e
characteristics of a complete womanhood. Somebody else has followed
up the address with a few fervent remarks, declaring that the only
proof of competence is performance. "The world belongs to those who
have stormed it." This last ringing sentence--delivered with an
almost defiant air of originality--has perhaps caught the graduate's
ear, but its familiar cadence awakened no response. Has she not
already stormed the world by taking her degree, and does not the world
belong to her, in any case, by virtue of her youth and inexperience?
Never, while she lives, will it be so completely hers as on the day
of her graduation. Let her enjoy her possession while she may.

And her equipment? Well, those of us who call to mind the medley of
unstable facts, untenable theories, and undesirable accomplishments,
which was _our_ substitute for education, deem her solidly informed.
If the wisdom of the college president has rescued her from domestic
science, and her own common sense has steered her clear of art, she
has had a chance, in four years of study, to lay the foundation of
knowledge. Her vocabulary is curiously limited. At her age, her
grandmother, if a gentlewoman, used more words, and used them better.
But then her grandmother had not associated exclusively with
youthful companions. The graduate has serious views of life, which
are not amiss, and a healthy sense of humour to enliven them. She
is resourceful, honourable, and pathetically self-reliant. In her
highest and happiest development, she merits the noble words in which
an old Ferrara chronicler praises the loveliest and the most maligned
woman in all history: "The lady is keen and intellectual, joyous and
human, and possesses good reasoning powers."

To balance these permanent gains, there are some temporary losses.
The college student, if she does not take up a definite line of work,
is apt, for a time at least, to be unquiet. That quality so lovingly
described by Peacock as "stayathomeativeness" is her least
noticeable characteristic. The smiling discharge of uncongenial
social duties, which disciplines the woman of the world, seems to
her unseeing eyes a waste of time and opportunities. She has read
little, and that little, not for "human delight." Excellence in
literature has been pointed out to her, starred and double-starred,
like Baedeker's cathedrals. She has been taught the value of
standards, and has been spared the groping of the undirected reader,
who