“You ought to have called on Ruth and me,” said Julia, with a mischievous attempt at patronizing Fritz, “and we would have introduced you to some one of your own age. We know several girls in the Freshman class.”
“Thanks,” said Fritz, “but you know that at Harvard we hardly realize that there is such an institution as Radcliffe. It makes so little—”
“Yes, it makes very little disturbance in Cambridge, and we would hardly realize the existence of Harvard had we not the advantage of knowing its Faculty pretty well,” retorted Ruth.
“I understand that you could hardly get on without them,” and thus the good-natured bantering between the two went on for some time longer, and in the end it was hard to tell with whom the advantage lay.
One evening at Rockley Julia announced that she had arranged for a “confession conference.” She would give no satisfaction as to her meaning until the whole dozen had assembled in the library before the open fire.
Then, producing a red-bound book, she declared that its pages were blank, except that one page in every five had in turn the names of each of the girls present.
“I am going,” she said, “to ask each girl to tell me what Radcliffe has meant to her, and then I am going to beg her to tell what her real ambition was in coming to college, or better, what she intends to be when she leaves. Let us take an hour to collect our thoughts and write; then another hour to read and discuss what has been written. Later, with your permission, these confessions will be handed to the Confession Recorder (and she laid her hand on Polly’s shoulder) to be copied into this book. I wish that the whole class would do something of the same kind. But at the end of ten years, how interesting it will be to see how near we twelve have come to our ideals.”
“Or how far we have fallen below them,” murmured a voice that sounded like that of Annabel.
Thus, with pencils and writing pads, the twelve set to work, for Julia’s proposal had the charm of novelty, and met no opposition. But when the time came for reading what had been written, the majority of the girls told what they hoped or planned, without confining themselves strictly to their notes.
Polly said that she had chosen to come to college because she was fond of study, and because it had been her father’s pleasure to tutor her in the classics. Out of a family of five girls, she had thought that one ought to have as good an education as a boy. “Besides,” she added, “it seemed rather a good joke to shock all our friends and relations, who thought it a terrible thing for a girl to go to college. Most people in the South still think so, although I have converted a few. Papa was a Harvard man,” she added in an undertone, “and that’s why I came to Radcliffe, and that’s all I have to say.”