“Of course, of course you can’t drop your grandmother’s name-ah, but-ah--why, it is all as clear as can be now--‘Minnie’ is only the nickname for ‘Mary’--your grandmother’s name was Mary, even if they called her familiarly ‘Minnie’; and all you need to do is to use your grandmother’s real name instead of her nickname.” And he beamed on her benevolently. Belle hesitated, but his charm of manner won the day. The alteration was made, the obnoxious “Minnie” gave place to “Mary,” and we were smilingly turned over to other members of the Faculty, who questioned us on chemistry and botany, in which, I believe, we did fairly well. We read the easy Latin at sight, conjugated a few verbs (I remember how they tried to conceal their smiles at our faulty pronunciation--we knew it was faulty, for we had shifted from the Roman to the English method, and our hybrid pronunciation was enough to excite mirth). When it came to physics, always a difficult study for me, we floundered and failed ignominiously. I’m sure I did the worse, for Belle could reason out such things pretty well, while I never could. We were “conditioned” in physics, and in a month’s time were to be examined again. Although they were very kind, we felt disgraced. Realizing that we had failed in one study, and probably had been leniently passed in others, we felt ourselves the ignorant, homeless creatures that we were. They told us to come the next day at ten for the opening lecture. Copying several addresses from the bulletin board, we trudged out of the big building, with our satchels and lunch-boxes in our hands. A fine rain was falling; it seemed later in the day than it was. We were adrift in that great city. Deciding to look up none of the addresses till the morrow, we started for the Young Women’s Christian Association, of which we had heard before leaving home. Belle thought that when we got out to Washington Street she could get her bearings and easily find Warrenton Street, where the Association building was. But on reaching there, she could not be sure whether to go up or down; so we plodded on, not knowing whether we were going toward or away from our hoped-for destination. Everyone we accosted was kind, but no one knew where Warrenton Street was. Car after car would go by, but we did not know what one to take. The only policemen we could discover were on the cars. We laughed miserably as we thought of our parents’ injunctions to “ask a policeman.” The Boston policemen didn’t like walking in the rain.