172

162b THE BOOK OF THE CLASS OF NINETEEN-ELEVEN









well aware that the sound of your voice is imparting a thrill of horror. The wrong voice!
But they are up against it now, and a head is stuck through a chink of the doorway, backed
by other heads—there, supposedly, to give it courage, but really out of curiosity. “Is
Miss Canan at home?” Miss Canan is not at home, but you don’t want to miss anything,
so you urge them to come in, and assure them without being asked that so far as you know
she has no dinner engagement for that evening. You try not to be a dragon, but you know
you are one. The heads are withdrawn, accompanied by giggles, unpunctuated with one
coherent remark. Then you rush in to tell the girl next door that some Freshmen you
never saw before are going to take Virginia on a picnic. It is all highly inane, but never-
theless it is all interesting to anyone who has been there herself—outside the door, I mean,
You would like to watch them start, as they are, if that be possible, more ridiculously
silly about that than about the invitation, but you are tactful, and go to the Tea House with
a classmate, deciding that you will encourage a Freshman yourself when your satire paper
isin. (Note, it was in June 7, 1911.) Then you go and sing on Senior steps and watch the
combinations that come home together.

That is the joy of it—the combinations. Two Freshmen who are intimate friends,
perhaps room-mates, decide to have a picnic, to which each will invite a Senior. One invites
you, the other picks out the girl in your own class whom you know least (and whom you
come as near disliking as you could anyone in 1911) or else the girl with whom you have
fought wildly all through class meeting that day, owing to complete disagreement on all
points under discussion and several others, but none of this may show before another class :
so you two come back, holding hands and vaguely wondering whether Plattie and Skyntie
were as intimate friends as you had always taken it for granted they were, and about other
little combinations you had effected in the days of your own youth.

All picnics are not sentimental, of course. There are all grades, the cramming picnic,
the casual friendly Dutch treat picnic, the Freshman-Junior picnic, the faculty picnice—
gettng warm, that last. There is a look about a person who is just going to take Miss
Donnelly or Miss Crandall on a picnic that can not be mistaken.

There have been times when I did not think much of picnics, such as the night after
I had been to a breakfast picnic, a luncheon picnic, two tea picnics, and a supper picnic all
on the same day, by which time the sight of a pitcher of lemonade gave me all the sensations
of drowning. But, generally speaking, picnics are a good thing and a delightful thing, and
among them one finds represented all phases of college life, all seeming rosy and sweet,
under the safe haze of spring sentiment.

Marion Sturces Scorr.