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Nancy doesn’t want to admit it, but she has to grow up eventually. Bess gets married and George starts spending a lot of time with her new friend Robin and Nancy tries to decide what she should do. Not that solving mysteries hasn’t been fun, but every case starts to feel vaguely familiar, like she’s solved them all already and is just going through the motions. She applies to Radcliffe, just to see, and then she has to convince her father to let her go by hinting that the editor of the River Heights Bugle might like to know that all those cases Carson won were because of Nancy. Radcliffe isn’t far from Emerson College, but Nancy doesn’t see Ned as often as she thought she might. It’s just such a chore, going all the way into Boston for a date.
She hates her art history class—though her professor practically goes into ecstasies over her titian tresses, or whatever strange term he used, and she files that knowledge away for future use, just in case. She’s really getting interested in political science, and she goes to rallies with her earnest housemates and has double dates with her friend Clara and a succession of know-it-all Harvard boys. Afterwards she and Clara get malteds at their favourite diner and talk about whose campaigns they’ll work on when they move to D.C. By winter break Nancy’s forgotten all about ghosts and missing heirlooms and how it feels to be tied up and blindfolded. Clara’s purse gets stolen one evening at a sit-in protesting the war, and Nancy feels that lurch in her stomach, that old itch to investigate, but she pushes it down and goes back to painting signs about the bomb. It’s pretty unlikely that pursuing Clara’s purse thief will lead them to an international ring of jewel thieves, and anyway, Nancy has term papers and final exams to worry about.