Honestly, I never could see just why a fellow should wait until he is through college before he begins to study the science of how to make some particular girl believe that if Adam came back he would look at him and say: "Gee, it swells me all up to think that chap is a descendant of mine!"
And I may be thick in my thought dome, but I never could see any objection to marrying a classmate, either, even though I didn't do it myself. I admit co-educational schools are strong on matrimony. Haven't I dug up for thirty-nine wedding presents for old Siwash students already? And don't I get a shiver that reaches from my collar-button down to my heels every time I get one of those thick, stiff, double-barreled envelopes, with "Kindly dig," or words to that effect, on the inside? Usually they come in pairs—the bid to the next wedding and the bill for the last present. Why, out of sixty-five ninety-umpters with whom I graduated, six couples are already holding class reunions every evening; and just the other day another of the boys, who thought he would look farther, came back after having made a pretty thorough inspection all over the civilized world, and camped outside of the home of a girl in our class until she admitted that he looked better to her than any of the rising young business men who had bisected her orbit in the last ten years. They're to be married this spring and I'm going back to the wedding. Incidentally I'm going to help pay for three more silver cups. We give a silver cup to each class baby and each frat baby, and I've been looking around this past year for a place where we can buy them by the dozen.
Weddings! Why, man, a co-educational college is a wedding factory. What of it? As far as I can see, Old Siwash produces as many governors, congressmen and captains of industry to the graduate as any of the single-track schools. And I notice one thing more. You don't find any of our college couples hanging around the divorce courts. There is a peculiar sort of stickiness about college marriages. They are for keeps. When a Siwash couple doesn't have anything else agreeable to talk about it can sit down and have a lovely three months' conversation on the good old times. It takes a mighty acrimonious quarrel to stand a college reunion around a breakfast table. Take it from me, you lonesome old space-waster, with nothing but a hatrack to give you an affectionate welcome when you come home at night, there is no better place on earth to find good wife material than a college campus. Of course I don't think a man should go to college to find a wife; but if his foot should slip, and he should marry a girl whose sofa pillows have the same reading matter on them as there is on his, there's nothing to yell for help about. Ten to one he's drawn a prize. Girls who go through co-educational colleges are extra fine, hand-picked, sun-ripened, carefully wrapped-up peaches—and I know what I'm talking about.
How do I know? Heavens, man! didn't I go through the Siwash peach orchard for four years? Don't I know the game from candy to carriages? Didn't I spend every spring in a light pink haze of perfect bliss? And wasn't all the Latin and Greek and trigonometry and athletic junk crowded out of my memory at the end of every college year by the face of the most utterly, superlatively marvelous girl in the world? And wasn't it a different face every spring? Oh, I took the entire course in girlology, Sam! I never skipped a single recitation. I got a Summa Cum Laudissimus in strolling, losing frat pins, talking futures and acquiring hand-made pennants. And the only bitter thought I've got is that I can't come back.
You'll never realize, my boy, how old Pa Time roller-skates by until you go back to a co-ed college ten years afterward. Here, in the busy mart of trade, I'm a promising young infant who has got to "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to the big ones, and be good and get to work on time for thirty years before I will be trusted to run a monopoly alone on a quiet day; but back on the Siwash Campus, Sam, I'm a patriarch. That's one reason why I don't go back. I'm married and I don't care to be madly sought after, but also I don't care to make a hit as a fine old antique for a while yet, thank you. When I am forty, and have gummed up my digestion in the dollar-herding game until I wheeze for breath when I run up a column of figures, I'll go back and have a nice comfy time in the grandpa class. But not now. The only difference between a thirty-year-old alumnus and the mummy of Rameses, to a college girl, is in favor of the mummy. It doesn't come around and ask for dances.
I suppose, Sam, you think you've been all lit up under the upper left-hand vest pocket over one or two girls in your time, but I don't believe a fellow can fall in love so far over his ears anywhere in the world as he can in Siwash College. That's only natural, for the finest girls in the world go to Siwash—except one girl who went to another school by accident and whom I ran across about three years ago wearing an Alfalfa Delt pin. I'll take you up to the house to see her some time. She was too nice a girl to wear an Alfalfa Delt pin and I just naturally had to take it off and put on an Eta Bita Pie pin; and somehow in the proceedings we got married—and all I have to say about it is three cheers for the universe!
Anyway, as I was saying, it was as easy to fall in love at Siwash as it was to forget to go to chapel. We got along all right in the fall. We liked the girls enormously and were always smashing up some football team just to please them. And, of course, we kept ourselves all stove up financially during the winter hauling them to parties and things in Jonesville's nine varnished cabs. It took about as much money to support those cabs as it does to run a fleet of battleships. But it was in the spring that the real fireworks began. Suddenly, about the first Wednesday after the third Friday in April, the ordinary Siwash man discovers that some girl whom he has known all year isn't a girl at all, but a peachblow angel who is just stopping on earth to make a better man of him and show him what a dull, pifflish thing Paradise would be without her. Life becomes a series of awful blank spots, with walks on the campus between them. He can't get his calculus because he is busy figuring on a much more difficult problem; he is trying to figure whether three dances with some other fellow mean anything more to Her than charity. He gets cold chills every time he reflects that at any minute a member of some royal family may pass by and notice Her, and that he will have to promote international spasms by hashing him. He realizes that he has misspent his life; that football is a boy business; that frats are foolish, and that there ought to be a law giving every college graduate a job paying at least two thousand dollars a year on graduation. He is nervous, feverish, depressed, inspired, anxious, oblivious, glorified, annihilated, encouraged and all cluttered up with emotion. The planet was invented for the purpose of letting Her dig Her number three heels into it on spring afternoons. Sunshine is important because Her hair looks better with the light on it. Every time She frowns the weather bureau hangs out a tornado signal, and every time She smiles somebody puts a light-blue sash around the horizon and a double row of million-candle-power calcium lights clear down the future, as far as he can see.
That's what love does to a college boy in spring. It's a kind of rose-colored brainstorm, but it very seldom has complications. By the next fall, the ozone is out of the air; and after a couple has gone strolling about twice, football and the sorority rushes butt in—and it's all over. Freshman girls are a help, too. Beats all how much assistance a Freshman girl can be in forgetting a Senior girl who isn't on the premises! Even in the spring-fever period we didn't get engaged to any extent. The nearest I ever came to it was to ask the light of my life for ninety-several if she would wear my frat pin forever and ever until next fall. And, let me tell you, there wasn't any local of the Handholders' Union on the Siwash Campus. That's another place where you soubrette worriers have us figured out wrong. Rushing a Siwash girl was about as distant a proposition for us as trying to snuggle up to the planets in the telescopic astronomy course. For cool, pleasant and skillful unapproachability, a co-ed girl breaks all records. We just worshiped them as higher beings, and I find that a lot of Siwash boys who have married Siwash girls are still a little bit dazed about the whole affair. They can't figure how they ever had the nerve to start real businesslike negotiations.
This very high-class insulation in our love affairs caused us fellows a lot of woe once in a while. You never could tell whether or not a girl was engaged to some fellow back home. We didn't get impertinent enough to ask. I think there ought to be a law compelling a girl who comes to college engaged to some rising young merchant prince in the country store back home to wear an engagement ring around her neck, where it can be easily seen. More than once, a Siwash man who had been conservative enough to worship the same girl right through his college course and who had proposed to her on the last night of school, when the open season for thou-beside-me talk began, has found that all the time some chap has been writing her a letter a day and that she has only regarded the Siwash man as a kind friend, and so on. Never will I forget when Frankling got stung that way! Of course we didn't generally know when a tragedy of this sort happened, but in his case he brought it on himself. If he hadn't made a furry-eared songbird out of himself when Ole Skjarsen drew his girl at the Senior class party—
You want to know about this girl lottery business, you say? Well, it's plain that I shall have to begin right back at the beginning of the Siwash social system and educate you a little at a time. Now this class party drawing is an institution which has been handed down at Siwash ever since the ancients went to school before the war. You see, at Siwash, as at most colleges, there is the fraternity problem. The frat men give parties to the sorority girls as often as the Dean of Women will stand for it, and every one gets gorgeously acquainted and extremely sociable. The non-fratters go to the Y. M. C. A. reception at the beginning of each year and to the Commencement exercises, and that's about all. Of course they pick up lots of friends among the non-sorority girls; and I guess D. Cupid solders up about as many jobs among them as he does among the others. But there isn't much chance for these two tribes to mix. That was why the class lottery was invented. It has been a custom at Siwash, ever since there has been a Siwash, for each class to hold a party each year. Now class parties are held in order that pure and perfect democracy may be promoted, and it is necessary to take violent measures to shuffle up the people and get every one interested. So they draw for partners. The class which is about to effervesce socially holds a meeting. At this meeting the names of all the men are put in one hat and the names of all the girls in another. Then two judges of impregnable honesty draw out a name from each hat simultaneously and read them to the class.