“‘Julia,’ said Ruth the next morning, as the two sat in the conversation room”
“And Pamela?”
“Oh, Pamela comes because she is a minister’s daughter, and because her conscience is always active. But most of us, I am sure, attend prayers two or three times a week. Tell your Freshman that she should be more observing. And now, to work; I am half sorry that we took this Shakespeare course.”
“Julia! You to express such a sentiment! I am astonished. Why, it seems to me the finest course we have had this year; at least it has meant more to me. Every word now in every play that I read seems to have such depth. I am always looking for the hidden sense. Yet I do wish that sometimes the meaning were a little plainer. What do you make of this, ‘Oh, such a deed as from the body of contraction plucks the very soul’? What is contraction?”
“Why, he gave us the note, ‘Power of making a contract.’”
“Yes, I should have written it on the margin, but my book is so covered with notes that sometimes I trust to memory. I am anxious to finish this this morning, so as to be free to enjoy the party this evening, for this afternoon I am obliged to go to town.”
“Oh, yes, the party, the Sophomores’ farewell to us. I wonder what they have planned? I hear that it is to be something very original. There’s Polly with her camera; perhaps she knows.”
But Polly, although she had more than a mere idea of what the Sophomore party would be, declared she was pledged to secrecy, and she invited Julia and Ruth to go upstairs with her while she took a picture of the “Fair Harvard” room.
This was a recitation room on the second floor, and Polly had been waiting a time when it should have no classes, and when the light should be favorable for a photograph. She meant to have a photograph of every nook and corner of the old building for the album that she was making. The “Fair Harvard” room deserved its name, for the author of the famous college song had married a member of the Fay family, and in a room of the old house he had written the well-known stanzas. His portrait and an autograph of the poem, now hanging between the windows, gave the room more interest than belonged to any other in the whole building.