. Being friends with a girl like that doesn’t get you anywhere. Besides, she isn’t a girl. She’s a middle-aged woman, when you come to think of it.”

“Doesn’t get you anywhere!” Selina’s tone was cool and even. Then, as the boy’s gaze did not meet hers: “Why, Dirk DeJong, Mattie Schwengauer is one of my reasons for sending you to a university. She’s what I call part of a university education. Just talking to her is learning something valuable. I don’t mean that you wouldn’t naturally prefer pretty young girls of your own age to go around with, and all. It would be queer if you didn’t. But this Mattie⁠—why, she’s life. Do you remember that story of when she washed dishes in the kosher restaurant over on Twelfth Street and the proprietor used to rent out dishes and cutlery for Irish and Italian neighbourhood weddings where they had pork and goodness knows what all, and then use them next day in the restaurant again for the kosher customers?”

Yes, Dirk remembered. Selina wrote Mattie, inviting her to the farm for Thanksgiving, and Mattie answered gratefully, declining. “I shall always remember you,” she wrote in that letter, “with love.”

XIV

Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the book-lined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it. They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to give an informal talk to the men before some university event they would start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs⁠—” At the dances they were not above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.

Two of Dirk’s classes were conducted by women professors. They were well on toward middle age, or past it; desiccated women. Only their eyes were alive. Their clothes were of some indefinite dark stuff, brown or drab-gray; their hair lifeless; their hands long, bony, unvital. They had seen classes and classes and classes. A roomful of fresh young faces that appeared briefly only to be replaced by another roomful of fresh young faces like round white pencil marks manipulated momentarily on a slate, only to be sponged off to give way to other round white marks. Of the two women one⁠—the elder⁠—was occasionally likely to flare into sudden life; a flame in the ashes of a burned-out grate. She had humour and a certain caustic wit, qualities that had managed miraculously to survive even the deadly and numbing effects of thirty years in the classroom. A fine mind, and iconoclastic, hampered by the restrictions of a conventional community and the soul of a congenital spinster.

Under the guidance of these Dirk chafed and grew restless. Miss Euphemia Hollingswood had a way of emphasizing every third or fifth syllable, bringing her voice down hard on it, thus:

“In the consideration of all the facts in the case presented before us we must first review the history and attempt to analyze the outstanding⁠—”

He found himself waiting for that emphasis and shrinking from it as from a sledgehammer blow. It hurt his head.

Miss Lodge droned. She approached a word with a maddening uh-uh-uh-uh. In the uh-uh-uh face of the uh-uh-uh-uh geometrical situation of the uh-uh-uh uh⁠—

He shifted restlessly in his chair, found his hands clenched into fists, and took refuge in watching the shadow cast by an