ant health is a precious possession
to be won and kept.

It is significant that already statistical investigation in this
country and in England shows that the standard of health is higher
among the women who hold college degrees than among any other equal
number of the same age and class. And it is interesting also to
observe to what sort of questions our recent girl graduates have been
inclined to devote attention. They have been largely the neglected
problems of little children and their health, of home sanitation, of
food and its choice and preparation, of domestic service, of the
cleanliness of schools and public buildings. Colleges for girls are
pledged by their very constitution to make persistent war on the water
cure, the nervine retreat, the insane asylum, the hospital,--those
bitter fruits of the emotional lives of thousands of women. "I can
never afford a sick headache again, life is so interesting and there is
so much to do," a delicate girl said to me at the end of her first
college year. And while her mother was in a far-off invalid retreat,
she undertook the battle against fate with the same intelligence and
courage which she put into her calculus problems and her translations
of Sophocles. Her beautiful home and her rosy and happy children prove
the measure of her hard-won success. Formerly the majority of
physicians had but one question for the mother of the nervous and
delicate girl, "Does she go to school?" And only one prescription,
"Take her out of school." Never a suggestion as to suppers of pickles
and pound-cake, never a hint about midnight dancing and hurried
day-time ways. But now the sensible doctor asks, "What are her
interests? What are her tastes? What are her habits?" And he finds
new interests for her, and urges the formation of out-of-door tastes
and steady occupation for the mind, in order to draw the morbid girl
from herself into the invigorating world outside. This the college
does largely through its third gift of friendship.

Until a girl goes away from home to school or college, her friends are
chiefly chosen for her by circumstances. Her young relatives, her
neighbors in the same street, those who happen to go to the same school
or church,--these she makes her girlish intimates. She goes to college
with the entire conviction, half unknown to herself, that her father's
political party contains all the honest men, her mother's social circle
all the true ladies, her ch