Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/52

 because many of the fellows leave as soon as dinner is over, others show little or no interest in the invited guests, and the whole responsibility of their entertainment is thrown upon the man who invited them to dinner or at best upon two or three members of the fraternity.

If it is true that you can tell very little about the real character of an individual until you see him in his home, it is equally true that you can tell very little about a fraternity until you see how it entertains its guests. On the whole I have felt that the training in manners in the fraternity house is careful, and that the guest who goes to one of these houses is pretty sure of receiving the most courteous and thoughtful consideration. But even good manners are not always inborn, and there is much to be learned when we are young, both from precept and from example. That not all fraternity men have so learned a few illustrations will at least suggest. I have gone to fraternity houses to dinner only to find that the man who had invited me was dining somewhere else; I have been at other houses where only a small percentage of the members even took the trouble to speak to me. I was the guest of someone else they apparently thought, so why waste their time on me. At first such neglect was something of a shock to me, for I had been taught even as a child that the guest of any member of my family was