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Peach, Chocolate, and Lime The Three Famous Flavors of Radcliffe

Once all this is done, limeness is just beginning. The distinctive feature of this flavor 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, scarves around their neck, long unpolished fingernails, rain ponchos, jewelry, and long hair. The most well-dressed of them imitate a European sort of gray-beige expensive simplicity: the sloppy ones wear skipolo shirts and dungarees and can be called (to their probable distain) "hip.". They have generally been to Europe, or hitchhiked across America.

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 traveling often takes the form of gliding. Perhaps a little too thin, some cultivate a mysterious, ethical, 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 generally have 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."

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If you want to get in touch with anyone of a particular flavor and can't judge adequately from the Freshmen 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 rooms, in Mallinckrodt, in Hilles Library, in the University Restaurant, 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.

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