Chapter XV
Conclusion
The first shovelful of earth was turned for Wellesley College the day before I was born, and when I was ready to enter as a student, only eleven classes had been graduated. Yet to me, coming as I did, from the embryonic, frontier college, with its single building in a waste of cactus and sagebrush, Wellesley, with its many dignified buildings set beside Lake Waban in a campus of sweeping lawns and stately trees, seemed an institution not only honorable, but ancient. Because of my three earlier visits in the East, the conditions of climate and of village life were not unknown to me, but it was the four continuous college years spent in the environment to which my race was wont, and to which my instinct responded, that brought me my heritage of joy in the slipping seasons, and made possible an understanding reading of the songs of our English tongue from “Sumer is icumen in” to “When lilacs last in the door yard bloomed.”
Wellesley’s hills and meadows, her trees, her birds, her lake brought me an ecstasy that lingers; her out-of-doors became an integral part of me, stored pictures of the wide whiteness of winter, with snow-laden firs or interlacing crystal branches, or of an autumn
