The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

her ribs.
    â€œWhat is your name, madame?” he asked.
    â€œViolet 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—”
    â€œWhen did you first make your application to the institute?”
    â€œIn 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—”
    â€œThat I would not consider an application from a female student?”
    â€œDr. 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.
    â€œSit, 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 hispurposeful 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?
    â€œI 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