Dear classmates:

First congratulations to all who have labored for suffrage! This should be the special greeting of the first class letter written after this great course seems assured!

I cannot put this in the first person, as I have done my bit of talking only in an obscure part of the field: this, like all my other work, being confined to the class room trusting that the (end) will 'take root downward' and, far in the future, 'bear fruit upward'. Still more, have I tried to do this in the cause of prohibition. Since our Goucher days of Economics, I have been so unable to see only one side of a question that my enthusiastic friends often think me lukewarm. So regarding prohibition, I maintain that if our social order were ideal. We should need only temperance; but the world being what it is, I consider prohibition a present need and, coming as it did in this and other countries, part of the Divine Purpose. I have followed the working out of these two courses of righteousness have been like following bright beacons in the denseness and of the conflicts of after-War perplexities and upheavals. How we have all lived many years in one during the time of War, these splendid letters wonderfully testify! Such inspiring chronicles of the times as they are! My own work should count as naught measured by this, for there again I worked chiefly with or through my pupils, whose prejudices I tried to overrule by giving broad and just news in our Current Events Club. They gladly sacrificed their recreation in responding, in varied ways, to the different calls and drives; and the more mature were chaperoned (very properly you may rest assured!) to certain Service Clubs to help entertain 'the soldier boys.' As I happened to travel during the War, I could not but compare the apparently indifferent attitude in the far West and the restrained and reserved form of hospitality of a New England Service Club with the warmth of intense patriotism shown in cities more familiar to me, particularly in Philadelphia. I did not travel to represent a whole course, as many of you did, but went to California in 1917 to visit a former 'old girl' who had passed through (days extra); but I paid other visits and had a vast amount of pleasure throught my whole trip. I was later in New England for the privelege of studying at Harvard.

Like other of you teachers, I have had the pride of sending more than one pupil to Goucher who are now graduates, one having been a member of the class who was specially to 'serenade' '1903' at the time of our fifteenth reunion, consequently. In the midst of our rejuvenating songs and talk, I felt suddenly, but not unpleasantly, (?loary?) when singled out by my 'stately junior'. Thus again I am returning to 'my girls' and very naturally as they are now almost the chief object of my life as, literally, I am more 'unattached' than the others of you who lay claim to that ward. So, when you think of the opportunity for real contact and vital influence given a resident teacher in a boarding school, you must not wonder, as some of you have done, that I do not seek a High School position. Often I feel I have my reward in the many graduates of years back still faithfully keep in touch with me; and in after years, knowing them on a different footing, I even at times have visited some of them in their own homes - and in the home in California I referred to there is a little girl whom I can claim as my name sake.

My church work, too, is bound up with school activities. Howver, other church interests, frequent visits to friends, and my vacation trips, I trust, keep me from being narrow. On my vacation trip this summer I have had the inspiration of a churchworkers' Episcopal Conference at Geneva, NY. In summer, too, in my uncle's home (from which I am now writing) I get a blessed taste of home life, and I think, enough interest in housekeeping to appreciate the (?A Y S?) of the servant problem and the formula of H. C.L.!!

'Round Robin' is not only a sweet link with the past, but a pledge for the future, most of our letters growing more rather than less personal and intimate as the years go by. As our enthusiasm for our faithful bird seems enduring, why may not his flights go on until he will bring us news of the happy homes established by the daughters of '1903'! And how the rest of us who are not mothers may have realized other dreams of a 'peaceful hermitage' or of greater ambition, or of still greater spheres of service!

With this hope, and with heartiest greetings and very best wishes to all,
Very sincerely and cordially yours,
Letitia Everett Ricaud
P.S.

Do make more of a point of mentioning your husbands' occupations. The childrens pictures are so charming I only wish that more should Mother as the (?) Guardian Angel.
L.E.R

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