“I never mind,” said Elizabeth, who had joined the others.
“Nor would we,” responded Clarissa politely, “if our marks, like yours, were most likely ‘A.’ You see the postmen, like the policemen and the car conductors in this cultured community, set a value on real intellect, and I hate to have them know that I am not at the very head of my class. I don’t wish to sail under false pretences, but I should be happier if my instructors would only spare me the big, blue ‘C.’ It always makes me feel giddy, as the English say.”
“Oh, Clarissa, you’d pun if you were dying.”
“Well, I can afford to be cheerful, for I’ve had an invitation,” and she read from a card that she drew from a note-book, “Le Cercle Français de l’Université Harvard requests the pleasure of your presence on Tuesday evening, May 17.”
“You are in luck. I hear that it is to be a delightful affair; but now before we go home for our hats, let us stroll over to Vaughan House, and patronize Mrs. Hogan and her buns.”
A luncheon-room had been fitted up in Vaughan House, a dwelling recently bought by the Radcliffe Corporation. It was only a step from Fay House, across the little campus, and both inside and out it preserved the aspect of a comfortable dwelling. The lunch-room, to be sure, had small wood tables of true restaurant style and a counter; and the coffee and chocolate were drawn from metal reservoirs, with spigots, in true restaurant fashion.
The three friends, for Elizabeth had not come with them, sat at a table beside an old graduate, who was spending the year in Cambridge for post-graduate work.
“Why, it doesn’t seem long,” she said, “since we used to carry our own sandwiches to Fay House in a little pasteboard box, and feel extremely thankful for the cup of hot tea or chocolate brought by the housekeeper to the little room back of the conversation room. If she went off before we could pay her, we would hide our dimes or half-dimes in the sugar bowl, and she always trusted us as we trusted her.”
“Can you remember the very beginning of Radcliffe?” asked Polly, “when it was called ‘The Annex’?”
“I wasn’t here myself, then,” said the other, smiling; “that was in 1879, but my sister came a year or two later, when the classes met either at the houses of the professors or in the little house in Appian Way. The library, I believe, comprised two or three shelves of books in another house, and a course with half a dozen students was considered extremely large.”