Chapter 4: Pamela’s Perseverance

When Pamela Northcote first found herself in Cambridge it seemed, as the children say, “too good to be true.” It had long been her dream to study some day under Harvard professors, but in this world dreams so seldom are realized that she was genuinely surprised that her dream had come to pass. Yet Pamela herself had been her own fairy godmother, and to her own efforts she owed her appearance at Radcliffe.

Pamela had been but a little girl when women first began to study at Cambridge. Even then she made up her mind that if she could she would sometime be an Annex student. The road had been a hard one, but here she was. “It’s worth all I’ve been through to come here, worth it all.” Yet she sighed, thinking of her difficulties in getting enough money to warrant her entering Radcliffe.

Pamela had been early left an orphan, and an uncle and aunt had given her a home, if not grudgingly, at least not always cheerfully. They did what they could for her physical comfort, but they would not encourage her in her desire to go to college; and had they been willing to encourage her, they could not have helped her. They had no money to spare for superfluous things, and a college education—at least for a woman—was certainly a superfluity.

That she should go to college had seemed to Pamela a filial duty. Her father, whom she remembered but dimly, had worked his way through a small New England college and later through the Harvard Divinity School. In a trunk of old letters Pamela had found one of her father’s written to her mother when Pamela was a baby. “If our boy had lived I should count no sacrifice too great that would enable me to send him to college.” A diary of her father’s in the same trunk showed Pamela how prayerfully he had dedicated his baby boy to the ministry. But the boy had lived only a year, and Pamela knew that he felt this loss keenly. “If my father had lived he would have wished me to go to college; he would have had me study with him until I was ready. It is my duty to make the most of myself, to be as nearly as I can like what his son might have been.” So Pamela worked and struggled to get a little money together for her college education. Although her desire for a Harvard course seemed presumptuous, Cambridge was her goal. There was a good academy in the town where she lived, and this simplified her preparation. In the vacations she taught a country school, and she decided that when she had three hundred dollars she would venture it all on a year at Cambridge, —provided, of course, that she could pass the examinations. Now it happened that the very year in which she was to be graduated from the academy, a prize was offered by a rich townswoman to be awarded to the student, boy or girl, in the Classical Department who should pass the best examination. Pamela wore herself almost to a shadow studying. She won the prize, a scholarship of two hundred dollars, given on the condition that the winner should spend the money on a college course. Colleges were recommended to Pamela in which this sum would have paid almost the whole cost of tuition and board, but the young girl would have none of these. She saw in the winning of the prize a dispensation that she was to attain her long-cherished hope of going to Cambridge. She passed most of her entrance examinations that spring, drawing somewhat on her slender capital for the journey to Boston, and in September she passed the remainder. On entering Radcliffe, therefore, her assets consisted of three honors from the examinations and three hundred dollars in money. Two-thirds of this money was the academy prize and one-third was her savings of several years. The brain that she had inherited from her father and the courage that had come to her from her mother were not backed by great physical strength. She was stronger, however, than she looked, and she did not fear her course at Radcliffe.