Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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There were several men’s fraternities in the college; most of the boys belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of the fraternities to put their pins on acceptable town and college girls. You were a Delta girl, or a Gamma girl or a Phi Psi girl. I resented this effort to tag me. Why should I not have friends in all the fraternities? And I had; I accumulated four pins and then, one disastrous morning, went into chapel with the four pins on my coat. There were a few months after that when, if it had not been for two or three non-Frat friends, I should have been a social outcast.

I spent four years in Allegheny College. Measured by what I got instead of by what I did not get and was obliged to learn later, I regard them as among the most profitable of my life. I find often that men and women accuse the college of not opening their minds to life as it is in the world. For a mind sufficiently developed to see “life as it is” I cannot conceive a more fruitful field than the classics. If I had been sufficiently mature I could have learned from George Haskins’ teachings of Cicero and Tacitus and Livy more than I know today about the ways of men in their personal and their national relations, more of the causes of war, of the weaknesses of governments. But I was not ready for it. Life is the great teacher, and she leads us step by step. It is not the fault of the human teacher that his pupil must learn to climb by climbing.