us had to
keep four or five votes all ready for use, for competition was pretty
swift and there were a tremendous number of co-eds in school. You never
saw such a job as it was. No sooner would I have Miss A. entirely
friendly to my candidate for the editorship of the Weekly than Miss B.
would flop over and show marked signs of frost--and then I would have to
drop everything and walk over from chapel with her three mornings
hand-running, and take her to a play, and make a wild pass about not
knowing whether any one would go to the prom with me or not. And then
just as she would begin to smile when she saw me Miss A. would pass me
on the street and look at me as if I had robbed a hen-roost. And just as
I was entirely friendly with both of them it would occur to me that I
hadn't called on Miss C. for three weeks and that Bannister, of the
Alfalfa Delts, was waiting for Miss D. after chapel every morning and
would doubtless make a lowdown, underhanded attempt to talk politics to
her in the spring. For a month before each election I felt like a giddy
young squirrel running races with myself around a wheel. Some college
boys can keep on terms of desperate and exclusive friendliness with a
dozen girls at a time--Petey Simmons got up to eighteen one spring when
we won the big athletic election--but four or five were as many as I
could manage by any means, and it kept me busted, conditioned and all
out of training to accomplish this. And when election-time approached
and it came to talking real politics, and the girl you had counted on
all winter to swing her wing of the third floor in Browning Hall for
your candidate would suddenly remember in the midst of a businesslike
talk on candidates and things that you had cut two dances with her at
the prom, and you couldn't explain that you simply had to do it because
you had to keep your stand-in with a girl on the first floor who had the
music-club vote in her pocket-book--well, I may get out over Niagara
Falls some day on a rotten old tight-rope, with a sprained ankle and a
fellow on my shoulders who is drunk and wants to make a speech, standing
up--but if I do I won't feel any more wobbly and uncertain about the
future than I used to feel on those occasions.

Of course it was entirely impossible for the few dozen college
politicians to make personal friends and supporters of all the girls in
Siwash. We didn't want to. There are girls and girls at Siwash, just as
there are everywh