"They'd be awfully shocked if you put it that way," said Miss Hicks; "and I wouldn't advise you to talk to them about it. Their notions of honor are so high that I had to pay for the lemonade for the independent men myself at the last election."
"Oh, very well," says I, taking my hat, "we'll think it over."
"You might wear blinders, you know," she suggested.
"Oh, go to thunder!" said I as earnestly as I could.
"Come again," she said when she closed the door after me. "I do so enjoy these little confidences."
Honestly, Miss Allstairs, when I think of that girl I shrink up until I'm afraid I'll fall into my own hat. It ought not to be legal for a girl to talk to a man like that. It's inhuman.
We thought matters over for two weeks and tried one or two little raids on the enemy with most horrible results to ourselves. Then we gave in. We put our pride and our devotion to art in cold storage and took up the politicians' burden. We gave those girls the time of their young-to-middle-aged lives. We got up dances and crokinole parties and concerts for them. We took them to see Hamlet. We had sleighing parties. We helped every lecture course in the college do a rushing business. We just backed into the shafts and took the bit without a murmur. And maybe you think those girls didn't drive us. They seemed determined to make up for the drought of all the past. They were as coy and uncertain and as infernally hard to please as if they'd been used to getting one proposal a day and two on Sunday. Let one of us so much as drop over to Browning Hall to pass the time of day with one of the real heart-disturbers, and the particular vote that he was courting would go off the reservation for a week. It would take a pair of theater tickets at the least to square things.
We gave dances that winter at which only one in five girls could dance. We took moonlight strolls with ladies who could remember the moon of seventy-six, and we gave strawrides to girls who insisted on talking history of art and missionary work to us all the way. When I think of the tons of candy and the mountains of flowers and the wagonloads of latest books that we lavished, and of the hard feelings it made in other quarters, and of our loneliness amid all this gayety, and of our frantic efforts to make the prom a success, with ten couples dancing and the rest decorating the walls, I sometimes wonder whether the college was worth our great love for it after all.
But we were winning out. By April it was easy to see this. The Blanks thawed with the snow-drifts. They got real friendly and sociable, and after the warm weather came on we simply had to entertain them all the time, they liked it so. When I think of those beautiful spring days, with us sauntering with our political fates about the campus, and the nicest girls in the world walking two and two all by themselves—Oh, gee! Why, they even made us cut chapel to go walking with them, just as if it was a genuine case of "Oh, those eyes!" and "Shut up, you thumping heart."