The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton

to know how much it was—money had become very interesting lately, because my mother and I did not have much to live on. “It has been a pleasure to have Benjamin Trueblood’s granddaughter with us, Miss Reid,” the manager said. It dawned on me that Jane Reid might be called an American aristocrat. And I was proud to be with her. But it took many years before I knew what that meant in her case, how true it was, but not exactly in the way I envisioned such a person at fourteen.
    As I was then, to be an aristocrat meant being beautiful and grand and having money, lots of it, and a blue convertible Dodge that made her seem like a princess. I figured out that the bill at the inn must have been about forty times what my allowance of a dollar a week amounted to. Whew!
    Leaving Warren and going into the High and Latin school as sophomores added to our sense of being strangers from another planet. The freshmen had already made alliances, chosen clubs and sports, when we entered the following year, and we were really a little like addicts deprived of our drug, suffering withdrawal symptoms. If Warren had a flaw it was to be a world so exciting in its demands and rewards and so rare in its human quality that all of us who graduated from there felt—it sounds absurd but it is a fact—a little like exiles for the rest of our lives. Of course this was poignant for me because of my parents’ divorce. Tommy, with whom I could have talked about that, had disappeared to Exeter. Of my best friends only Anne had gone on with me to the Cambridge High and Latin. In a way I suppose that first year there was a year of mourning.
    It can’t have been easy for Jane Reid, our lodestar, to manage an occasional visit as she did, although that year she was beginning the ordeal of arranging her grandfather’s papers at the Trueblood House, and this, on top of her teaching, really devoured her life. My mother was quite firm with me at that time not to “run in” and try to see Jane at home. But when her father died I wrote her a letter and got one back in her clear, handsome writing, and it was an event because I felt I was being treated as a friend rather than a pupil: “It was good of you, dear Cam, to find time to write to me. The loss of one’s father seems at the time like the worst thing that can ever happen. The house without Pappa feels terribly empty. For Mamma his sudden death has been a shock she was not prepared for, but she is her usual valiant and serene self. You must come and cheer us up.”
    Of course I did, the very next Sunday afternoon, and we went for a walk along the Charles on a cold November day. It was tremendously exciting for me because I realized that I had very rarely been alone with Jane, and never before, perhaps, had a real conversation in which I was treated as an equal. It would not be the last time that we argued about politics. Hoover had just been nominated by the Republicans and Jane Reid felt that he would make a good president because of the tremendous job he had done organizing war relief in 1919. I was passionately for Smith, “the happy warrior,” even though he was a Catholic and I heard on all sides that he would be influenced by church dogma and not be able to act as a free man. I felt he was flexible and imaginative, and cared more for people. “Hoover cares about people—he has proved it.” Jane Reid flushed as she said it, a little angry, I could sense.
    â€œBut Hoover is for big business, you can tell.”
    â€œSmith is for ending Prohibition,” she answered hotly. Then we laughed, and I slipped an arm through hers as we trudged along. It was a great moment.
    â€œI suppose you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican,” I teased, intoxicated by the subtle change in our relationship.
    Then she became serious, and we stopped for a moment before turning back, stopped and looked at some rather miserable ducks at the frozen