Read On a Farther Shore for Free Online

and white kid gloves.Students were expected to go to Sunday morning services at a church of their choosing, and attendance at Sunday evening vespers on campus was mandatory.
    The curriculum at PCW aligned with what would have been found at any liberal arts college,though it was understood that the main aim of a young woman at PCW was to marry and become a homemaker—perhaps after working a year or two as a teacher—and that a higher education was for the purpose of personal growth and enrichment that would someday make one a better wife and mother.Students at PCW studied English, history, science, math, foreign languages, and music. Everyone had to take physical education, and most of the girls played intramural sports.Carson, dressed in blue bloomers, black stockings, and white tennis shoes, played goalie on a field hockey team that won three consecutive class championships.At one game the cheering students had to share the spectators’ area with two goats and several dogs loitering on the scene. A later report had it that at least one of the goats had come from the Carson home in Springdale. In a team photograph, Carson appeared trim, athletic, and firm-jawed.
    Carson suffered from acne, which at times covered her face andshoulders. She had only a few, unusually plain dresses, all of them sewn by her mother.Like most of the other girls, she wore a bobbed hairstyle, sometimes with a tight Marcel wave put in with a hot iron, so that her hair fit the shape of her head like a helmet.Never shy in class, never unprepared, Carson always knew the answer to any question and was eager to give it.A few girls who got to know her a little discovered that Carson also had a subtle wit, was alert to pretense or shallowness, and could be slyly observant of her classmates. But this was a side of her personality she rarely showed off. Mostly invisible, Carson came off as a quiet, awkward girl who usually skipped social events and was thought to be either a recluse or a studious bore. Some students resented her academic skills and the earnest impression she made on her instructors.
    Maria Carson made regular weekend visits to PCW. She’d show up at Rachel’s dormitory room and spend hours talking and reading and typing papers for her talented daughter. Rachel’s classmates saw Mrs. Carson as a doting mother who was determined to see her daughter succeed academically. Maria had an education beyond what the meager circumstances of the Carson family might have suggested—and that was not typical of women at the time. Before she’d met Rachel’s father, Maria had graduated with honors in Latin from the Washington Female Seminary in 1887. Now approaching sixty, Maria was older than most of the other students’ mothers. She was friendly enough but seemed to have no interest in anyone other than Rachel.One of Rachel’s friends would later recall that Mrs. Carson was without pretense—and said that if the queen of England had called on Rachel’s mother she would have answered the door in an “old calico housedress.”Mrs. Carson spent so much time with Rachel that other girls in the dorm—who found Maria’s frequent presence there inappropriate—joked that Carson’s mother ought to have been paying tuition herself. Rachel heard but ignored these criticisms and seemed not to mind her mother’s visits.
    Carson’s assignment to write about herself in her first-year English class resulted in a strange, impenetrable essay that suggested shehad great expectations without explicitly saying what they were. It opened moodily, with Carson describing herself as “a girl of eighteen” who loved the outdoors and who could never be happier than when in the glow of a campfire with the stars overhead. She continued, less gracefully, to explain her special relationship with that world: “I love all the beautiful things of nature, and the wild creatures are my friends. What could be more wonderful than the thrill of having some little furry animal