As the electric trolley turned the corner onto Raymond Avenue, the driver sang out, “Vassar College!” The elongated vowels of his coarse New York accent reverberated off the walls, though every woman sitting on the wooden seats was already poised to disembark. Anita Hemmings smiled at two freshman girls who looked at once delighted and struck by nerves, and walked down the steps to collect her suitcases. Her trunk had been sent ahead and would be waiting for her in the school’s congested luggage room, then brought up to her quarters by a porter.
The New York town of Poughkeepsie had boasted a trolley only since 1894. In her freshman year, Anita had arrived with her cases in a shaky horse-drawn tram, dusty and soot-colored, and painted with the words hudson river r.r. depot and a large gold number four. But for the past three years, Vassar students had pulled up in the efficient trolley, and she couldn’t think of a better way to approach the Lodge, the handsome, red-brick gatehouse that served as the campus’s entrance and guard post. Anita glanced up at the clock atop its simple façade, centered above four long windows. It was almost five o’clock. She had left Boston at just past seven in the morning and hadn’t encountered any other Vassar girl until she changed trains in Albany. Now she was just steps away from her favorite sliver of the world, the college where she would reside for one more year.
Anita had never lived in a building that could be described as handsome until she went off to school, first in Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley, then at Vassar. Her hometown of Boston was crowded with elegant structures: stately brick houses you could stroll past, imagining the favored lives transpiring inside. But she had never had more than a glimpse of their sumptuous interiors. Here, on the vast expanse of land Vassar occupied a few miles from the gently curving Hudson River, every inch was hers—shared with 522 other girls, but still hers…
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