Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/173

 a suite of rooms down town over first one restaurant and then another. These rooms were reached by a dark and untidy box stair, and though they seemed to us at first quite elegant and palatial, they were, in point of fact, bare and barn-like and uninviting. They were too remote from the campus to serve as a convenient meeting place, and they did not furnish the slightest semblance of a home as a fraternity house is today supposed to do. The members of the chapter were scattered about the town, and there was little chance of their all getting together in the rooms excepting on Friday and Saturday nights, and even then there was little to be done excepting to pound the piano, which was usually out of tune, or to sit around on the stiff uncomfortable chairs and smoke, and smoking made some of the brothers sick. The rooms were rather scantily furnished, and as I look back at them now through the vista of twenty-five years, they were pretty close to impossible as a loafing place or a living place. It was only the companionship of congenial friends that made them seem something like an imitation of home.

We all had keys to these apartments, and we used to wander up to the rooms every day or two alone or with some pal and sit round and imagine we were enjoying ourselves. We held our initiations there—pretty rough some of them were with