OCTOBER TERM.
October had come, and term had begun again, and Cambridge was full of new faces—fresh young faces that would soon lose their smoothness and roundness, and that delightful ingenuousness that distinguishes successive generations of Cambridge freshmen.
There were a great many girl freshers at Newnham this term, and several of the old familiar faces were no longer seen. Pamela Gwatkin had come up for another year. A scholarship, the Grace-Hardy Scholarship, which is only given to girls in their fourth year, who have done well in a Tripos, had been awarded her to enable her to proceed to the second part of the Mathematical Tripos. When women year after year stand first on the list of the Smith's prizemen, it will be necessary to create a third part, when probably the majority of the candidates will be women.
Pamela Gwatkin had been working hard all through the Long Vacation, and she had come back pale and hollow-eyed, and oh! so lean. She will be like a deal board by the end of the year, and her beautiful, serious eyes will have nothing but mathematics in them.
Lucy had come back to work, too, but there were no mathematics in her eyes. She had just been plucked again in that horrid Part II. of the 'Previous,' which takes in Mathematics and Paley; but she had passed the classical part. She had only come up for one term. She was to be married in the spring, and she was quite, quite determined to get through the Little-go before she took her place as the wife of a Master of a college. She wouldn't be pointed at by everybody in Cambridge as a Failure!
She had got her old room next to Maria Stubbs, and she told Maria all about her engagement the first night after Hall.
Maria didn't bully her as she expected she would, perhaps she would have done the same thing herself had she been in her place.