354 ELIZABETH GARY AGASSIZ 



May 8, [1904] 



DEAR MRS. BRIGGS: It was a great pleasure to have 

 your note after the Radcliffe dance the other evening. 

 I was very sorry not to go and very glad that you were 

 there. It is such a good thing that you are in sym- 

 pathy with their pleasure as well as with their studies. 

 The fact of your having been a "college girl" your- 

 self is so valuable for them and for us. I remember 

 that an English instructress from one of the Oxford 

 Halls for women said to me, "Try always to have a 

 college-bred woman among the officers you will 

 find it an immense help." I think she was right. 

 With affectionate regard, 



Yours truly, 



ELIZABETH C. AGASSIZ 



During the time that the reorganization of the college 

 was being effected, owing to the exceptionally high cost of 

 building, the work on Agassiz House was being delayed, and 

 it was not until March that, according to the record in 

 Mrs. Agassiz's diary, the .clearing of the site, which had 

 been begun in the summer of 1903, was resumed. The 

 building was not completed until 1905, when on June 16 

 it was opened for inspection by invited guests, and on June 

 19 the Auditorium was dedicated by the first performance 

 of Marlowe, a play by Josephine Preston Peabody, a 

 former student of the college. Like Bertram Hall the build- 

 ing owed its perfect appropriateness for its purposes and 

 its beauty of proportion and detail to the architect and to 

 the unerring taste of Mrs. Henry Whitman, who, although 

 she did not live to see the work completed, has in it, as 



