d a similarity of
background and tradition forms a natural basis for companionship;
but there is tolerance for other backgrounds which are not without
dignity, though they may be lacking in distinction. Poverty is
admittedly inconvenient, but carries no reproach. Light hearts and
jesting tongues minimize its discomforts. I well remember when the
coming of Madame Bernhardt to Philadelphia in 1901 fired the students
of Bryn Mawr College with the justifiable ambition to see this great
actress in all her finer roles. Those who had money spent it royally.
Those who had none offered their possessions,--books, ornaments,
tea-cups, for sale. "Such a chance to buy bargains," observed one
young spendthrift, who had been endeavouring to dispose of all she
needed most; "but unluckily everybody wants to sell. We know now the
importance of the consuming classes, and how useful in their modest
way some idle rich would be."

That large and influential portion of the community which does not
know its own mind, and which the rest of the world is always
endeavouring to conciliate, is still divided between its honest
desire to educate women, and its fear lest the woman, when educated,
may lose the conservative force which is her most valuable asset.
That small and combative portion of the community which knows its
own mind accurately, and which always demands the impossible, is
determined that the college girl shall betake herself to practical
pursuits, that she shall wedge into her four years of work, courses
in domestic science, the chemistry of food, nursing, dressmaking,
house sanitation, pedagogy, and that blight of the
nursery,--child-study. These are the things, we are often told,
which it behooves a woman to know, and by the mastery of which she
is able, so says a censorious writer in the "Educational Review,"
"to repay in some measure her debt to man, who has extended to her
the benefits of a higher education."

It is to be feared that the girl graduate, the youthful bachelor of
arts who steps smiling through the serried ranks of students, her
heart beating gladly in response to their generous applause, has
little thought of repaying her debt to man. Somebody has made an
address which she was too nervous to hear, and has affirmed, with
that impressiveness which we all lend to our easiest generalizations,
that the purpose of college is to give women a broad and liberal
education, and, at the same time, to preserve and develop th