Jean Webster

“ Priscilla asked solicitously. "Don't you feel well?"
Patty sighed. "I'm getting old," she said.
"You're getting what?"
"Old. Soon I'll be thirty, and then forty, and then fifty; and do you think any one will love me then if I deal in subterfuges and evasions? Character, my dear girls, is a plant of slow growth, and the seeds must be planted early."
"You went and told the committee voluntarily,—of your own accord,—without even waiting to be called up?" Georgie persisted, determined to get at the facts of the case.
"I'm getting old," repeated Patty. "It's time I was getting good. ”

“ She was greeted in the study with a cry of welcome.
"Well, Patty," said Priscilla, "I hear you've been taking a walk with the bishop. Did you tell him you'd cut chapel?"
"I did; and he said he wished he might have cut, too."
"She's incorrigible," sighed Georgie; "she's even been corrupting the bishop."
"You'd better be careful, Patty Wyatt," warned Bonnie Connaught. "Self-Government will get you if you don't watch out, and then you'll be sorry when they take you off the Senior Prom." ”

“ This happy, irresponsible community life, which had come to be the only natural way of living, was suddenly at an end. She remembered the first day of being a freshman, when everything but herself had looked so big, and she had thought desperately, "Four years of this!" ”

“ Involuntarily she prepared for flight; but the bishop had spied her, together with a little rustic seat under a tree, and he smiled upon the one and dropped down upon the other with a sigh of content.
"A beautiful view," he gasped; "but a very steep hill."
"It is steep," Patty agreed politely; and as there seemed to be no chance of escape, she resumed her seat and added, with a laugh: "I have just run away from you, Bishop Copeley, and here you come following along behind like an accusing conscience."
I have just run away from you, Bishop Copeley
The bishop chuckled. ”

“ They all seem to think, you know, that because we come to college we must be monsters of reason, and they urge us to remember that reason and science are not the only things that count in the world—that feeling is, after all, the main factor ”

“ She would have to say good-by, with no opening day in the fall—and Priscilla lived in California and Georgie in South Dakota and Bonnie in Kentucky and she in New England, and they were the only people in the world she particularly cared to talk to. She would have to get acquainted with her mother's friends—with chronically grown-up people, who talked about husbands and children and servants. And there would be men. She had never had time to know many men ”

“ She was worshiping under the blue sky, to the jubilant chanting of the birds. ”

“ That wasn't what yours was about?" she asked anxiously.
"Not this time," said the bishop; "I preached an old one."
"It's the best way," said Patty. "We're human beings, if we do come to college. I remember once we had a man from Yale or Harvard or some such place, and he preached an old sermon: he urged us to become more manly. It was very refreshing."
The bishop smiled. "Do you run away from church very often?" he inquired mildly.
"No; I don't have a chance when I room with Priscilla. But obligatory chapel makes you want to run away," she added. "It's not the chapel I object to ”