Brenda's cousin at Radcliffe

by Helen Leah Reed

Julia, for example, felt little responsibility for her uncle and aunt. They had many friends on the grounds, as had Nora and Edith and the rest of their party. She caught glimpses of Brenda constantly flitting about in her firefly fashion, with Arthur Weston in attendance. It was an open secret that Brenda’s engagement to Arthur was to come out before Commencement, and those who knew them the best had already offered the young people their congratulations. Many of the class, too, knew that Ruth and Will Hardon were also on the verge of having their engagement announced, and an observer might have thought that there was something more than good comradeship in the devotion with which Philip followed Julia from place to place. Julia had used not only the invitations to which she was entitled as a member of the class, but she had been able to secure many in addition from girls who did not need all their own allotment. She was able, therefore, to invite not only her former classmates at Miss Crawdon’s, but the teachers, too. Miss South was there in the light mourning that she wore for Madame Dulaunay. Those who knew her were wondering what she would do with the great house that her grandmother had left her, which it would be hard to keep up on a comparatively small income.

Of all those whom Julia had known best at Miss Crawdon’s school, Belle alone was missing. By this it need not be understood that any one really missed her, for Belle, since she had been sent to New York to boarding-school, had really dropped out of the little set in which she had once been a leading member. In vacations some of her new friends visited her or she visited them, and she laughed at the ways of her Boston contemporaries as “far behind the time.” She and Brenda always kept up a correspondence, and her letters, though wholly about herself, were always entertaining. She had already left Boston to stay with friends at Mount Desert.

“But why Radcliffe College?” asked one of Polly’s guests, her cousin from New York.

“Yes, where did you get that name?” asked another cousin, walking with her.

“Why, from Lady Anne Moulson, of course,” responded Polly, not at all unwilling to tell the story. “From Lady Anne Moulson, who was once Anne Radcliffe, and who founded the first scholarship at Harvard. The fact was unearthed just as the poor little nameless Annex was ready to appear out as a regular institution, and so she was christened Radcliffe College. Some did not care for the name, and would have preferred Longfellow College or something else local, but on the whole it seemed the best that could have been chosen.”

“I trust that Lady Moulson deserved the posthumous fame that has come to her, for certainly your college will give her name undying glory,” said one of the cousins gallantly in true Southern fashion, though he modified his praise slightly lest Polly should think that he wholly approved of a college education for girls.

To show herself impartial, Julia carried Tom Hearst’s flowers as well as Philip’s on Class Day. But it was Philip with whom she walked about the grounds after her duties as hostess were over, and Philip with whom she promised to go to Memorial Hall on the evening of Harvard Class Day, and Philip who was to be her escort at the Yale game the succeeding Saturday. Yet though they had many little conversations, and although what they said was largely personal, it must be admitted that there was not a word of sentiment in it all,—of sentiment, at least, as it is understood in its more romantic sense. They did talk, however, a great deal about their plans for the immediate future. Philip had decided to regard his father’s wishes, by taking his two years in the Law School, hoping that his previous reading and some special effort would take him through in less than three years. Julia confided to him certain ideas that she and Miss South hoped to carry out in the form of a training school for girls of the Angelina type. Philip’s face clouded when she told him that she should sail for Europe in July, with her uncle and aunt and Brenda and Miss South.

“But you’ll be back in the autumn?” urged Philip.

“Oh, possibly.”

“But I’m depending on you for advice and that kind of thing.”