The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton Page A

clear to me that it was of great importance in her growth as a human being, and perhaps the enforced parting set her on a course she would follow to the end of her life.
    After the year of silence, Jane and Maurice did see each other again. Nothing changed their ability to meet and talk about everything, and when he volunteered for the ambulance corps and went to France he wrote Jane at Vassar long, confidential letters. She was one of the bridesmaids at his wedding, and godmother to his first child, a daughter named for her.
    It is odd that, on the whole, novelists speak little of friendship between opposite sexes, and especially these days, when sexual encounters dominate everything else in most fictional characters. I am writing about a woman who had a genius for friendship with both sexes, and touched deeply an enormous number and variety of lives. Could she have done so to the same extent, and at the same depth, had she married? I think not. It is one of the questions I hope to be able to probe as I pursue my quarry.
    I now come to a block, for although Jane always glowed with happiness whenever she talked of Vassar, we had so much else to talk about when I knew her as a grown-up person myself that only rarely did I glean some facts about that seminal time in her life. But one thing is certain. She met at Vassar a young woman, Lucy Goodspeed, who was to be woven into the rest of her life as her most intimate friend. Jane’s nickname at Vassar was Reedy, possibly a reference to her height, or simply a diminutive of her family name, but whenever I was with her and someone called her Reedy, I knew that person had been a classmate at Vassar.
    When one saw Lucy and Jane together it was clear that Lucy had the greatest respect for her friend, that although she was herself head of a girls’ school, she deferred to Reedy out of love and something like honor. She honored Jane, and was able to prove it in singular ways. For instance, for years she went over Jane’s accounts (shades of dismal math days at school), which were apt to be in some confusion. Lucy was dark, with deepest brown eyes and a rather dark skin, and reminded me of a bird, a shy bird. My guess is that at Vassar she had entered Jane’s orbit as one of a group who gravitated toward that immense vitality and sense of adventure, for Jane was an imaginer of every sort of fun, an instigator of every sort of adventure, from picnics by the lake to plays. I have hesitated to use the tarnished word “glamour,” but there is no doubt that Jane Reid had it and that women as well as men were entranced by those extraordinary eyes, that women as well as men wanted to ally themselves with her in one way or another.
    But then Jane herself had an instinct for devotion, an intense need to follow as well as to lead. She could be swept off her feet, and at Vassar she was, by a young instructor in the English department, Miss Frances Thompson. Miss Thompson was very tall, very thin, quite plain, but she was a great teacher who could tease her students, only a few years younger than she, as well as inspire them, and she had a contagious passion for education. Also she opened doors for Jane into a new world, for Miss Thompson came from Chicago and her father was the well-known head of a settlement house there. She had been brought up among the poor with a burning sense of the injustices done to immigrants, and the need to help was bred into her bones. She brushed away Jane’s somewhat Victorian ideas of poetry by reciting Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” its terse, vigorous language and its celebration not of the beautiful but of the tough and harsh. This is what Jane had been looking for when she decided to go to Vassar. Not the genteel world in which she had been brought up, but the real world, or what she thought of as “real.” In the course of two years under Miss Thompson she came to the decision that teaching was what she wanted to