unkindness. They see that others have "taken up" the Freshman, and what time they have for social labor must be spent where it will tell. Again, a girl may enter Vassar and live for months a self-centred, unsocial life. She is probably a cool, undemonstrative, studious girl, with nothing remarkable about her, unless perhaps an acute appreciation of loneliness. The old girls call on her, but she is too busy to return their calls, and in the crowd of more attractive protégées they soon forget her. She perhaps wonders sometimes whether she will ever have any friends in college; but before the end of the first year she will have found her place. In her own classes she finds some one to admire and appreciate her, or on her corridor there are lonely girls like herself, and gradually they draw together, till in a little while there is a new clique, more exclusive, perhaps, and more intolerant than the older ones, for the clique that is rigidly confined to one college class often has less good in it than any other. The existence of cliques is as natural as is that of states. Those whose views and aims and interests are similar must attract one another. And while the narrowing element must be admitted, it is still true that to the clique are due many of the friendships that make a college course so valuable, lasting for life, a never-failing source of strength.
Stories of life in schools and colleges for boys almost always contain a strong element of hero-worship. The poor weak little fellow is always burning with a desire to be of some use to the man who is leader of the football team or who pulls the stroke oar. The same tendency, in modified form of course, is visible at Vassar. The majority of students, some time during their college courses, see in an upper class one who they imagine approaches their ideal. This shows itself in various ways. The impulsive Freshman, not too strong of judgment, perhaps sends flowers to her whom she delights to honor. Another, cooler and stronger, makes her idol the model of her own life, and is often much helped thereby. A third is content if she can watch the favored one from a distance and dream dreams of what her life must be. Sometimes all this leads to a real friendship that is a help to both. More often it dies a natural death as the girl grows older and her ideal rises; and in her Senior year she breathes a sigh of thankfulness that that older Senior will ever be ignorant of the emotions she inspired in an impressible Freshman sister. All this is only another proof that man is a worshipping animal, and that even in civilized communities the heart seeks to find its ideal in something tangible and near itself.
I have thus tried to give a general idea of what life is like in Vassar College. To give more than a general idea would be impossible, for the lives of no two students are alike. Each impresses her own
