HANDS ACROSS THE CHARLES

The Saturday Review of Literature quotes Charles Francis Adams's words to the effect that Boston society is "a boy-and-girl institution," and adds his famous pronouncement: "I have tried Boston socially on all sides; I have summered it and wintered it, tried it drunk and tried it sober; there's nothing in it--save Boston." The Review explains that "the boy-and-girl quality of society in Boston is of course due to the proximity of Harvard College." It comes always as something of a shock when we are given the giftie to see oursels as others see us; however, Adams annoyance at the strong collegiate infusion in Back Bay circles seems less downright if one remembers his brother's caustic remarks about the college itself.

Between Mr. Adams' two statements there is something of a contradiction: the youthful, galliard tone is decidedly something extra in Rub life, supplied from a foreign source. Like an amoeba, the Sanhedrim that draws up Boston social lists reaches out long pseudopodia to Cambridge, absorbing whatever it wants in the ways of male sustenance, and rejecting the rest. So the young roam through their pleasures and palaces quite separately from the old, and it is the young who usually usurp the front pages of the society sections. Relegation of the middle-aged, and increased respect for the goings-on at deb parties have been common to all societies for many years now, but nowhere so boldly as in Boston. In New York the opening of the opera still recalls to the public the indisputability of an ancient grand monde; nothing so cogent remains of the old regime along the banks of the Charles. The charming anomaly of society there is that, while staying quite the most full-blooded of any in America, and retaining more of its superiority and crustiness than any other, it still caters most unreservedly to the youngsters.

The process by which Harvard came to be such an important adjunct to the existence and happiness of nearby social lights was probably a complicated one, but in the end it all comes down to economics, to the necessarily large import trade in eligible males, drunk or sober. Having suffered the drain of this trade for many years, having been fed off the fat of the filled land, having danced to expensive orchestras night after night, Harvard is still a bit prone to echo ungratefully Adams' sentiments; to decide, in the gray awakening after a champagne coming-out, to get his next date at Radcliffe.