Fifteen is the minimum age at which any are admitted, even for the preparatory classes; but no girl of fifteen has the poise, the _settledness_ of nerve and muscle and brain to enable her to bear uninjured the immense strain that the mere living in such a great family necessitates. It is almost impossible for any one who has not tried it to understand this; and parents listen with a polite, incredulous smile, when I explain why I think it unwise for their bright young daughters to attempt here the not difficult Latin, mathematics, etc., of the preparatory years. We--the parents and I--agree perfectly that the girls can do the work easily enough, but they, the parents, can not see the difference which is so clear to my mind--as, after these eight years, it could hardly help being--the difference that it will make to the girls whether they do the work in the small classes of the home school, and surrounded in their leisure hours with the freedom and repose of the accustomed family, or in the large classes that are here necessary, and amid the inevitable excitements, outside the recitation room, of a constant residence in a household of five hundred. Again and again I have seen these young students, for, of course, they enter despite my protestations--everybody wants to see the folly of everything for himself--I have seen them succumb to the unwonted nervous tax within a few weeks; others bear up for months, many get through the year and go home to spend their summer vacation in bed--"Vassar victims" all, whose ghosts haunt the clinical records of doctors from Texas to Canada, from Maine to California, and whose influence makes, so far as it is felt, against woman's chances for liberal education; for these failures are counted as natural effects of study, of mental labor which the female organization cannot endure! I have no doubt that, for a respectable minority of these fifteen-year-old girls, life here, with its absolute regularity of hygienic regimen, is less disadvantageous than the mixture of school and "society," in which they would be permitted to dissipate their energies at home; but that does not alter the fact that the vital needs of immaturity, physical, mental, and moral; cannot be most wholesomely met amid conditions so artificial as must obtain in a great educational establishment. With those who enter more advanced classes at an immature age--fortunately, they are very few--the case is still worse, for, in addition to the nervous tax to which I have alluded above, they attempt woman's work with a child's strength. The result is inevitable--a stunted, unsatisfactory womanhood, the penalty for the violating of Nature's law of slow, symmetrical development, is not to be escaped.