“Dear Margaret: I’ll get even with Walter some time if it takes a leg. What do you suppose he let me in for? Listen to this, if you please, and learn what a beast you’ve carelessly married. You know that day he and Donnie were chuckling and whispering in camp and wouldn’t let us in, and had the films out? Well, I know now what they were up to—do I know? Gosh!
“The running for the fraternities began yesterday. You see, before a fellow is taken into a society he has to spend a week running around and doing exactly what the upper classmen of that society tell him, no matter how crazy it is. Buck and Donnie, for instance, had to go into Huyler’s, dressed in weird clothes, and propose simultaneously to the candy girl, and both had to burst into tears when she refused them. That’s just a sample.
“Well, two days ago I got a hint that I’d better appear in Billy Brent’s room—Donnie’s older brother, you know, a junior. So up I went, grinning but shivering. There was a bunch of juniors there, and I saw by their joyful faces that I was going to get mine strong.
“I didn’t make any mistake. I was handed two packages and told that they were photographs, and I was to go from room to room and peddle them earnestly for five cents apiece. I was to say to each fellow that they were pictures of Yale’s favorite son in his two favorite costumes, and I was to plead and insist importunately and use every effort of every sort to make the fellows buy one at least, and five if possible, without consideration of personal pride. I supposed they were of the president, don’t you know, or some big bug, and I thought I was getting off rather easy. I grabbed the packages—there were about two hundred in the two—and then Billy Brent said:
“‘You’d better look at your wares, Morgan, so you can sell ’em with more enthusiasm.’
“I looked. They were me, both of ’em—me as the great god Pan—you’ve seen it—a sylvan life study—in the earliest known costume, gleaming by glimpses through sheltering foliage—and thank the cats for the foliage! With that whittled tootling machine in a pose at my mouth—a hundred of that! Also me as a Sabine maiden in your darned gray corduroy petticoat, fishing. I didn’t ever know that had been taken. It seems Walter snapped it up the river, at the very moment the fellows came around the bend, and just before I took to the woods. Likely you’ve seen it.
“Walter gave both the films to Donnie and he passed them on to Billy with the suggestion.
“So I started on my weary way, and knocked at door after door of the ‘Hutch,’ and all around the street, and was treated first as a white man, and then as I went on begging and insisting importunately, as was my duty, to get twenty-five cents out of each fellow—why, of course, they turned on me and kicked me out in time. Everybody bought one—that was easy fruit, but it was harder than the dickens to squeeze out the other twenty cents—I couldn’t do it but a few times. Al Nelson took a dozen for dinner cards and that helped—though humiliating. But I’ve still got seventy-five on my hands, and after I go over to Commons in a few minutes from now, and feed my face, I’ve got to start out and beg and insist importunately some more. It’s a cruel and unusual punishment, and you watch me get even with Walter when I get home. You might as well mention to him that if I live and keep my health I’ve got a hunch he’d better cheer up, for the worst is yet to come.
With love to yourself,
Bob.”