Page:The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (1923).pdf/76

 some brother who is feared will mar the favorable impression which has been made or is being made on him, he is kept in the background, or sent down town on an errand. And when it comes to the time of bidding him, the brothers are most carefully selected who, it is thought, will impress him most strongly. He should, himself, then keep this all in mind, and so far as possible make as careful a study of the members of the chapter as they are making of him.

Nothing is so unwise as to talk too much, unless it be to talk too little; the happy medium is the summum bonum of the freshmen's desires. Worse by far, however, than too fluent or too meager speech, is the awful error of showing eagerness or interest. "I like you fellows better than any others I have met," I heard a freshman confess last fall to a senior as he was bidding him good night after an evening at the fraternity house. I turned cold with horror at the confession. It was precisely the way the senior wished him to feel, but it was the baldest sort of bone-head work for the freshman to admit it. It almost cost him his invitation to join the organization. It was to the senior as it might have been if the young woman whom he was expecting to invite to the Junior Promenade had expressed to him, before he asked her, the happiness which she would feel in accompanying him