Stanford Stories: Tales of a Young University

A MIDWINTER MADNESS. Genius has been defined as a capacity for taking pains. When a college man's good fairy makes her first call at his cradle, she may bestow upon him the football instinct, with muscles to match; no fairy could do more. But if she bumps up against Heredity, and is powerless to give him the supreme gift, she may compensate for it in a degree by leaving the kind of larynx and tympanum used in the Glee Club. Failing this, she may render next best service by throwing a mandolin in his way and bewitching his parents into paying for lessons. Some twenty years later, behind the enchanted scenes of a specially hired theater, or on the polished floor of society's inner temple, he may think of the fairy kindly. Doubtless, all theatrical life means drudgery, but the Christmas tour of the Glee and Mandolin clubs is drudgery amidst bowers of roses. The hard-working professional would call it play; yet, even in this gilded stage-life, there is the common affliction of being forced to appear at every concert, and in places you don't care about—unless, of course, you happen to be seriously ill. The Clubs had just done an abbreviated stunt for the Los Angeles High School the afternoon before Christmas. The occasion was a big ad., but they ripped matters through in a hurry, because the social event of the trip came that afternoon—Lillian Arnold's reception at her home on Figuerroa Street