It is so much better to have a purpose
I don't know if I would have liked Miss Mead. I like to think I would have:
You think I am brave. Well, if I am, what are you? To be sure, I am back here alone, but then I have Miss Mitchell and all these grand instruments, and nobody makes fun of it all here. But when I get home, no one there will take any interest in Astronomy. I shall have no telescope, at first, and there will be no one there to help me on. Do you think I shall be brave enough then to hold on tight to what I have begun? When I think of it so, I get discouraged. Presently I think of it this way. There you have been away from the college two years. You have your telescope, and have commenced work ... If you have held out, why shouldn't I? Then I feel better. ... You said last commencement day, "It is worth working for." I believed you, and I shall always cling to that sentence. ... I have thought it all over, and don't think I care at all to get fame. I want to work at it because I love it, and because it is so much better to have a purpose to live for than to have nothing."
Gertrude Mead, an M.A. student at Vassar College, writing in 1870 to Mary Witney, who later succeeded Maria Mitchell at Vassar.*
I hope she got her telescope.
* Excerpted in Mack, Pamela: "Straying from Their Orbits: Women in Astronomy in America" in Women of Science: Righting the Record, edited by G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.