“Now, I’ll tell you, Angelina, what I propose to do. I will see if your mother will let you come to Cambridge once a week. There is one day when I am not very busy. I can probably arrange to have you sleep in this house. I will pay your way over here and give you your meals. In return I shall expect you to do whatever mending Miss Roberts and I have ready for you. Besides, I will give you a lesson to study at home, and each Wednesday I will hear you recite it and show you how to study.”
Angelina both looked and spoke her thanks. “I don’t see how you ever came to think of anything so beautiful.”
“I am glad that you like it,” responded Julia, “and I hope that you will do your best to help carry it out.”
Angelina chose history as her subject of study, and as she had had American History at school, Julia began with a little outline of the World’s History.
It was a good plan and it worked very well. Shiloh evidently had not given Angelina enough to do in winter, and it was well for her to have an interest outside her home. Yet her mother needed her help to a certain extent, and it would have been a mistake to encourage Angelina to work entirely outside of the house. The weekly visit kept Julia in closer touch with the Rosa family than would otherwise have been possible, and this in itself was a good thing. Then, too, she gained deeper insight into Angelina’s character than she could have gained in any other way.
She engaged a small room from Mrs. Colton where Angelina slept when in Cambridge, and in it she placed a wicker-work table with a large basket and all the appliances for mending stockings, sewing on buttons, and the simple repairing of which Angelina was capable.
“I have always heard,” said Ruth, who shared in the advantages of Angelina’s services, “that lazy people take the most pains; for, honestly, it would save you time and money to do your own mending, and let me do mine, rather than have all this bother with Angelina.”
“Oh, it’s a good thing for me, too,” replied Julia. “Our great danger here in college is in thinking that we have no duties except those connected with our studies, as if the only thing worth living for were to get ‘A’ or ‘B’ in some course.”
“I know girls who wouldn’t think ‘B’ worth living for,” retorted Ruth, “but I agree with you that there is always a danger that we may be too narrow in our interests. That’s why I am glad that so many girls are taking an interest in the operetta. In doing it they will be assisting the fund for the North End reading-room, which is calculated to do an immense amount of good. You have no idea, Julia, what a success the operetta will be.”
“I hope so.” Julia spoke absent-mindedly. A plan that Miss South had suggested for Angelina and girls of her kind was running through her mind. But she knew that until she should leave college there would be little chance of carrying it into effect. She would have been glad to work with some of the organized charities, but she felt that college must claim the most of her time. Comparatively few of her classmates, however, were without some bit of philanthropic work. Several taught Sunday-school classes. Several others gave an evening a week to some Boys’ or Girls’ Club in Boston or Cambridge. The Emmanuel Society, so named for John Harvard’s College, had regular meetings before which appeared various organizations, who made clear their claims to the support of thoughtful young women. The College Settlements appealed strongly to the undergraduate, and a chapter to raise money for the work had been formed at Radcliffe. The Emmanuel Society supported an annual scholarship, and maintained a library of text-books to be lent to students who could not afford to buy all the expensive books needed in their courses.