Free When Patty Went to College by Jean Webster Page A

lot--but she couldn't express it."
    "That's just like me."
    "Ah, it's like a good many people." A silence ensued, and the freshmen looked at one another dejectedly. "But you can live, even if you should flunk math," Patty continued reassuringly. "Other people have done it before you."
    "If it were only geometry--but we're scared over Latin."
    "Oh, Latin! There's no use studying for that, for you can't possibly read it all over, and if you just pick out a part, it's sure not to be the same part they pick out. The best way is to say incantations over the book, and open it with your eyes blindfolded, and study the page it opens to; then, in case you don't pass,--and you probably won't,--you can throw the blame on fate. My freshman year, if I remember right, they gave us for prose composition one of Emerson's essays to translate into Latin, and we couldn't even tell what it meant in English."
    The three looked at one another again.
    "I couldn't do anything like that."
    "Nor I."
    "Nor I."
    "Nor any one else," said Patty.
    "We can flunk Latin and math; but if we flunk any more we're gone."
    "I believe so," said Patty.
    "And I'm awfully shaky in German."
    "And I in French."
    "And I in Greek."
    "I don't know anything about German," said Patty. "Never had it myself. But I remember hearing Priscilla say that the printed examination papers didn't come but in time, and Fräulein Scherin, who writes a frightful hand, wrote the questions on the board in German script, and they couldn't even read them. In French I believe the first question was to write out the 'Marseillaise'; there are seven verses, and no one had learned them, and the 'Marseillaise,' you know, is a thing that you simply can't make up on the spur of the moment. As for Greek, I told you my own experience; I am sure nothing could be worse than that."
    The freshmen looked at one another hopelessly. "There's only English and hygiene and Bible history left."
    "English is something you can't tell anything about," said Patty. "They're as likely as not to ask you to write a heroic poem in iambic pentameters, if you know what they are. You have to depend on inspiration; you can't study for it."
    "I hope," sighed Lady Clara, "to get through hygiene and Bible history, though, as they only count one hour apiece, I suppose it isn't much."
    "You mustn't be too sanguine," said Patty. "It all depends on chance. The class in hygiene is so big that the professor hasn't time to read the papers; he just goes down the list and flunks every thirteenth girl. I'm not sure about Bible history, but I think he does the same, because I know, freshman year, that I made a mistake and handed in my map of the Holy Lands done in colored chalk to the hygiene professor, and my chart of the digestive system to the Bible professor, and neither of them noticed it. They did look a good deal alike, but not so much but what you could tell them apart. All I have to say is that I hope none of you will be number thirteen."
    The freshmen stared at one another in speechless horror, and Patty rose. "Well, good-by, my children, and, above all things, don't worry. I'm glad if I've been able to cheer you up a little, for so much depends on not being nervous. Don't believe any of the silly stories the sophomores tell," she called back over her shoulder; "they're just trying to frighten you."
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    X
    "Per l'Italia"
    College is a more or less selfish place. Everybody is so busy with her own affairs that she has no time to give to her neighbor, unless her neighbor has something to give in return. Olivia Copeland apparently had nothing to give in return. She was quiet and inconspicuous, and it took a second glance to realize that her face was striking and that there was a look in her eyes that other freshmen did not have. By an unfelicitous chance she was placed in the same study with Lady Clara Vere de Vere and Emily Washburn. They thought her foreign and queer, and she thought them crude and boisterous, and after the first