Brenda's cousin at Radcliffe

by Helen Leah Reed

“Ah, Pamela,” and Polly laughed. “Sermons in stones, books in the running brooks are nothing to your lessons. But there, don’t blush at me, but tell me what you had in mind.”

“Oh, I was only thinking that it’s less what the individual player does than what the team does as a whole. A girl who thinks only of her own ability to make a wonderful throw may make a throw that will gain great applause, but she generally sends the ball into the hands of the enemy.”

“Like Elizabeth Darcy last year. Did you see that match?”

“No,” responded Pamela.

“Well, she brought down the house with two or three brilliant throws, but she really did more to hurt her team than any one on the other side. If I had been Clarissa I should have been afraid to have Annabel on the team for the same reason. She thinks of herself first, and of the general good last.”

“Human nature according to Hobbes.”

“Oh, my dear, I never think of ethics out of the class-room. There—there look!” and both girls turned to see a goal scored for Clarissa’s team—or rather for their own team, since Clarissa was the embodiment of the Senior athletic aspirations.

The match with Wellesley was one of the things of which they were sure, and it was likely to be exciting. Brenda teased Julia when she heard of the coming contest by saying that she was bound to be on the side of Wellesley this year, for Amy had just entered Wellesley, and Brenda was still very fond of her. Since their trip to Nova Scotia they had seen little of each other except in summer, for Amy had been very hard at work preparing for college, and society had absorbed Brenda the past two years. Amy had felt especially tender toward Brenda the past year or two, because the beginning of their acquaintance had seemed to mark the beginning of prosperity for Amy and her mother. The efforts of Mrs. Barlow and Mr. Elton had resulted in a fairly large sale of Mrs. Redmond’s paintings. Indeed, her water-color sketches had become so much the fashion that her income now permitted her to live in Salem. Thus Amy for a year or two had been able to see much more than in former years of her schoolmates out of school, and some of her little sharp corners had been entirely rounded off. The death of Cousin Joan the past winter had made it possible for Amy to enter college without any worry as to ways and means; for although the money left by Cousin Joan from most points of view would have been considered very small indeed, it was enough to carry Amy comfortably through college. It was left to her for this purpose, “in recognition,” as Cousin Joan wrote in a note that was found with the will, “of her patience with a very troublesome old woman.” Amy, wiping away a few tears, as she thought of the invalid whose life had been so narrow, protested that it was her mother and not she who should have the money as a reward for patience. But Mrs. Redmond reminded her daughter that the money was really a gift to her as well as to Amy, since she would now be saved a certain amount of financial care in planning Amy’s college career. Therefore, Amy at Wellesley, and Julia at Radcliffe, at odds only on the subject of some college championship, exchanged visits and compared notes, and each ended invariably by thinking her own college the best.

Brenda and Amy had been a little less intimate since those first Rockley days, and in the past year the former had been away in California; at least, she had gone for a year’s absence in the March of Julia’s Junior year. She wrote to Amy as to Julia rapturous letters about the beauties of California, mingled with entertaining accounts of her sister Caroline’s children. Before Christmas Mr. and Mrs. Barlow started for California to visit their daughter and bring Brenda home. Nora went with them, by special invitation, as an attack of measles in the early autumn had prevented her resuming her special work at Radcliffe, and her eyes needed the rest.

In the absence of her relatives, therefore, Julia was naturally thrown more in the society of her Radcliffe friends than had been the case in other years. Edith was spending the year abroad, and the little group of Miss Crawdon’s girls was widely scattered. Julia spent Christmas with Ruth in Roxbury, where Pamela, Clarissa, and Polly were also invited; for Ruth, although she had not entirely changed in her general opinion of Pamela and Clarissa, had still changed somewhat in her feeling toward them. She had learned to see the good points of the candid Western girl and of the timid Vermonter.