nd a passport into good society.
But Gertrude decided in favor of a public school education.

Lucille and Gertrude as sisters were fond of each other, but Lucille
lived more for self, while Gertrude preferred others to self. Gertrude
had learned early how by a smile or bow to retain an old friend or to
win a new one. She spent very little time thinking about her own needs,
preferring to take flowers or fruit, even when given her, to some sick or
aged person. Nothing pleased her more than to visit the Old Ladies' Home
with a few gifts and read the Bible or comforting stories to the inmates.

Mrs. Harris when east chanced to spend a June day at Wellesley College
near Boston. By early moonlight several hundred Wellesley girls and
thousands of spectators had assembled on the banks of Lake Waban to enjoy
the "Float." Gaily uniformed crews in their college flotilla formed
a star-shaped group near the shore for their annual concert. Chinese
lanterns, like giant fire-flies, swung in the trees and on many graceful
boats. The silver notes of the bugle and the chant of youthful voices
changed the college-world into a fairyland.

Both mother and daughter were charmed and Lucille gladly decided to enter
Wellesley. Hard study, however, and the daily forty-five minutes of
domestic work then required, did not agree with her nature, and after a
few weeks she decided upon a change, and continued her education at one
of the private schools on the Back-Bay in Boston.

Gertrude, possessing a more active mind and ambition, resolved to obtain
an education as good as her brother Alfonso had had at Harvard. She had
read of a prominent benefactor who believed that woman had the same right
as man to intellectual culture and development, and who in 1861 had
founded on the Hudson, midway between Albany and New York, an institution
which he hoped would accomplish for women what colleges were doing for
men.

So Gertrude applied for enrollment and was admitted to Vassar College.
Rooms were assigned her in Strong Hall. She liked Vassar's sensible way
of hazing, a cordial reception being given to freshmen by the sophomores.
She was glad to be under both men and women professors, for this in part
fulfilled her idea of the education that women should receive.

At Vassar were several girls from Harrisville whom Gertrude knew, but no
boys. She wrote her mother that she would be better pleased if Vassar had
less Greek and more boys. She could not unders