Page 66 - 1916 February - To Dragma

TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 145

T H E POEMS OF A GREAT TEACHER

T H E R E has been recently published by Houghton, Mifflin and
Co. of Boston the poems of Alice Freeman Palmer—she who
was president of Wellesley College at the age of twenty-six, who by
the end of the first week of the college year knew every one of her
girls by name, and whose great genius lay in finding the best in every
girl. The poems, like the Life published in 1908, are edited by
her husband, Prof. George H . Palmer, and the volume is called
A Marriage Cycle.

We quote from it one short poem. I t is so typical of what its
author must have been.

OPPORTUNITY MISSED

I meant to be so brave and strong,
And change your burden into song;
liut yet—but yet—you went away
With all unsaid I longed to say!

WO U R N A T I O N A L S T A N D I N G
H A T constitutes the national standing of a fraternity? We
were discussing this subject not long since in our local
Panhellenic. One of our Pi Phi's was inclined to believe that the
strength of a fraternity's national standing lay i n the number and
strength of its alumna? organizations; and the other, remembering
Pi Phi's own splendid work in the Tennessee mountains, said that
definite service to the world meant efficiency of national standing.
A Theta insisted that such standing was due to the placing of chap-
ters only in colleges and universities of highest grade. A girl just
out of college declared that it depended upon the number of chap-
ters, and though we "old graduates" all pounced upon her, we
tried in vain to convince her that she was wrong.

One of our own girls had not vouchsafed an opinion, and we
were waiting for her. I t was rather a long time before she spoke.

" I think you're all rather straining at gnats," she said at last. " I
don't believe national standing rests on any of those things. I
think it's nearer home than that. To tell the truth I believe it
rests just on individual responsibility. I believe the members of our
active chapters hold it in their power to make our national standing
strong or weak. Three careless girls in each chapter, especially i f
they are given positions of responsibility, as so often unfortunately
happens, can lower our standing nationally. Carelessness in dress
0 r behavior, lack of responsibility in the running of a chapter house,
laxity in the matter of grades—all of these things hurt national
standing, because they hurt the reputation of the respective chapters,