The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Reunion
THE senior craned his neck and looked curiously and interestedly at the old grads returned to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary. They seemed a rather battered lot to the young fellow just preparing for the struggles of life. The men were heavy or bald or gray, and the lines cut deeply into their faces. Some of the women were still pretty, but—but they were not young. It was depressing to him to feel that as success came youth seemed to vanish.
I remember in my freshman year asking an indifferent senior what he was expecting to do after graduation. "Something easy and profitable," was his reply. "The work can't be too light nor the salary too big for me." He is not now earning a thousand dollars a year. He has never realized that success means struggle and sacrifice and responsibility; that it means doing the hardest things one can find, and sometimes doing them for little compensation. And struggle and sacrifice leave their marks. The wrinkles and the gray hair and the rounding shoulders are usually but the signs of developed character and accomplishment. They are the honorable scars of intellectual and moral battle. Few who succeed escape them.
A friend of mine who was staying at a high-priced summer place last year remarked to his wife how few young people there were at the hotel. "That isn't strange," she replied. "One has to be middle aged to have made enough money to come here."
The reunion was a happy one; men and women came thousands of miles to enjoy the pleasures and to live over again the joys of youth and irresponsibility. Most of them had accomplished a good deal, but the marks were there,—clearly, undeniably, and they will always be. If our characters have developed, if we have struggled and sacrificed and fought, our faces will tell the tale.
The story is told of a well-known public character that when he held in his hand a photograph of himself with all the lines smoothed out and all the wrinkles obliterated, he objected. "It cost me fifty years of hard struggle and endeavor to put those lines in," he said, "and I don't want them taken out."
Perhaps those who took part in the reunion did not look young to the senior, but they showed character; they had been through a fight and had won the battle.
June