Page:The plastic age, (IA plasticage00mark).pdf/298

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
THE PLASTIC AGE

mail bring a summons from the dean? President Culver spoke sternly in chapel and hinted that there would be no Prom the coming year. Most of the men said that the Prom had been an “awful brawl,” but there were some who insisted that it was no worse than the Proms held at other colleges, and recited startling tales in support of their ar¬ gument.

Leonard Gates finally settled the whole matter for Hugh. There had been many discussions in the Nu Delta living-room about the Prom, and in one of them Gates ended the argument with a sane and thoughtful statement.

“The Prom was a brawl,” he said seriously, “a drunken brawl. We all admit that. The fact that Proms at other colleges are brawls, too, does n’t make ours any more respectable. If a Yale man happens to commit murder and gets away with it, that is no reason that a Harvard man or a San¬ ford man should commit murder, too. Some of you are arguing like babies. But some of you are going to the other extreme.

“You talk as if everybody at the Prom was lit. Well, I wasn’t lit, and as a matter of fact most of them were n’t lit. Just use a little common sense. There were three hundred and fifty couples at the Prom. Now, not half of them even had a drink. Say that half did. That makes one hun¬ dred and seventy-five fellows. If fifty of those