The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Vacations
THREE young girls came hastily and noisily into the car as the train moved out of the station. They had barely escaped being left. The Christmas vacation was over, and they were going back to college. As they disposed of their various belongings, settled back in their seats, mussed up their hair a little more becomingly, and made discriminating use of their powder rags, fragments of conversation began to float through the car. I buried myself in the book I was reading, but I found it impossible not to hear something of a "peach of a vacation" mingled with grand opera and Farrar in Carmen, with New Year's Eve at the Congress Hotel, with a lovely Delta Upsilon formal at Northwestern, and with an all-night party at the South Shore Club.
"I am simply dead," one of them said, "and I have a peck of back work to hand in tomorrow." The babble of conversation ceased shortly, and the silence became so great that I turned to find the cause. They were asleep, their tired, pallid faces and the dark rings under their eyes showing all too well what a lovely, restful vacation they had had.
The man who said that it takes the strongest constitution to stand the average trip for the health might have added that it takes the strongest student to stand the ordinary vacation. A woman whom I once knew when asked if she employed a servant girl remarked that she had had one, but that she was just then doing her own work. She hoped as soon as she was strong enough to try one again. I have often felt that it might be a good thing to require students to pass a physical test to determine whether or not they are strong enough to indulge in the dissipations of a vacation. The line of pale, sad eyed, tired, and physically knocked-out undergraduates who come into my office after every vacation may have had a "peach of a time", but they very seldom reveal much of the bloom on their return. A real vacation ought to be stimulating and restful, but it oftentimes leaves students exhausted, unprepared for their work, and worth nothing for days after they get back. Instead of finding themselves eager and ready for hard work, they come back to rest up.
There is no more severe test of a man's character than the way in which he spends the time that is his own and the way in which he puts in the hours or days of leisure and vacation. Most of the moral delinquents whom I know strayed away from the path of virtue and self-control when they had nothing else to do—when they were having a vacation.
January