relinquished with relief; Domestic Work they abandoned without
a pang; Bible Study shrank from four to three years and from three
to two, and then to one, almost without their noticing it. But
when, in 1901, the Honor Scholarships were established, a storm
of protest burst among the undergraduates, and thundered and
lightened for several weeks in the pages of College News. And
not the least vehement of these protestants were the "Honor girls"
themselves. To see their names posted in an alphabetical list
of twenty or more students who had achieved, all unwittingly, a
certain number of A's and B's throughout their course, seems to
have caused them a mortification more keen than that experienced
by St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar. But that the college ideal
should be "degraded" pained them most.

There was something very touching and encouraging about this
wrong-headed, right-hearted outburst. After the usual Wellesley
fashion, freedom of speech prevailed; everybody spoke her mind.
In the end "sweetness and light" dispersed the mists of sentiment
which had assumed that to acknowledge inequality of achievement
was to abolish equality of opportunity, and burned away the ethical
haziness which had magnified mediocrity; the crusaders realized
that the pseudo-compassion which would conceal the idle and the
stupid, the industrious and the brilliant, in a common obscurity,
is impracticable, since the fool and the genius cannot long be
hid, and unfair, since the ant and the grasshopper would enjoy
a like reward, and no democracy has yet claimed that those who
do not work shall eat. When in 1912 the faculty at last decided
to inform the students as to all their marks, the news was received
with no protest and with an intelligent appreciation of the
intellectual and ethical value of the new privilege.