“I wish you would send me your picture of mother.  I often wondered why you didn’t give it to me; won’t you lend it to me now?  I think it is put away in your desk in the library.  Almost all the girls have pictures of their families—­some of them of their houses and even the horse and dog—­in their rooms.  And you must have a new picture taken of yourself—­I’d like it in your doctor’s gown, that they gave you at Williams.  It’s put away in the cedar chest in the attic—­Mary will know where.  And if you have a picture of father anywhere I should like to have that too.”

She did not know that when this reached him—­one of the series of letters on which the old gentleman lived these days, with its Wellesley postmark, and addressed in Sylvia’s clear, running hand, he bowed his white head and wept; for he knew what was in the girl’s heart—­knew and dreaded this roused yearning, and suffered as he realized the arid wastes of his own ignorance.  But he sent her the picture of her mother for which she asked, and had the cottage photographed with Mills Hall showing faintly beyond the hedge; and he meekly smuggled his doctor’s gown to the city and sat for his photograph.  These things Sylvia proudly spread upon the walls of her room.  He wrote to her—­a letter that cost him a day’s labor:—­

“We don’t seem to have any photograph of your father; but things have a way of getting lost, particularly in the hands of an old fellow like me.  However, I have had myself taken as you wished, and you can see now what a solemn person your grandfather is in his toga academica.  I had forgotten I had that silk overcoat and I am not sure now that I didn’t put the hood on wrong-side-out!  I’m a sailor, you know, and these fancy things stump me.  The photographer didn’t seem to understand that sort of millinery.  Please keep it dark; your teachers might resent the sudden appearance in the halls of Wellesley of a grim old professor emeritus not known to your faculty.”

The following has its significance in Sylvia’s history and we must give it place—­this also to her grandfather:—­

“The most interesting lecture I ever heard (except yours!) was given at the college yesterday by Miss Jane Addams, of Hull House, the settlement worker and writer on social reforms.  She’s such a simple, modest little woman that everybody loved her at once.  She made many things clear to me that I had only groped for before.  She used an expression that was new to me, ‘reciprocal obligations,’ which we all have in this world, though I never quite thought of it before.  She’s a college woman herself, and feels that all of us who have better advantages than other people should help those who aren’t taught to climb.  It seems the most practical idea in the world, that we should gather up the loose, rough fringes of society and weave the broken threads into a common warp and woof.  The social fabric is no stronger than its weakest