A White Bird Flying by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Youth sees life as a plot, a gay, romantic adventuresome plot. But they who have lived past their youthfulness, know that life does not arrange itself forever in well-defined patterns, nor does it always arrive at solutions. Life is like a river--a groping, pulsing river, endlessly rising and falling, finding its way through mists and shadows to some far sea. Every human is a part of the interminable flow. Every human is a part of the story. One life touches another and is gone. There is contact for a brief time,--an influence for good or ill. And the river goes on, endlessly rising and falling, finding its way to the sea.

Laura's sophomore and junior years carried her a little farther toward that unknown shore, other lives touching her own, leaving their imprint. Classes in Narration and English Composition turned to Poetics and Advanced Narration. Philosophy and Child Psychology were left behind. Psychology of the Emotions and Mental Hygiene entered. Laura moved down on second floor and back on third. She roomed during different semesters with the Carmen-looking girl and the little Dresden-china blonde and a sloe-eyed freshman. She attended ball games and sang lustily with twenty-five thousand others: "There Is No Place Like Nebraska" and, carried away by mass emotion, at the moment would have cheerfully bared her breast for a sacrificial pound of flesh if Nebraska, in the guise of Shylock, had demanded it. She went in and out of the Alpha Beta house with all the intimacy of her own home, and when, between courses at the candle-lighted dinner table, the girls sang: "Alpha Beta, I Love You, " and she saw the familiar faces of her sisters all about her, she would have thrown herself loyally on a burning pyre for Alpha Beta. But luckily, Alpha Beta required no such offerings to the gods. She wanted merely that one keep up to standard the honor of the house, which translated, meant scholarship, campus activities, appearance, and a high rate of dating.