[A MAIDEN CRUSADER:
FRANCES E. WILLARD]
Instead of peace, I was to participate in war; instead of the sweetness of home, I was to become a wanderer on the face of the earth; but I have felt that a great promotion came to me when I was counted worthy to be a worker in the organized crusade for "God and Home and Native Land."... If I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would say it is to make the whole world homelike. The true woman will make every place she enters homelike—and she will enter every place in this wide world.
Frances E. Willard.
A MAIDEN CRUSADER
THERE is no place like a young college town in a young country for untroubled optimism. Hope blossoms there as nowhere else; the ideal ever beckons at the next turn in the road. When Josiah Willard brought his little family to Oberlin, it seemed to them all that a new golden age of opportunity was theirs. Even Frances, who was little more than a baby, drank in the spirit of the place with the air she breathed.
It was not hard to believe in a golden age when one happened to see little Frances, or "Frank," Willard dancing like a sunbeam about the campus. She liked to play about the big buildings, where father went every day with his big books, and watch for him to come out. Sometimes one of the students would stop to speak to her; sometimes a group would gather about while, with fair hair flying and small arms waving, in a voice incredibly clear and bird-like, she "said a piece" that mother had taught her.
"Is that a little professorling?" asked a new-comer one day, attracted by the child's cherub face and darting, fairylike ways.