About this time a letter from home brought her a sharp disappointment.  Ethel was not a good correspondent, but during the homesick winter months she had written several times to three of the girls she had known in school.  Two had gone west, but the other one was still in Ohio and was planning to come to New York, to take a course of training as nurse in one of the hospitals.  In fact it had been all arranged.  And Ethel had not realized how much she had counted on this friend, until now a letter came announcing her engagement to a young doctor in Detroit.  She was going there to live, and her letter was full of her happiness.  Ethel was very blue that night.

But only a few days after this she received another missive that had quite a different effect.  It was a long bulky epistle, a “round robin” from the members of the little high school club to which she had belonged at home.  The girls had scattered far and wide.  One was teaching music in an Oklahoma town; another had gone to Cleveland and was a stenographer in a broker’s office there; a third was in Chicago, the wife of a young lawyer; and a fourth had married an engineer who was working a mine in Montana.  It made an absorbing narrative, and she read it several times.  At first it took her out of herself, far, far out all over the land.  How good it was to get news of them all, how nice and gossipy and gay.  It was almost as though they were here in the room; she seemed to be talking with each one; and as they chatted on and on, the feeling grew in Ethel that each was starting like herself and that some were having no easy time in unfamiliar places.  She could read between the lines.

But the part that struck her most was the contribution of their former history “prof,” a little lame woman with snappy black eyes, who had been the leading spirit in their long discussions.  She was an ardent suffragist, and she it was who had brought so many modern books and plays and “movements” into their talk.  Chained to her job in the small town, she had followed voraciously all the news of the seething changing world outside, of the yeast at work in the cities.  And to the letters of some of the girls who seemed bent upon nothing but social success, the little teacher now replied by an appeal to all of them: 

“Girls, some of these letters worry me.  I don’t want to preach—­you will lead your own lives.  But I cannot help reminding you of the things we talked about—­the splendid things, exciting things that are stirring in this land today.  Oh, what a chance for women—­what openings with narrow doors—­what fights to make the doorways wide for the girls who will come after you!  Keep yourselves strong and awake and alive—­keep growing—­remember that life is a school and for you it has only just begun.  Don’t sit at your desks—­in your homes, I mean—­blinking with a man at your side.  Keep yourselves free—­don’t marry for money—­don’t let yourselves get under the thumb of any husband, rich or poor, or of social position or money or clothes or any such silly trumpery.  Get the real things!  Oh, I’m preaching, I know, as I did in spite of myself at home.  But girls—­dear friends and comrades—­be strong—­and don’t give up the ship!”