, Geology, Physics, and Psychology,
had lost their laboratories, their equipment, their lecture rooms;
that twenty-eight recitation rooms, all the administrative offices,
the offices of twenty departments, the assembly hall, the study
hall, had all been swept away. Yet, in a little less than three
weeks, there had sprung up on the campus a temporary building
containing twenty-nine lecture and recitation rooms, thirteen
department offices, fifteen administrative offices, three dressing
rooms, and a reception room. Plumbing, steam heat, electricity,
and telephone service had been installed. A week after college
opened for the spring term, classes were meeting in the new building.
During that first week, offices and classes had been scattered all
over the campus,--in the Society houses, in the basements of
dormitories, the Art Building, the Chemistry Building, the Gymnasium,
the basement of the Library, the Observatory, the Stone Hall Botany
Laboratories, Billings Hall; all had opened their doors wide. The
two hundred and sixteen residents of old College Hall had all been
housed on the campus; it meant doubling up in single rooms, but
the doublets persuaded themselves and the rest of the college
that it was a lark.

This spirit of helpfulness and cheer began on the day of the fire,
and seems to have acquired added momentum with the passing months.
Clothes, books, money, were loaned as a matter of course. By
half past nine o'clock in the morning, the secretary of the dean
had written out from memory the long schedule of the June examinations,
to be posted at the beginning of the spring term. Members of
the faculty were conducting a systematic search for salvage among
the articles that had been dumped temporarily in the "Barn" and the
library; homes had been found for the houseless teachers, most
of whom had lost everything they possessed; several members of
the faculty had no permanent home but the college, and their worldly
goods were stored in the attic from which nothing could be saved.
It is said that when President Pendleton, in chapel, told the
students to go home as soon as they had collected their possessions,
"an unmistakable ripple of girlish laughter ran through the
dispossessed congregation." This was the Franciscan spirit in
which Wellesley women took their personal losses. For the general
losses, all mourned together, but with hope and courage. In the
Department of Physics, all the beautiful instrum