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 wit