And they love to take Soc. Sci. 2, for it combines sociology and history into a rigorous but functional how-to manual. There the girls who address envelopes for the Young Democrats meet the boys who aspire to the Senate, and on rainy days the girls look more rained on than in other classes.
Whether the girl is noisily career minded or a silent academic recluse, she is likely to have a certain chocolate attitude toward college. To her, the experience of Harvard-Radcliffe is most important for "the infinite opportunities it offers." She sees college primarily as a set of doors to be utilized, rather than a self-sufficient milieu. And so she chooses to compliment another girl by giving her some utilitarian and unfeminine attribute: like "brilliant," "down to earth," "conscious," "alive," or "great" and the like.
If both of these flavors are unsuitable, a girl can still do Radcliffe in lime. For this it is most useful to have been brought up in a family which is professionally intellectual: usually college professors, artists, or writers. It helps to have gone to one of the progressive private schools, where standards are predominantly individualistic and intellectual, rather than social. (With girls' schools these are more easily distinguished than with boys'.) And it is useful to have lived in a college town, a foreign country, or a sophisticated urban community; to have applied to a very small number of progressive and stiff colleges, like Swarthmore, Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, and so forth.
Once all this is done, limeness is just beginning. The distinctive feature of this style is Style. Girls who adopt it are sometimes thought of as the Radcliffe stereotype, and probably give wholesome Harvard freshmen from Iowa their first proof that the East is indeed strange looking. Greek shoulderbags are extremely popular, as are ski jackets, black tights, pierced ears, half high heels, long unpolished fingernails, rain ponchos, "Marimekko" dresses, primitive jewlry, and long hair. The most well-dressed of them imitate a European sort of gray-beige, expensive simplicity; the sloppy ones wear ski polo shirts and dungarees and can be called (to their probable disdain) "beat." They have generally been to Europe, or hitchhiked across America.
The Arts
Upper level English courses contain many of these girls, as do courses in creative writing, foreign languages, and the other humanities. They rarely participate in extracurricular activities, with the exception of creative arts. When, they do act, write, paint, or play instruments -- it is usually extremely well. Probably they wrote poetry when they were young.
Limes very seldom have groups of close friends, and never cliques. Instead they travel mostly alone, or with a serious boyfriend. And their travelling often takes the form of gliding. Perhaps a little too thin, some cultivate a mysterious, ethereal, or merely composed look. They are most conscious of their sex and often the most beautiful of the girls. They decorate their rooms with taste, and more concern for art and individuality than do their fellow students. And a search for self-expression, for eternal, almost mythic verities, is implied in the adjectives they use to compliment another girl: "beautiful," "good," "nice," "womanly," "sympatico," "free."
This self-consciousness is usually of an assured quiet, sort. They define the Radcliffe years as an arrow pointing toward them, with everything else fading into a grayish blur. What do they like best here? The privacy, the independence, the challenge, or some particular experience of the past, they answer softly.
Like the chocolates, this flavor wanted to liberalize the sign-out rules, but while the chocolate reason was an indignant "We are responsible enough," the lime reason was "they have no business interfering with our lives."
If you want to get in touch with anyone of a particular flavor and can't judge adequately from the Freshman Register, you should go to certain addresses. Peaches center about dorm living rooms, the Spa, Widener reading room, and organized social functions. Chocolates are upstairs in their room, in Mallinckrodt, in "Rad Libe," in Restaurants, at their organization's headquarters, or eating early dinner. Limes are also in Widener (although more likely in the stacks, than the reading room), in cafeterias and coffee shops, in the Fogg, and in people's apartments.
They all meet, to be sure -- at registration and graduation.