ap from the Y. M. C. A. proposed timidly to lead us in
prayer. What a glare he got from all over the room! "Damn fool," I heard
someone mutter. Bad form!

Politics also were tabooed. Here again there were exceptions. A still
fiery son of the South could rail about niggers, rapes and lynchings and
the need for disenfranchising the blacks. It was good fun to hear him.
Moreover, a fellow who was a good speaker, and needed the money, might
stump the state for either political party, and his accounts were often
amusing. But to sit down and talk about the trusts, graft, trade unions,
strikes, or the tariff or the navy, the Philippines, "the open door," or
any other of the big questions that even then, ten years ago, were
beginning to shake the country, and that we would all be voting on soon?
No. The little Bryan club was a joke. And one day when a socialist
speaker struck town the whole college turned out in parade, waving red
sweaters and firing "bombs" and roaring a wordless Marseillaise! We
wanted no solemn problems here!

Finally, it was distinctly bad form to talk about sex. Not to tell
"smutty stories," they were welcomed by the average crowd. But to look
at it squarely, as I tried to do, and get some light upon what would be
doubtless the most vital part of our future lives--this simply wasn't
done. What did women mean to us, I asked. What did prostitutes mean at
present? What would wives mean later on? And all this talk about
mistresses and this business of free love, and easy divorces and
marriage itself--what did they all amount to? Was love really what it
was cracked up to be, or had the novelists handed us guff? When I came
out with questions like these, the chaps called "clean" looked rather
pained; the ones who weren't, distinctly bored.

For this whole intricate subject was kept in the cellars of our minds,
cellars often large but dark. Because "sex" was wholly rotten. It had
nothing to do, apparently, with the girls who came chaperoned to the
"proms," it had to do only with certain women in a little town close by.
Plenty of chaps went there at times, and now and then women from over
there would come to us on the quiet at night. But one afternoon I saw a
big crowd on the front campus. It grew every moment, became a mob,
shoving and surging, shouting and jeering. I climbed some steps to look
into the center, and saw two painted terrified girls, hysterical,
sobbing, swearing and shrieking. So they were shoved,