Most girls would rather hurry down with a big trunk in a crowded special train, and go to four teas, meet a score of men apiece whom they will never see again, dance all night, and then, in a few minutes, arise looking as fresh as they did on Easter Sunday, and smile good-byes at the depot to the breakfastless young men whom they leave forsaken and sleepy to try to go on where they left off, while they themselves hurry back to town, and to another dance the next night.
A college dance is generally considered very good fun. There is an adventurous zest in journeying to a college, and exploring it, and meeting crowds of people you never saw before, and there is something wild and reckless in being quartered in an odd little boarding-house, or, more delicious still, in some room in University Hall borrowed by your entertainer for the occasion, with the owner's photographs and souvenirs hanging about just as he left them. Then, too, the young men themselves, some of whom you have met or heard of before, try to be very agreeable, and do everything in their power to make you have a good time, if for no other reason, in order that you may see how superior their college is to any other, so that even several-seasoned society girls consider it worth their while to run down to a college dance, and be amused by these fresh-faced young fellows. Some of them have been coming off and on for several generations of college men, and could talk interestingly of your brother in the class of '88 should they be so inclined. They know all about these hops. This is written for you who have yet to attend one.
There are three regular dances each year, and they are given by the three upper classes. One takes place at the close of the mid-year examinations, to usher in the new term. Another is given at a more beautiful time of the year, usually occurring on the eve of some great baseball game. The third one, the most splendid and most jammed, is the sophomores' reception, given on the night before Commencement to the class which graduates the following day.
Each class has a dance committee, who fly around and work hard to make their dance finer than the last one, and generally succeed. They procure a fine patroness list to engrave on their invitations, containing several of the sort of names that appear in connection with Patriarchs' balls and Philadelphia assemblies, together with those of two or three professors' wives, to lend a tone. The committee get hold of the Gymnasium, pull down the bars and draw the trapeze to one side; then have a lot of pink and white cheese-cloth tacked up, hang some athletic trophies over the rafters, string a few hundred incandescent lights here and there, and send to one of the neighboring cities for a smart caterer and a large high-priced orchestra to come for the night. Then they are ready for you.