“But what have you learned?” asked Clarissa. “That’s part of the game.”
“Oh, everything,” responded Polly, “but chiefly that I am not the very brightest girl in the world, as some of my friends and admirers used to try to make me believe, when I lived down South.”
“And your ideal?” asked Julia.
“Oh, I’m going to write the great novel of North and South. The subject is a large one, still I think that I can conquer it, but it will be years yet,” and Polly sighed heavily—for Polly.
We know how Clarissa and Pamela happened to come to Radcliffe. Clarissa now confessed that she had learned at Cambridge that it was a good thing to live in a conventional place for a time and get the sharp edges rubbed off. She added that at school she had always been considered the smartest girl, but Radcliffe, she had found, was made up of the smartest girls from a good many schools, and the majority seemed to be able to hold their own quite as well as she. “What’s the matter with basket ball?” cried two voices in unison from the other side of the room, and Clarissa hastened to declare her ideal. This was, she said, to stay quietly at home with her parents for the next two or three years. “They think that I’ve been away too long, but if I really wish a profession at the end of that time, they will not interfere with my studying.”
Pamela, after a moment’s hesitation, said that she had found Radcliffe a most encouraging place, and that instead of subduing a girl, as Clarissa implied, she thought that it tended to make her less timid.
“Which shows,” interposed Polly, “that Radcliffe is very like the chameleon inspected by several persons, each of whom gave a different account of the little creature.”
Pamela added that she was going to try for a European Fellowship, and, if possible, spend a year or more at the American School at Athens.
Lois confessed that the pure love of study had drawn her to college, and Radcliffe had been her choice, because while attending it she could also live at home. “Although,” she added, “I believe that there is no better college. Yet I so love study that even without Radcliffe I should have studied by myself. But college has been wonderfully broadening for me, especially during the past year, when I have had so many delightful friends. As to my ideal,” she concluded, “I am ashamed to say that my purpose has changed somewhat. I may not study medicine—at least not at present. I am going to teach for two years, and at the end of that time I shall try to go abroad for special research in Philosophy. There are certain theories that I can work out by myself while teaching and—after that—”
“Lois,” cried Esther Haines, one of the group, “mark my words, in two years you will be marching to the altar to the tune of ‘The Wedding March.’”