office. Miss Pendleton is unswervingly just, undauntedly generous,
and completely devoted to the college. Not every one realizes
that her reserve hides a sympathy as keen as it is deep, though
no one doubts this who has ever appealed to her for help. Finally,
all those who really know her are well aware that she is utterly
self-forgetful, or rather, that it does not occur to her to consider
any decision in its bearing on her own position or popularity.
This inability to take the narrowly personal point of view is,
perhaps, her most distinguishing characteristic....

"Miss Pendleton unquestionably conceives the office of college
president not as that of absolute monarch but as that of constitutional
ruler; not as that of master, but as that of leader. Readers of
the dean's report for the Sabbatical year of Miss Hazard's absence,
in which Miss Pendleton was acting president, will not have failed
to notice the spontaneous expression of this sense of comradeship
in Miss Pendleton's reference to the faculty."

Rhode Island has twice given a president to Wellesley, for Ellen
Fitz Pendleton was born at Westerly, on August 7, 1864, the daughter
of Enoch Burrowes Pendleton and Mary Ette (Chapman) Pendleton.
In 1882, she entered Wellesley College as a freshman, and since
that date, her connection with her Alma Mater has been unbroken.
Her classmates seem to have recognized her power almost at once,
for in June, 1883, at the end of her freshman year, we find her on
the Tree Day program as delivering an essay on the fern beech;
and she was later invited into the Shakespeare Society, at that
time Wellesley's one and only literary society. In 1886, Miss
Pendleton was graduated with the degree of B.A., and entered the
Department of Mathematics in the autumn of that year as tutor;