Among women students there are also many of the cerebral type, mentioned above, women who need tenderness neither in the form of friendship nor of love; yes, who fear in both a bond for their “free individuality.” These take part in sports, discuss, jest, with their fellow men students, openhearted and unconcerned, without thinking whether they please or not. All these young girls now go about with perfect freedom; even in the Romance countries, a young woman can now go alone with her bag of books or her racquet. For in circles where study has not yet exercised its freeing influence, sport has brought this about.
In America, student life, because of the early entrance of the men into the professions, becomes more a one-sided, feminine comrade life. There, the women have to develop their arts of the toilet for each other, whom they find more interesting, more worthy of pleasing than the masculine sex. Even in Europe, feminine comradeship in the student years is at times most intimate. For a friendship between a young girl and a young man often ends with love—on one side. Or in an intimate circle A has fallen in love with B, but B with C, etc. Such eventualities the wise girl will avoid for they can bring both suffering and obstruction to her work. With women comrades, she has, without this risk, an interchange of ideas which promotes study, deepens culture, opens up new views, and gives to all new impulses. There exists, at least at the present time, a difference between the masculine and feminine method of inquiry, of solving problems, of apprehending ideas, which results in the fact that comradeship between women cannot take the place of comradeship between men and women. It is, however, for deep and beautiful natures often impossible at the beginning of life to be capable, in a spiritual sense, of more than a single friendship with their own sex; for each new spiritual contact becomes a new and difficult problem. For such men or women a friendship with a comrade of their own sex is often the richest advantage of their student time. Often a student in good circumstances finds her joy in taking care of some lonely comrades. They find at her apartments, in a friendly welcome, a few flowers and pictures, a teakettle, a fireplace, that feeling of homely warmth for which the shivering students have longed,—a longing which has often driven a lonely, impressionable youth from the dreary students’ room to “rough pleasures.” Now when he leaves the little comrade circle, his sweetest memories of home, his finest dreams, vibrate in him. And the timid girl goes in the certainty that there is another girl who is concerned about her wretched fate.