Cambridge sketches
Estelle M. H. Merrill, Ed.

To men and women of Cambridge our old Fay House is well known. Many a time, bound, perhaps, on social pleasure, accepting the invitation of an “Annex maid” to an Idler tea, they have entered the wide doorway, walked through the broad hall to the drawing-room, where hangs the portrait of Mrs. Agassiz, our president, and where, I am glad to say, during the past winter, Radcliffe students have been able to find, many hours during the day, Miss Agnes Irwin, our dean.

From the drawing-room these guests have doubtless gone through our little conversation room with its magazines and papers, its well worn copies of Life; and from here, where groups of girls may usually be found discussing any topic under the sun, from the latest fashion to the automaton theory, our friends probably passed on to the auditorium. Yet who at an Idler tea can imagine the pleasures which have been in that auditorium. Before the guest appears a crowd of youths and maidens. Tables are spread, music sounds. But all this reveals not at all the scene of many a Friday afternoon when the Idler Club meets and the little stage of the auditorium, with its walls of soft green and pillars of cream white, becomes the stage for a play. And only with vivid imagination, brought into most active service, can our guests picture to themselves the auditorium when Professor Norton, Professor Goodwin, Mrs. Laura Ormiston Chant, Major Brewer of the Salvation Army, or Miss Helena Dudley, of Denison House, the Boston college settlement, have stood before the Radcliffe students and spoken on some subject which interested all.

Though Fay House at an Idler tea has proved a pleasant place to many, did I wish to made Fay House dear to a friend. I should lead her blindfold