DANCERS WITH FATE

At last, the deb has come into her own. After decades of neglect she has finally been noticed. Yesterday's "Traveler" devoted paragraphs to her sorry plight, and with an acutely sympathetic pen limns a detailed picture of the tortures and agonies of the social round.

"Her working garb may be of chiffon, but her hours will be from 1 P.M. to 5 A.M. the next day.... The debutante must keep going--going--going until she drops.... It is the hardest kind of work, this keeping hold of the dazzling social pin-wheel, with its endless revolutions."

Yes, it tells you, she has luncheon-engagements, tea engagements, dinner engagements, balls, and post-ball meals to live through. She must change her clothes countless times, she must screw her courage to the sticking point and see it to the end.

Heartbreaking and poignant, no less. The glittering society miss pays dearly for her glitter. And the very inevitability of it all, the irresistability of the awful doom is what strikes you. We all know how much the debs would prefer to be educated, instead of just cultured, how much they'd give for an evening with Spinoza or Kant, or one at a concert or a less stylish but heavier play. Picture the deb, with all these thwarted intellectual desires--dancing, dancing her life away, and all because the omnipotent Moloch makes it clear that she is to do or die. Too few of us accord her the full sympathy she deserves.

(Ed. Note--The Crimnson has received numerous letters on the Hasty Pudding Initiation but feeling that they added little to what has already been said they are not printed in today's issue.)