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 CHAPTER V: TRANSITIONAL

I

ND so it was with a great fear in my heart that, in the course of time and after I had learned as little as it was decent for Philadelphia girls to learn in the days before Bryn Mawr, I left the Convent altogetlier for Philadelphia. I can smile now in recalling the old fear, but it was no smiling matter at seventeen: a weeping matter rather, and many were the tears I shed in secret over the prospect before me. My holidays had not revealed Philadelphia to me as a place of evil and many dangers. But as I was to live there, it represented the world,—the sinful world, worse, the unknown world, to battle with whose temptations my life and training at the Convent had been the preparation.

It added to the danger that sin could wear so peaceful an aspect and temptation keep so comfortably out of sight. During an interval, longer than I cared to have it, for I did not "come out" at once as a Philadelphia girl should and at the Convent I had made few Philadelphia friends, my personal knowledge of Philadelphia did not go much deeper than its house fronts. For the most part they bore the closest family resemblance to those of Eleventh and Spruce, with the same suggestion of order and repose in their well-washed marble steps and