My First Thirty Years by Gertrude Beasley

Author:Gertrude Beasley [Beasley, Gertrude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

September arrived and Brother Druery came in his buggy to take me to Simmons College. I was sure to have to answer embarrassing questions. They would ask about my father; and I would tell them he was dead; no, I wouldn’t; yes, I would. Perhaps the girls would make fun of me; maybe they would feel sorry for me; maybe they would all look upon me as belonging to the charity list. I dreaded it; it was like pulling teeth, to use my mother’s expression. I felt the scholarship would jeopardize me in some way; my mother’s doubts, when Druery had mentioned the subject first, had sunk in. If I recall correctly, I performed my old childish trick when the Bursar asked about my father; my father was not living; “not with my mother” I kept to myself. And how old was I; and what subjects did I wish to take; and where were my credentials. I went through the usual red tape and I believe bought most of the books I required the first day.

At that time (1908) there were no street cars in Abilene and the preacher made arrangements for me to go to school in the college hack which went about picking up children and young people who were furnished with no other means of transportation. The girls whom I remember most distinctly in this hack were Virginia Guitar, whose father was more than a millionaire, and Mary Paxton, oldest daughter of the president of the Citizens National Bank of Abilene. They were gay and full of chatter and wore pretty clothes; besides they had everything one required in the way of book cases and lunch baskets. Mary and I were in one or two of the same classes and sometimes we talked about the lessons; we may even have exchanged answers in Algebra or talked about theorems in geometry. But what interested me was their chatter; they rarely chatted and joked with me, but with one another they were like so many magpies. Their tongues would go, as my mother often described us when we talked too much or too rapidly, “like the clatter bone of a goose’s ass (arse)”; and the stream of conversation was just what one would expect. Flirtations, sweet-hearting, small talk, make-believing; who was elegant, who was clever; Prof. Mullins was the most polite gentleman they had ever known; Virginia remarked every facial expression and every gesture of his hands. This girl wore a necklace of real diamonds. She acted as though it didn’t trouble her at all. Mary wore two small glittering stones in rings.

They were both studying French and sometimes tried to speak to one another in this curious language. The teacher was a French woman who scarcely spoke English; but she knew German and Spanish. I should have liked to enter one of the modern language classes, but Latin was required in the academy (as the high school course attached to this school was called) and I had to

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