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U.S. Nat. Mus. Wash. D.C.
23 March 1948.

Dear Doris:

We were relieved to hear from you yesterday and that you had gotten thru your exams all right. What is this paper? Purely a voluntary free-for-all try for a prize? Or do you have it in some lit course? By the time you get this it will be in, I suppose. I don't see but what you are having interesting dates with interesting boys, who in general are over the callow youthful period. Nelson sounds like a nice chap, a poor lonely soul, I take it, since his rejection by Jean. And the Fritzer, Jenks, sounds nice, if he doesn't drink too much. What does he drink? Just beer? It can't be very strong stuff to keep it up all the evening.

Dolores called up last evening again, to ask when you were to get here. She is in the midst of her exams. She says they have them all the time. She got 68 on her zoology, she says it is awfully hard, but she likes it. Gentlemen's Agreement has just arrived here, this Thurs. and when I told her you had been to see it, she said she would make the effort too. She wants to do everything you do. I don't tell about all the times you go out, of course.

Dad says there is a lab job at Beltsville that he has been investigating, just a temporary summer one, that you might like. It would pay well, and wouldn't be very strenuous.

It is a rainy morning, a warm rain, and the leaves are coming out. When we drove about the Basin we found the cherry blossoms opening. They will last over Easter, but not much longer if this warm weather holds. I brought in a great armful of forsythia to distribute about the museum. Chapin who bought a house in West Medway last fall asked me if it grew up in Mass and said he meant to set some out up there.

Helen Curtis wrote me a note that Dorothy has a job at the Emerson College of Oratory. She said that the snow had all gone up there, to their relief. Grandma wrote too that at last she was able to get out doors. I bet Mrs. B is on the rampage, with movies every afternoon and bridge parties in between. Miss Colcord thinks her job hunting up the bibliography of shipworms may take her up to Duxbury this summer and a spell at the M.C.Z. She is quite enthusiastic over such a program. I tell her to wait till warm weather for it, and she nods in wise assent. I am glad you went in to see Miss Bryant, she is such a serene soul with the accumulation of years of wisdom. You know when she was in her 3rd year at Radcliffe her father died and she had to get to work and couldn't finish. She was taken on as Emerton's asst. (he was the famous spider man) and when he died he left her enough money to keep on in spider work -- it was tied up with her job there.

Now I must get to work. It is dark as a dungeon up in the Dome to-day.

Love,
Mother.