agree that the college was
not founded primarily for the sake of Tree Day, and that the
Senior Play is not the goal of the year's endeavor.

It is the story of the Wellesley her daughters and lovers know
that I have tried to tell: the Wellesley of serious purpose,
consecrated to the noble ideals of Christian Scholarship.

I am indebted for criticism, to President Pendleton who kindly
read certain parts of the manuscript, to Professor Katharine Lee
Bates, Professor Vida D. Scudder, and Mrs. Marian Pelton Guild;
for historical material, to Miss Charlotte Howard Conant's "Address
Delivered in Memory of Henry Fowle Durant in Wellesley College
Chapel", February 18, 1906, to Mrs. Louise McCoy North's Historical
Address, delivered at Wellesley's quarter centennial, in June 1900,
to Professor George Herbert Palmer's "Life of Alice Freeman Palmer,"
published by the Houghton Mifflin Co., to Professor Margarethe
Muller's "Carla Wenckebach, Pioneer," published by Ginn & Co.;
to Dean Waite, Miss Edith Souther Tufts, Professor Sarah F. Whiting,
Miss Louise Manning Hodgkins, Professor Emeritus Mary A. Willcox,
Mrs. Mary Gilman Ahlers; to Miss Candace C. Stimson, Miss Mary B.
Jenkins, the Secretary of the Alumnae Restoration and Endowment
Committee, and to the many others among alumnae and faculty, whose
letters and articles I quote. Last but not least in my grateful
memory are all those painstaking and accurate chroniclers, the
editors of the Wellesley Courant, Prelude, Magazine, News, and
Legenda, whose labors went so far to lighten mine.

F.C.

CONTENTS

I. THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS
II. THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENT
III. THE FACULTY AND THEIR METHODS
IV. THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY
V. THE FIRE: AN INTERLUDE
VI. THE LOYAL ALUMNAE
INDEX [not included]

CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS

I.

As the nineteenth century recedes into history and the essentially
romantic quality of its great adventures is confirmed by the
"beauty touched with strangeness" which illumines their true
perspective, we are discovering, what the adventurers themselves
always knew, that the movement for the higher education of women
was not the least romantic of those Victorian quests and stirrings,
and that its relation to the greatest adventure of all, Democracy,
was peculiarly vital and close.

We know that the "man in the street", in the sixties and seventies,
watching with perplexity and