Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/174

 very little regalia and very much less paraphernalia; we invited our girl friends in sometimes, under proper chaperonage, but it was after all a poor substitute for real fraternity life.

We stuck to this sort of thing for three years, I believe it was, and then, following the example of some of the older fraternities, we rented a house near the campus, on Green Street, bought, borrowed, or stole a little furniture, and became from that time on a real part of the college community. I have often wondered just what form of mental aberration was afflicting the man who designed the house into which we moved and in which we lived for the next few* years. It was not particularly suitable for a dwelling house or a summer hotel or a hospital; it had rooms of the most curious shape, and of the most unheard-of arrangement; it had an unusable basement which we converted into a dining-room, this latter room approached by a dark unventilated passage way; there was no attic and few closets; but we disposed ourselves in it with a good deal of comfort and satisfaction and began soon to realize for the first time some of the possibilities of the right sort of fraternity life. If the house had been better and more convenient, perhaps we should not so soon have conceived the idea of having a house of our own. At any rate one might as well look with optimism upon the