“I never knew before that there were so many kinds of people in the world—­girls, I mean.  All parts of the country are represented, and I suppose I shall always judge different cities and states by the girls they send here.  There is a California freshman who is quite tall, like the redwood trees, I suppose.  And there is a little girl in my class—­she seems little—­from Omaha who lives on a hilltop out there where she can see the Missouri River—­and when her father first settled there, Indians were still about.  She is the nicest and gentlest girl I know, and yet she brings before me all those pioneer times and makes me think how fast the country has grown.  And there is a Virginia girl in my corridor who has the most wonderful way of talking, and there’s history in that, too,—­the history of all the great war and the things you fought for; but I was almost sorry to have to let her know that you fought on the other side, but I did tell her.  I never realized, just from books and maps, that the United States is so big.  The girls bring their local backgrounds with them—­the different aims and traits. . . .  I have drawn a map of the country and named all the different states and cities for the girls who come from them, but this is just for my own fun, of course. . . .  I never imagined one would have preferences and like and dislike people by a kind of instinct, without really knowing them, but I’m afraid I do it, and that all the rest of us do the same. . . .  Nothing in the world is as interesting as people—­just dear, good folksy people!”

The correspondence her dormitory neighbors carried on with parents and brothers and sisters and friends impressed her by its abundance; and she is to be pardoned if she weighed the letters, whose home news was quoted constantly in her hearing, against her own slight receipts at the college post-office.  She knew that every Tuesday morning there would be a letter from her grandfather.  Her old friend Dr. Wandless sent occasionally, in his kindly humorous fashion, the news of Buckeye Lane and the college; and Mrs. Owen wrote a hurried line now and then, usually to quote one of John Ware’s sayings.  The minister asked about Sylvia, it seemed.  These things helped, but they did not supply the sympathy, of which she was conscious in countless ways, between her fellow students and their near of kin.  With the approach of holiday times, the talk among her companions of the homes that awaited them, or, in the case of many, of other homes where they were to visit, deepened her newly awakened sense of isolation.  Fathers and mothers appeared constantly to visit their daughters, and questions that had never troubled her heart before arose to vex her.  Why was it, when these other girls, flung together from all parts of the country, were so blest with kindred, that she had literally but one kinsman, the grandfather on whom all her love centred?

It should not be thought, however, that she yielded herself morbidly to these reflections, but such little things as the receipt of gifts, the daily references to home affairs, the photographs set out in the girls’ rooms, were not without their stab.  She wrote to Professor Kelton:—­