COLLEGE GIRLS
Five hundred undergraduates, under the auspices of the Woman's
University Club, New York, welcomed Mr. Clemens as their guest,
April 3, 1906, and gave him the freedom of the club, which the
chairman explained was freedom to talk individually to any girl
present.
I've worked for the public good thirty years, so for the rest of my life
I shall work for my personal contentment. I am glad Miss Neron has fed
me, for there is no telling what iniquity I might wander into on an empty
stomach--I mean, an empty mind.
I am going to tell you a practical story about how once upon a time I was
blind--a story I should have been using all these months, but I never
thought about telling it until the other night, and now it is too late,
for on the nineteenth of this month I hope to take formal leave of the
platform forever at Carnegie Hall--that is, take leave so far as talking
for money and for people who have paid money to hear me talk. I shall
continue to infest the platform on these conditions--that there is nobody
in the house who has paid to hear me, that I am not paid to be heard, and
that there will be none but young women students in the audience. [Here
Mr. Clemens told the story of how he took a girl to the theatre while he
was wearing tight boots, which appears elsewhere in this volume, and
ended by saying: "And now let this be a lesson to you--I don't know what
kind of a lesson; I'll let you think it out."]
COLLEGE GIRLS
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