o consider the sex; I bend in admiration."--LA BRUYERE.

We shall never know, though we shall always wonder, why certain
phrases, carelessly flung to us by poet or by orator, should be
endowed with regrettable vitality. When Tennnyson wrote that mocking
line about "sweet girl graduates in their golden hair," he could
hardly have surmised that it would be quoted exuberantly year after
weary year, or that with each successive June it would reappear as
the inspiration of flowery editorials, and of pictures, monotonously
amorous, in our illustrated journals. Perhaps in view of the serious
statistics which have for some time past girdled the woman student,
statistics dealing exhaustively with her honours, her illnesses, her
somewhat nebulous achievements, and the size of her infant families,
it is as well to realize that the big, unlettered, easy-going world
regards her still from the standpoint of golden hair, and of the
undying charm of immaturity.

In justice to the girl graduate, it must be said that she takes
herself simply and sanely. It is not her fault that statisticians
note down every breath she draws; and many of their most heartrending
allegations have passed into college jokes, traditional jokes, fated
to descend from senior to freshman for happy years to come. The
student learns in the give-and-take of communal life to laugh at many
things, partly from sheer high spirits, partly from youthful
cynicism, and the habit of sharpening her wit against her neighbour's.
It is commonly believed that she is an unduly serious young person
with an insatiable craving for knowledge; in reality she is often
as healthily unresponsive as is her Yale or Harvard brother. If she
cannot yet weave her modest acquirements into the tissue of her life
as unconcernedly as her brother does, it is not because she has been
educated beyond her mental capacity: it is because social conditions
are not for her as inevitable as they are for him.

Things were simpler in the old days, when college meant for a woman
the special training needed for a career; when, battling often with
poverty, she made every sacrifice for the education which would give
her work a market value; and when all she asked in return was the
dignity of self-support. Now many girls, unspurred by necessity or
by ambition, enter college because they are keen for personal and
intellectual freedom, because they desire the activities and the
pleasures which college generousl