Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/212

 out of him by the knowing fusser to whom he confided the details of his call. The poor freshman is pitied, laughed at for his taste, and told that he has been wasting his time upon a "dead one." It is the fusser who sets the styles in girls as well as in dancing and in social forms and conventions.

The fusser is a social aristocrat. It annoys him to meet at any social function one whom he does not know or who is not in his own particular social set. If he is a fraternity man, and he very frequently is, it galls him to have to associate with "barbs"; if he is a liberal arts student he feels annoyed at having to come in contact with the cruder "ags." If he goes to a dance, he clings to his partner throughout the evening; he avoids bourgeoisie crowds of common undergraduates, he considers any general college function cheap and vulgar; he likes best to get into a small exclusive organization for social activities where one does not meet so many uninteresting people whom one does not know or care for. Anything that makes for social democracy he discourages or frowns upon, and if by mistake he stumbles into a democratic social gathering, he is unspeakably bored or gets a lot of sport out of the experience by taking his place at a distance, not entering with any heartiness into the pleasures under way, and by making fun of whatever is done or of whoever comes along. He looks upon the whole performance as a crude, vulgar jam which affects him only to give him ennui or pain.

I was talking to the president of one of the most prominent of our undergraduate organizations at a Union dance last spring about these very matters.