Nevertheless, despite what he was pleased to call his inspiration, he won his assistant professorship at an earlier age than the average, and we were married on fifteen hundred a year.

Oh, what a happy year!  I am bound to say the family were very nice about it.  Everyone was nice about it.  And when we came back from our wedding journey the other professors’ wives overwhelmed me with kindness and with calls—­and with teas and dinners and receptions in our honor.  Carl had been a very popular bachelor and his friends were pleased to treat me quite as if I were worthy of him.  This was generous, but disquieting.  I was afraid they would soon see through me and pity poor Carl.

I had supposed, like most outsiders, that the women of a university town would be dreadfully intellectual and modern—­and I was rather in awe of them at first, being aware of my own magnificent limitations; but, for the most part, these charming new friends of mine, especially the wealthier members of the set I was thrown with, seemed guilelessly ignorant in respect of the interesting period of civilization in which they happened to live—­almost as ignorant as I was and as most “nice people” are everywhere.

Books sufficiently old, art sufficiently classic, views sufficiently venerable to be respectable—­these interested them, as did foreign travel and modern languages; but ideas that were modern could not be nice because they were new, though they might be nice in time—­after they became stale.  College culture, I soon discovered, does not care about what is happening to the world, but what used to happen to it.

“You see, my dear,” Carl explained, with that quiet, casual manner so puzzling to pious devotees of “cultureine”—­and even to me at first, though I adored and soon adopted it! “—­universities don’t lead thought—­they follow it.  In Europe institutions of learning may be—­indeed, they frequently are—­hotbeds of radicalism; in America our colleges are merely featherbeds for conservatism to die in respectably.”  Then he added:  “But what could you expect?  You see, we are still intellectually nouveaux over here, and therefore self-consciously correct and imitative, like the nouveaux riches.  So long as you have a broad a you need never worry about a narrow mind.”

As for the men, I had pictured the privilege of sitting at their feet and learning many interesting things about the universe.  Perhaps they were too tired to have their feet encumbered by ignorant young women; for when I ventured to ask questions about their subject their answer was—­not always—­but in so many cases a solemn owllike “yes-and-no” that I soon learned my place.  They did not expect or want a woman to know anything and preferred light banter and persiflage.  I like that, too, when it is well done; but I was accustomed to men who did it better.

I preferred the society of their wives.  I do not expect any member of the complacent sex to believe this statement—­unless I add that the men did not fancy my society, which would not be strictly true; but, even if not so intellectual as I had feared, the women of our town were far more charming than I had hoped, and when you cannot have both cleverness and kindness the latter makes a more agreeable atmosphere for a permanent home.  I still consider them the loveliest women in the world.