Both men and women accepted their rough quarters with few complaints.  Nearly all were obliging and ready to do their best to make up for the deficiencies in bell boys and other hotel accommodations.  We arranged a plan whereby twelve women teachers were to be on duty each day,—­a division of four for morning, afternoon, and evening, respectively.  The number of each woman’s cot and room was placed after her name, and one teacher acted as clerk while the others played bell boy and hunted for those in demand.

And they were overworked!  By five o’clock in the afternoon the parlor of the Exposition Building looked like a hotel lobby in a town where a presidential nominating convention is in session.  To begin with, there were the one hundred and sixty schoolma’ams.  Then the men teachers, who had been assigned to the old nipa artillery barracks, found the women’s parlors a pleasant place in which to spend an odd half-hour, and made themselves at home there.  In addition, each woman seemed to have some acquaintance among the military or civil people of Manila; and officers in white and gold, and women in the creams, blues, and pinks of Filipino jusi thronged the rooms till one could hardly get through the press.  Victorias and carromatas outside were crowded as carriages are about the theatres on grand opera nights at home.

It would have been difficult in all that crowd to say who was there with good and sufficient reason.  Many a man drifted in and out with the hope of picking up acquaintance, and doubtless some were successful.

I was at the desk one day, doing duty for a teacher who was sick, when two forlorn but kind-looking young men approached and asked if I could tell them the names of any of the teachers from Michigan.  We had a list of names arranged by States, and I at once handed this over.  They pored over this long and sorrowfully.  Then one heaved a sigh, and one took me into his confidence.  They were from Michigan, and they had hoped to find, one or the other, an acquaintance on the list.  The eagerness of this hope had even led them to bring a carriage with the ulterior motive of doing the honors of Manila if their search proved successful.  Their disappointment was so heavy, and they were so naively unconscious of anything strained in the situation, that my sympathy was honest and open.  But when they suggested that I introduce them to some of the women teachers from Michigan, and I declined the responsibility as gently as I could, the frigidity of their injured pride made me momentarily abject.  They drifted away and hung about with expectancy printed on their faces—­that and a mingled hate and defiance of the glittering uniforms which quite absorbed all feminine attention and left their civilian dulness completely overshadowed.

One of the Radcliffe maidens had an experience which goes far to show that higher culture does not eradicate the talent for duplicity for which the female sex has long been noted, and which illustrates a happy faculty of getting out of a disagreeable situation.  It also illustrates a singular mingling of unsophistication and astuteness, which may be a result of collegiate training.