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: