In the first place, Wellesley was reputed to be modeled on the beloved school of Mary Lyon, and to have preserved some of its best features. In the second place—the location near Boston gave it an advantage over its sister inland college in the way of music, art, libraries, museums. It was also, by virtue of its situation, more accessible to visitors, and many a notable person, drawn by the glamour that still lingered about a woman’s college, came to inspect the materialization of Tennyson’s vision of The Princess. The inspection of visitors and girls was mutual, and, we hope, of advantage to both. In the third place, and this is what finally decided me, I preferred the course of study.
I entered college on certificate, covering the work I had done in three schools, the Los Angeles High School, Field Seminary in Oakland, and Pomona College Preparatory School in Claremont. So far as I can judge, my western preparation was as effective as that of my classmates who came from the East and the Middle-West.
College life is broken by vacations. I was fortunate in being able to return to my home for the long summers, while seeing various parts of the East during the shorter recesses. With great delight each June I left Massachusetts, beautiful to look upon, intolerable to live in, going to California’s comfortable southwest coast. I was always sped on my way by the pities of my friends who ignorantly supposed that California climate was so much warmer than the eastern in summer as it is in winter. I doubt if any of my friends were so cool as I.
The eight trips back and forth across the continent gave opportunity to see many different places. One journey by the Canadian Pacific gave glimpses of the old city of Montreal, of the lovely land north of Lake Superior and of the grandeur of the great northern Rockies. On another trip a stop-over in Chicago gave me ten days at the Columbian Exposition, whose chief memory is of the dignified white buildings, the art collection, and the lighted lagoons at night.
My shorter vacations included one each in Chicago, Boston, New York City, and Washington, where I had the privilege of seeing how actual sessions of Congress compared with our college representations. I discovered that we at college had neglected some of the stage furniture—the couches upon which exhausted congressmen took their daily siesta.
Twice I spent Christmas in Skowhegan, Maine, my mother’s old home town to which she had taken me in my little girl days. Here I found deep snows and a temperature forty degrees below, and in my hostess the truest embodiment of the Christmas spirit I have ever met.
A Christmas vacation spent in Boston was one of the most interesting. A friend and I took a room high up in an old house near Copley Square—two girls free to enjoy the city. Among other delights we had a feast of music—the Haydn and Handel Society Messiah, a recital given by Paderewski, the new Polish pianist, two symphony concerts, heard from the twenty-five cent gallery of the old Symphony Hall, the Christmas music at the Church of the Ascension, and the memorable watch-night service, New Year’s Eve, at Trinity Church, when everyone hoped and no one knew that Phillips Brooks would come. The church was dim and fragrant with the odor of cedar and pine, and the people were hushed by the beauty of the ancient ritual. As midnight approached the great figure of the bishop appeared from among the trees of the choir and mounted the pulpit. Bishop Brooks spoke simply and solemnly and as the hour struck made a prayer out of his own deep heart. With his message for the New Year we went into an unforgettable, marvellous night, with snowy ground, a dark sky filled with fleecy clouds about a prismed moon. In three weeks the beloved Bishop was dead—a true bishop of all the people. The knowing of Phillips Brooks was one of the good things my years in Wellesley brought me.
College days were over. I was a graduate of Wellesley, with all that meant of training, of prestige, of obligation.
The four years had been busy and valuable, but they were not the happiest days of my life, as school days are often said to be. I was going through a period of re-adjustment and re-valuation that did not make for peace of mind. I was often lonely, for, although I had a wide and pleasant acquaintance, I did not make the intimate friends that I did either before or after college days. I have wondered why. Was I so unsettled that no one me dominated and attracted its own, or was I, the western girl, always something of a stranger in a strange land? It may have been better so, since I was to go so far from college haunts and friends. The girls at the end sang pensively of Seniors about to be “lost in the wide, wide world.” I didn’t care or fear. I hastened to be lost, for the wide, wide world meant California, my homeland, to which I fled the instant I secured my diploma. The western girl who went East to college went West to live.
The years at Wellesley soon slipped back into the dim region of memory and Los Angeles became once more the familiar environment of my life. It was so good to be at home again—but Time was bringing changes and new responsibilities. The family was smaller than it had been, for my sister had followed me to Wellesley, and my aunt was taking a year-long vacation in the East, thus giving me a chance to learn by experience how to be a house-keeper. I judge that I, the amateur, did not always reach the usual standard of good order set for our home, for I have a picture of my father down on his knees at the parlor fireplace, one evening before dinner when company was expected, carefully wiping the blower with an oiled rag, while suggesting to me “I think if your Aunt Marthy were here she would take those newspapers from the shelf under the table.” I did not know that he noticed such things. I was a bit conscience-smitten.