Wit

Women are often amusing conversationalists, particularly when stimulated by a masculine audience or by the fact that they are wearing new hats. But if the badinage across a tea-table were carried on in black and white; if ivory tablets were provided for the composition of mots in pencil, would the written small-talk charm? Would it scintillate and glitter? No, thought the editors of the Harvard Crimson (undergraduate daily). To test the well-known fact that a woman's wit is quenched by the sight of a sheet of paper like a candle by a wet snuffer, they last week invited the girls of Radcliffe College to contribute to their humorous column, The Crime.

Now the girls of Radcliffe had recently been slurred by the Lampoon (Harvard funny paper). Editors of the Crimson were in high hopes that a feminine sparkle or two would find its way into Crime to justify Radcliffe, give the lie to the leering Lampoon.

Missives on colored paper, dispersing scents from Houbigant and Liggett & Meyers, began to arrive in the office of the Crimson. What was the satisfaction of the editors to discover that they were witty!

Not, to be sure, anything that called for an immediate copyright. But still, The Crime is never very funny, and the editors could not be blind to the fact that the Radcliffe contributions were well above their usual standard. A mot, for instance:

We would say that there are one or two things in particular that a Harvard man cannot pass gracefully.

1--A football.

2--A bargain counter.

3--Out.

There were other examples of collegiate waggery, astounding when one considered that they were the product of the feminine intellect. Radcliffe had turned the trick. Collegiate fops who declared that there have been no witty women since the 18th Century were laughed to scorn. The Lampoon was worsted. For a day jubilation pranced in the Crimson editorial rooms--and then, on a plain typewritten sheet, came the cruel, the incredible denouement. . . .

It was a letter from the President of the Lampoon. It benignly informed the editors of the Crimson that the female digs at Harvard, the womanly brilliance which glittered in The Crime, had been contributed by the editors of the Lampoon--males, all.