feminine fellowship does not affect its intellectuality. The
Wellesley faculty, like the faculty of Harvard, is not a cloistered
body, and contact with the minds of "a world of men" through books
and the visitations of itinerant scholars is about as easy in the
one case as in the other. Every year Wellesley has her share of
distinguished visitors, American, European, and Oriental, scholars,
poets, scientists, statesmen, who enrich her life and enlarge
her spiritual vision.


III.

One chapter of Wellesley's history it is too soon to write: the
story of the great names and great personalities, the spiritual
stuff of which every college is built. This is the chapter on
which the historians of men's colleges love best to dwell. But
the women's lips and pens are fountains sealed, for a reticent
hundred years--or possibly less, under pressure--with the seals
of academic reserve, and historic perspective, and traditional
modesty. Most of the women who had a hand in the making of
Wellesley's first forty years are still alive. There's the rub.
It would not hamper the journalist. But the historian has his
conventions. One hundred years from now, what names, living
to-day, will be written in Wellesley's golden book? Already they
are written in many prophetic hearts. However, women can keep
a secret.

Even of those who have already finished their work on earth, it is
too soon to speak authoritatively; but gratitude and love will not
be silent, and no story of Wellesley's first half-century would