“I’m dreadfully sorry, sir. The young lady will simply not be moved. Shall I call someone?” The secretary’s clipped gray voice betrayed not the slightest sense of Violet as a fellow female, as a fellow human being, as anything other than an obstacle to be removed from Dr. Grant’s eminent path.
Violet was used to this. She was used to the look of aggravation on Dr. Grant’s face. She was used to rooms like this, the smell of wooden furniture and ancient air, the acrid hint of chemicals in some distant laboratory, the clickety-click of someone’s typewriter interrupting the scholarly quiet. She tilted up her chin and held out her leather portfolio of papers. “With all respect, Dr. Grant, I will not leave until I learn why my application to your institute has once more been sent back, without any sign of its having been read and considered.”
“Application to this institute,” said the secretary scathingly. “The cheek of these American girls. I shall ring for help at once, Dr. Grant.” She lifted the receiver of a dusty black telephone box.
But Dr. Grant held up his hand. He looked at Violet, really looked, and his eyes were so genuinely and intensely blue that Violet felt a leap of childlike hope inside her ribs.
“What is your name, madame?” he asked.
“Violet Schuyler, sir. I have recently graduated with highest honors from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, with bachelor of science degrees conferred in both mathematics and chemistry. My marks are impeccable, I have letters of recommendation from—”
“When did you first make your application to the institute?”
“In March, sir. It was returned in April. I presumed there had been some misdirection, so I sent it again, and—”
He turned to the secretary. “Why have I not seen Miss Schuyler’s application?”
The secretary knit her fingers together on the desk and creased her narrow eyes at Violet. “I assumed, sir, that—”
“That I would not consider an application from a female student?”
“Dr. Grant, the institute . . . that is, there is not a single scientist who . . . It’s impossible, sir. Of course it is. Your laboratory is no place . . .”
Dr. Grant turned back to Violet with eyes now livid. “I apologize, Miss Schuyler. Your application should have been received with exactly the same attention as any other. If you will please do me the honor of attending me in my office, I shall read it now, with the utmost regard for your tenacity in delivering it against all obstacles.” He stood back and motioned with his arm.
And so it began, the awakening of Violet’s gratitude, in that instant of triumph over the pinched and gray-suited secretary. She swept into Dr. Grant’s office and heard the firm click of the door as he closed it behind them, the decisive shutting-out of disapproving secretaries and rigid parents from the territory around them.
“Sit, I beg you,” he said, proffering a venerable old leather chair, and Violet sat. He pulled out his pair of rectangular reading glasses and settled into his own chair, behind the desk, while the clock drummed away in the corner and a robin sang from the tree outside the open window. As he read, he remained absolutely still, as if absorbed whole into the papers before him. Violet clenched her fingers around her knee and observed his purposeful energy, the fighting trim of his whip-thin body. Dr. Grant was three years older than her own father, and yet every detail of him belonged so clearly to a newer age, the modern age. Even his graying hair, the color of burnished steel.
How on earth did she get here, in this English building, filled with a race of people to whom she did not belong? Why had she fled her family, her life, her country, her comfortable future? What was she doing?
You’re greedy, her mother had said to her quietly, that last night in New York, as she had packed her things. Greedy and selfish. It’s not the knowledge you want, you can have that from your journals. You want to be in the newspapers, you want to be Marie Curie, you want to think you’re different from all of us. That all other women are silly and complacent and conventional, except you, brilliant you.
Isn’t that right, Violet?
“I beg your pardon,” Dr. Grant said, raising his head a quarter hour later to part the curtain of silence between them. “I believe a mistake has been made. You are quite the most qualified applicant to this institute in four years.”
Despite his heroic vanquishing of the secretary, Violet had somehow been expecting resistance. Resistance was all she knew: from her parents, filling the musty Fifth Avenue air with argument and expostulation; from her brothers, jeering over the silver and crystal. The opposition of the entire world against one embattled island of Violet.
She opened her mouth to return this volley that did not arrive. Instead, on the end of a wary breath, she offered: “I was informed at the outset that it’s too late to enter the university for the current term.”
He waved that aside in a flash of starched white cuff. “I shall see to it personally. You will have to join one of the women’s colleges, of course. Somerville, I think, will be best. I know the principal well; there should be no trouble at all. Have you lodgings?”