and organization.

This is why a general history of the movement for the higher
education of women, although of value, cannot tell us all we need
to know, since of necessity it approaches the subject from the
outside. The women's colleges must speak as individuals; each one
must tell her own story, and tell it soon. The bright, experimental
days are definitely past--except in the sense in which all education,
alike for men and women, is perennially an experiment--and if
the romance of those days is to quicken the imaginations of college
girls one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence, the women
who were the experiment and who lived the romance must write it down.

For Wellesley in particular this consciousness of standing at
the threshold of a new epoch is especially poignant. Inevitably
those forty years before the fire of 1914 will go down in her
history as a period apart. Already for her freshmen the old college
hall is a mythical labyrinth of memory and custom to which they
have no clue. New happiness will come to the hill above the lake,
new beauty will crown it, new memories will hallow it, but--they
will all be new. And if the coming generations of students are
to realize that the new Wellesley is what she is because her
ideals, though purged as by fire, are still the old ideals; if they
are to understand the continuity of Wellesley's tradition, we who
have come through the fire must tell them the story.


II.

On Wednesday, November 25, 1914, the workmen who were digging