accident or juxtaposition, but tastes, interests, habits, work,
ambitions. It is for this reason that to college friendship clings
a romance entirely its own. One of the friends may spend her
days in the laboratory, eagerly chasing the shy facts that hide
beyond the microscope's fine vision, and the other may fill her
hours and her heart with the poets and the philosophers; one may
steadfastly pursue her way toward the command of a hospital, and
the other towards the world of letters and of art; these divergences
constitute no barrier, but rather an aid to the fulness of friendship.
And the fact that one goes in a simple gown which she has earned
and made herself, and the other lives when at home in a merchant's
modern palace--what has that to do with the things the girls care
about and the dreams they talk over in the walk by the river or
the bicycle ride through country roads? If any young man to-day
goes through Harvard lonely, neglected, unfriended, if any girl
lives solitary and wretched in her life at Wellesley, it is their
own fault. It must be because they are suspicious, unfriendly
or disagreeable themselves. Certainly it is true that in the
associations of college life, more than in any other that the country
can show, what is extraneous, artificial, and temporary falls away,
and the every-day relations of life and work take on a character that
is simple, natural, genuine. And so it comes about that the fourth
gift of college life is ideals of personal character.

To some people the shaping ideals of what character should be,
often held unconsciously, come from the books they are given by
the persons whom they most admire before they are twenty years
old. The greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school
or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal
ideal. The college professors who transformed me through my