“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply to our college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large, that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many people. The conventional idea of an American college--you know this because the idea was yours before you came here--is that it consists of a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same ends, in a general way,--just what the ends are I don’t think the public cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and fine,--and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive, congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.” “Then I wish it wouldn’t attempt to,” murmured Hewitt. “There is no attempt,” answered Curtiss; “there is merely a pretence,--a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive any one. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,--a proceeding that of course doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’ indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a crowd as you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its equality, from time to time, in theory?”