There were many kinds of handwriting here, and widely different stories of the growth, the swift unfolding, of the lives of a new generation of women.

"Girls like me." She read it through.
Then she took up her pen and began to write swiftly: "I have been here for over three years--but it was hard to write before, because everything was far from clear." She stopped and frowned.

"How much shall I tell them ?" An eagerness to be frank and tell all was mingled with that feeling of Anglo-Saxon reticence which had been bred in Ethel's soul back in the town in Ohio.

"Besides, I haven't time," she thought.
"I feel," she wrote, "as though I were just out of danger--barely out.
In danger, I mean, of nervously dashing about after nothing until I got wrinkled and old at forty--nerves in shreds.

I might have done that.