Even the undergraduate’s extra-collegiate social life, which would probably stand next on the Martian’s list, is thoroughly regimented. Speaking broadly, it is incorrect to call on girls at the nearest girls’ college; and, speaking still more broadly, there is usually one correct college whereat it is socially incumbent to pay devoirs. In coeducational institutions the sex line is an exacting but astonishingly innocent consumer of time and energy, of which the greater part is invested in the sheer maintenance of convention. Along both these social avenues the student practises a mimicry of what seems to him to be the forms regnant in secular society and, intent on the forms, tends to miss by a little what neighbourly ease really exists there, so that he out-conventionalizes the conventional world. The non-college American youth, of both sexes, would scarcely tolerate the amount of formalism, chaperonage, and constraint that our college youth voluntarily assumes. The word “fussing” is the perfect tag for the visiting, the taking to games and dances, the cherishing at house-parties, and the incessant letter-writing that are the approved communications across the sex line. You make a fuss over a girl, and there it ends; or you make a fuss over a girl and get engaged, and there it ends; or--and this is frequent only in the large Western universities where well-nigh all the personable youths of the State’s society are in college together--you make a fuss over a girl, you get engaged, and in due time you get married. So far as fussing is concerned, sex is far more decorous among collegians than among their non-collegiate fellows of the same ages and social levels. There is a place, of course, where it is indecorous enough; but that place is next on the Martian’s list. Which now shifts its weakening emphasis to recreation. You will have thought that most of the foregoing attached to recreation and that all play and no work is the undergraduate rule. You will have erred. Above this point almost everything on the list is recognized by the student to be in some sort an obligation, a serious concern, a plough on which he finds his hand gently laid by custom but which he cannot decently relinquish till he has gained the end of the furrow. “Nobody could be busier than the normal undergraduate. His team, his paper, his club, show, or other activity, sometimes several at once, occupy every spare moment which he can persuade the office to let him take from the more formal part of college instruction.” The quotation is not from a baccalaureate sermon: it is from the Harvard class oration of 1921.