Kipling saw a picture, painted by Burne-Jones and shocked the world of women's colleges by writing the "Vanipire". And then Theda Bara played it in the movies and shocked the rest of the world by saying, "Kiss me, my fool" to one of the funniest looking specimens ever decorated with the early editions of Form Fit Sartorial subtleties. But Kipling never reached the heights in that verse which he attained in "The Ladies". I fancy he never reached such heights anywhere else, and I've read all the verse he ever wrote, read it and re-read it. No, "The Ladies" is perfect, complete, sufficient. And especially when one has just enjoyed a conference of the Intercollegiate Literary Magazines of Eastern America and Boston.

"Now I aren't no' and with the ladies,

For, taking 'em all along,

You never can tell till you've tried 'em,

An' then you are like to be wrong."

I wasn't wrong. I was quite right. College men are divided into two classes of which the first or primary class is that including the gay young things or girls away from home because one doesn't marry until one has looked around a bit and father doesn't mind a little peace; of which the second or secondary class is that which includes thinking beings or those whose charm is as negligible as presidential repartee and whose pallor of feature is rouged alone by the faint fervor of a minimum intelligence. Oh! How dreadful of you!

But all truths aside the most entertaining part of the conference was not way the girl from--shsh--held a cigarette or the longnette on the delegate from come come, come but the colossal criticism mothered by one majesty of mental vacuity who just loved to criticise. I think she would criticise on her death bed, and I rather hope--but that really is not nice at all, do you think so? Anyway when she said that one delightful bit of verse by a certain delightful bit of femininity was "Quite too unexpressive and not sufficiently motivated". I felt a sympathy for that child of Gerhart Hauptanan's imagination who dwelt in a matriarchy.

Just fancy living in a matriarchy. It might be all right for a plumber, but for a poet! All his stuff would get marked a triple E minus and be sent packing, though not far. For after all even the college woman, class two, does rather admit the existence of the less deadly of the species. She admitted it on Mt. Auburn Street when she smiled through piled manuscript at a jovial editor with a headache and offered to let him take her to supper. He took aspirin.

Perhaps he took too much. Anyway, something allowed him the visionary eyes of a Merlin for he was able to look about the conference and picture the same group ten years from now. The Browning Club of Cherokee Falls will be addressed this afternoon by Mr. Blank, the young American poet, who will take as his subject "Browning's Effect on Me". The one with the lorgnette will have another just like it and swell with emotion at intervals of ten seconds by the wrist watch her husband, gave her as a peace offering the last time he came back from a short business trip to New York and preferred blindes. The insignificant from--will hurry to tell Mr. Blank how she had read his verse while a college girls. He will look at her and believe the college part but wonder the rest. And the one from North Hampton will try to engage him in a minor flirtation which will at least amuse her husband and probably send a poet and a Butter and Egg Man out in search of a drink.

"I've taken my fun where I've found it:

I've rogued and I've ranged in my time:

I've had my pickin' o' literary women and I must admit that not only the colonel's lady and Jucy O'Grady but Dumb Dora and Winifred Intelligentsia have very little dissimilarity.. If you think so--the conference next year is at Smith--in February.