"We were born Bohemians," Gertrude wrote about Leo and herself. Accordingly, they moved into a house and proceeded to shock the southern neighbours with their wild western ways. On the walls were Japanese prints, on their furniture, footmarks. The brother and sister took pleasure in looking "ratty," Gertrude uncorseted and besandalled. In the laboratory she was sloppy, always stained and in a muddle.

She stuck it out for four years; the first two interested her. She enjoyed doing research on the brain, enjoyed writing a comparative study which Dr. Llewellys Barger incorporated in his book. However, the faculty and students criticized her constantly, and, by the third year, Gertrude was overwhelmingly bored. Says the Author's Journal: "There was a good deal of intrigue and struggle among the students that she liked, but the practice and theory of medicine did not interest her at all."

Gertrude never got her medical degree. Once having admitted boredom, she stopped studying. After final examinations, her professor suggested summer school. Replied Miss Stein, "I have so much inertia and so little initiative that very possibly if you had not kept me from taking my degree, I would have, well, not taken to the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology and you don't know how little I like pathological psychology and how all medicine bores me."

No one is sure whether Gertrude regretted her brave words. Some critics maintain that she never recovered from the defeat. In any case, she left education behind at the age of twenty-six. In the spring of 1902 she joined Leo in England.

Leo always referred to Gertrude's early days as the best period of her life: the days before she caught what he called "the absurd notion of genius." Later, when she visited America in 1934, she had become a Lion. On her one-night stay in Cambridge, when she lectured to Harvard and Radcliffe, Miss Stein wrote:

"It was funny about Cambridge it was the one place that there was nothing there nothing that I recognized nothing. Considering that I had spent four years there it was sufficiently astonishing that there was nothing that I remembered at all.... I lost Cambridge then and there. That is funny."

The Lion never returned, not to Cambridge, nor to America