"Do you remember," asked Ellen, "the evening we spent sitting in the trunk-room in Merion, helping Alice Marston write the Professor?"
"Dear me, I had forgotten," sighed Louise, "and I don't think anything has ever seemed really funny since that."
"The sad part of it is," continued Evelyn, "that the warning in the motto we used would now be a necessity. Who but ourselves would understand those jokes? What was the motto?" to an inquiring freshman,
"Quae jocum suspiciet, eam oportet ridere;
Quae non, oportet aliis ridentibus ridere.
Ne lacrima!
Quot intellixistis?"
"Don't apologize for talking Latin, Evelyn," said Marjorie, with a comical glance at the group, "it's like our mother tongue."
"That was the way the Latin lecture used to begin," explained Ellen, for the benefit of the undergraduates. "You see we used to have lectures in Latin as a sort of elective."
"That sounds impressive; it did to me when I first heard it," responded Marjorie, "but those Latin lectures were the most humorous things you could imagine. You watched the Polyglot's face, and you knew when to laugh and when to weep, and you were a little dull if you didn't understand enough to raise your hand when he called out 'Quot intellixistis?'
"Do you remember the one on Irish bulls? In your honour wasn't it, Pat?" turning to Beatrice O'Hara, whose vaunted Irish blood was evident in her speech.
"I wish I'd kept a record of Pat's bulls," remarked Susan. "I often feel as though one of them was just the tonic I needed."