The Professor & The Teacher in 1885

The Professor and the Teacher: A Winter Afternoon in 1885

Mildred Thompson was a professor of philosophy for the young ladies at Wellesley College. Some of them, she hoped, would put what they learned at the college to good use and not simply vanish into matrimonial expectations and disappointments.

She lived in a small house on the edge of the campus with a teacher at a nearby girls' finishing school. That was Anne Bellows, and the two met when they were both Wellesley freshman. Both went against their parents' wishes by becoming teachers and remaining in Wellesley together. That was years ago and largely forgotten by their families, one in New York, the other in Boston.

Every few weeks, groups of three or four of the professor's students met at the small house for tea and sandwiches and especially for conversation, sitting among the mismatched chairs and sofas in the front parlor, often with a carefully-tended fire in the cold of a Massachusetts winter.

And sometimes the professor noticed Miss Bellows paying particular attention to one of the students. Miss Bellows was not as discreet as she thought, at least to the piercing eye of her friend and sometimes to the discerning eye of the student.

* * *

"You seemed particularly interested in Miss Phillips," the professor says on one of the cold 1885 afternoons after the group that included the aforementioned Portia Phillips is gone and the two are finishing their cleaning up.

"I don't know what you mean," Miss Bellows responds.

"I think you do. She is a very plain girl, is she not?"

The teacher ignores this. She pauses in putting plates into a cabinet as the other's hands encircle her waist.

"Tell me what you were thinking, are thinking."

"You are away. Taking your class to the museum for the afternoon. I am marking essays when the bell rings. It is her."

"Who?"

"Miss Phillips. She didn't go with you."

The professor whispers. "What happens? Where do you go?"

The teacher puts the plate in her hands down.

"She reaches out her arm. Says nothing. Only reaches out her arm."

"Like this?" the professor asks, mimicking the move as she begins to leave the kitchen. Miss Bellows grabs her friend's hand, following out to the smokey parlor

"She goes to the stairs, and I follow," the two continuing to mimic what the teacher has fallen into.

"She leads me to my room."

"Your room?"

"Our room. The door is open and she pulls me to the bed. Our bed. She throws the covers off."

The professor does this with her free hand. Silently, Miss Bellows, still clutching the professor's hand, lies on the bed and only then is the hold released.

"She pulls the chair next to the bed. With her left hand, she grabs my right." Miss Bellows pauses. "Her hand reaches down and around and then up my dress and my petticoat until it reaches my..."

"Your honey bush?"

"Yes. My 'honey bush.' Her fingers find me."

"Like this?"

"Oh, God. Like that. She begins to run them up and down.

"Oh Mildred. I am so moist.

"Yes. Like that. Then she finds my button. But she ignores it as one...no two fingers enter me. In and out. Yes. In and out. She returns to my button."

"And is the bed creaking as it is now?"

"I don't care. But yes. She's looking down at me, her left hand tightening. God. I can't help looking into her demon soul and she smiles. As you smile now. And she, too, in her excitement is getting short of breath. Not like me. But I know her too well and I can tell."

"But you've only just met."

"Yet somehow I know her. She is my true love and then I..."

Miss Bellows pulls her hand away from the professor and the professor uses her now free hand to caress the teacher's lovely face, beside the teacher's eyes staring at the ceiling till the spasm is over.

The two say nothing while Miss Bellows recovers herself and Professor Thompson removes her hand from beneath the garments.

Finally, Miss Bellows says, "Mildred, you know I would never do that to you."

"To us."

"Yes, my love. To us."

The professor leans in and kisses the teacher's lips.

"But I so enjoy doing that to you."

"To us."

"Aye, my love. To us."

And she joins the other and, both quite pleased with themselves, fall into a deep sleeps that do not end until well into the nighttime.

THE END

* * *

The relationship described in this story was what became known as a "Boston Marriage," after Henry James's 1886 novel The Bostonians. They were not uncommon among middle class or upper middle class women of the period, who could use the excuse of needing to save money as the reason for living together.

They were sufficiently common at Wellesley College that they were also known as "Wellesley marriages," in part because a married woman could not remain on the faculty. Whether all these "marriages" were more than arrangements-of-convenience I cannot say. The arrangement between Prof. Thompson and Miss Bellows was well more than that.