The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton

returning a serve, running, running to the net.
    It was the first major crisis in Jane’s life. No doubt she had been occasionally deprived of something she wanted very much to do, usually something that involved risk of one sort or another. But this attacked her inmost self, and seemed an invasion of her very being. It was so unlike Mamma, warm, loving Mamma, who often persuaded her husband to give her daughters a free rein, but when Jane had tried to argue her mother said, “The subject is closed,” and left the room.
    There were torrents of tears and many a night her pillow was soaked after Alix was safely asleep. Even Snooker was hard put to say anything comforting. This was a matter of honor and she could not take Jane’s side against her mother.
    â€œIt’s the price you pay for being who you are,” she said.
    â€œAnd who is that?” Jane cried out. “I’m not a criminal!”
    â€œYou are a beautiful young woman whom many a young man is going to want to marry, and …” here Snooker hesitated, but Jane might as well face reality while they were at it, “you will inherit considerable wealth someday.”
    â€œWhat’s money if it makes you miserable and cuts you off from your best friend?”
    â€œIt seems hard, I know, dearie, but you’ll get over it in time.”
    â€œI’ll never get over it,” Jane said quietly. “It’s rocked my faith in everything.”
    As far as anyone could see, she did get over it in time, but what they could not know was that when the tears stopped flowing—no one cries forever—a determination was forming to do things her own way as far as that was possible, And the first visible sign of this new firmness and will was Jane’s decision to go to Vassar. Who had ever heard of a Reid or Trueblood female not going to the Annex, Radcliffe College as it would soon become? Edith was there, doing brilliantly, and it had been taken for granted that Jane would live at home, and see young men, the brothers and friends of her schoolmates in the normal social life of Cambridge.
    James Reid was violently opposed to her wish. The first time Jane spoke of Vassar he had flung his napkin down and left the room, a gesture of such unusual violence that it silenced the whole family. Jane had blushed to the roots of her hair, but held her head erect. And perhaps because Allegra had minded dismissing Maurice more than she let on, she decided there and then to back Jane. That night in bed she and James had a long talk about it. And she was able to persuade him that real harm could be done if Jane ceased to trust her parents to be fair. “In time she will understand about Maurice … but she won’t understand if we force her in the matter of her education. And, truly, James, there is something to be said for leaving home to go to college. She will make friends on her own, people from other parts of the country.”
    â€œPeople from other parts of the country, as you put it, come to Harvard and Radcliffe … after all, I, her father, did so, and you didn’t meet me, my dear, by going to Vassar!” But the tone had changed and now they were laughing. Allegra knew it was going to be all right.
    Vassar did seem very far away compared, for instance, to Smith, Wellesley, or Mount Holyoke … but Jane was adamant, and when she told her parents that two of her class at school were entering Vassar, they felt reassured.
    There would be one more summer at the island before, as Martha put it, “everything starts breaking apart.” She had been thinking of the family, but what she could not know and none of them could know was that the guns of August would precipitate a world war that would radically change the safe, hopeful ethos of their childhood forever. For this was 1914.
    I have chosen to dwell on Maurice and that friendship at some length because, as I think over Jane’s life, it seems