She was like a person recovered from a fever who finds mere health a condition of joy.  She went back to her music, to her neglected books, with a singing heart.  And in accordance with the curious ways of Providence, noted in the proverb relating the different fates of him who hath and him who hath not, there was at once added to her pleasure in the old elements of her life the very elements she had longed for unavailingly.  Seeing her friendly and shining of face, friendliness went out to her.  She had made many new acquaintances during her brief glittering flight and had innumerable more points of contact with the University life than before.  She was invited to a quite sufficient number of hops and proms, had quite the normal number of masculine “callers,” and was naively astonished and disillusioned to find that those factors in life were by no means as entirely desirable and amusing as her anguished yearning had fancied them.  She joined one of the literary societies and took a leading part in their annual outdoor play.  At the beginning of her Junior year, Judith entered as a Freshman and thereafter became a close companion.  Sylvia devoured certain of her studies, history, and English, and Greek, with insatiable zest and cast aside certain others like political economy and physics, which bored her, mastering just enough of their elements to pass an examination and promptly forgetting them thereafter.  She grew rapidly in intellectual agility and keenness, not at all in philosophical grasp, and emotionally remained as dormant as a potato in a cellar.

She continually looked forward with a bright, vague interest to “growing up,” to the mastery of life which adolescents so trustfully associate with the arrival of adult years.  She spent three more years in college, taking a Master’s degree after her B.A., and during those three years, through the many-colored, shifting, kaleidoscopic, disorganized life of an immensely populous institution of learning, she fled with rapid feet, searching restlessly everywhere for that entity, as yet non-existent, her own soul.

She had, in short, a thoroughly usual experience of modern American education, emerging at the end with a vast amount of information, with very little notion of what it was all about, with Phi Beta Kappa and a great wonder what she was to do with herself.

Up to that moment almost every step of her life had been ordered and systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the goal of her diploma.  Rushing forward with the accumulated impetus of years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal ... and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of her feminine classmates in a blind alley. “Now what?” they asked each other with sinking hearts.  Judith looked over their heads with steady eyes which saw but one straight and narrow path in life, and passed on by them into the hospital where she began her nurse’s training.  Sylvia began to teach music to a few children, to take on some of Reinhardt’s work as he grew older.  She practised assiduously, advanced greatly in skill in music, read much, thought acutely, rebelliously and not deeply, helped Lawrence with his studies ... and watched the clock.