A Girls Student Days and After | Page 6

long dreary years are really over, lived through, and the poor forlorn
freshman is metamorphosed into the senior, they weep again. Is it not
strange that these seniors who wept on entering school should weep
also when leaving it? It looks in the end as if Phoebe Pamela were sure
to get well. Yet the effort to get well requires a fine effort at
self-control,--an effort every girl is the better for making, although it
may take everything plucky in a girl to "back up" her intention to
remain in school. The earlier the student considers this question of

homesickness the better. Let her face its possibilities before she goes
away from home, and make up her mind, if she is attacked, resolutely
to overcome it. If it comes, let her never give up the struggle, for, by
giving in, she will only lose ground in every way, morally, socially,
intellectually. By her cowardice she will part with what she can never
recover later.
Many temptations follow in the wake of homesickness, and the most
serious of all is to make friends too rapidly. It may be laid down as a
rule that a friendship formed on this stop-gap principle, and too rapidly,
is not likely to endure. Such a friendship is not a sane or a wise relation,
for friendship is like scholarship: if it is worth anything at all it comes
slowly. Impulsive, quickly forced friendships are not wise investments;
the very fact that they come so quickly implies an unbalanced state of
idealizing, or lack of self-control. This does not mean that one is not to
form pleasant acquaintances from the very beginning of the school life.
Acquaintanceship always holds something in reserve and is the safest
prelude to a deeper and more vital friendship.
There is no denying that there is great temptation to violent admirations
and attractions in school. In the first place, in school or college the girl
is brought into contact with a large circle of people who are immensely
interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is full of novelty, of the
unusual. Some of the students and teachers whom she meets for the
first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than her own home
life has given her. They are often new types and new types are always
interesting.
I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship--it plays its part in
other books. It would seem sometimes as if almost too much emphasis
had been placed upon the making of friendships in school,--friendship
which is, after all, but a by-product, the most valuable it is true,
nevertheless a by-product of the life. Wholly practical are the tests of
friendship which I shall give. In the first place a friend is too absorbing
who takes all of one's interest to the exclusion of everything else: there
should be interest in other people, other activities as well as in one's
work. Such a friendship can only make a girl forget for what she has

come to school. The new relation which disposes one to look with less
respect and affection upon one's own people and home--and they, be it
remembered, have stood the most valuable test of all, the test of
time--cannot be a good influence. It may be said in general that an
association which is developing the less fine traits in one's character,
giving emphasis to the less worthy sides, should be relinquished
immediately, even at the cost of much heartache. The heartache will be
only temporary; the bad influence might become permanent. On the
other hand, since friendship is giving as well as taking, one does well to
consider the fact that if one's own part in it does not tell for good, there
is just as much reason for stopping the friendship where it is. Some of
these associations--and this is a hard saying, I know--which seem
everything at the time are nothing, as the years will prove. A girl
idealizes, and idealizes those who are not worthy. Inevitably the day
comes when she laughs at herself,--if she does not do worse and pity
herself for having been such a goose.
Only a few of the friendships made in school are destined to endure.
One of the foremost of those that last is founded on similarity of
interest. Perhaps it is the girl with whom one has worked side by side in
the laboratory,--a relation formed slowly and on a permanent basis.
Many of the best of friends have come together through community of
interests, and this is a type of friendship for which men have a greater
gift than women.
There is still another type which develops because of some
conspicuously noble or fine quality which proves attractive. Hero
worship, this, which enlarges one's self through the admiration