life is so interesting and there is so much to do," a delicate girl
said to me at the end of her first college year. And while her
mother was in a far-off invalid retreat, she undertook the battle
against fate with the same intelligence and courage which she
put into her calculus problems and her translations of Sophocles.
Her beautiful home and her rosy and happy children prove the measure
of her hard-won success. Formerly the majority of physicians had
but one question for the mother of the nervous and delicate girl,
"Does she go to school?" And only one prescription, "Take her out
of school." Never a suggestion as to suppers of pickles and
pound-cake, never a hint about midnight dancing and hurried day-time
ways. But now the sensible doctor asks, "What are her interests?
What are her tastes? What are her habits?" And he finds new
interests for her, and urges the formation of out-of-door tastes
and steady occupation for the mind, in order to draw the morbid
girl from herself into the invigorating world outside. This the
college does largely through its third gift of friendship.

Until a girl goes away from home to school or college, her friends
are chiefly chosen for her by circumstances. Her young relatives,
her neighbors in the same street, those who happen to go to the
same school or church,--these she makes her girlish intimates.
She goes to college with the entire conviction, half unknown to
herself, that her father's political party contains all the honest
men, her mother's social circle all the true ladies, her church all
the real saints of the community. And the smaller the town, the
more absolute is her belief. But in college she finds that the
girl who earned her scholarship in the village school sits beside
the banker's daughter; the New England farmer's child rooms next
the heiress of a Hawaiian sugar plantation; the daughters of