A House Is Not A Home

It wasn't often that Bentley got to cat outside the House. Of course, when they had held the Senior Dinner and the special dinner for the new sophomores he had been forced to go out to Leverett to eat. But he hadn't liked it; Bentley was essentially a homebody.

That was why it seemed so strange to everyone that night when he announced with obvious delight and excitement that he was planning to eat out. Not, not at a restaurant, of course not. At the Graduate Common, with some friends and a professor, he explained.

"I find the house so stifling," he went on. "One really must get out to the graduate schools for a meal now and then. The change is so intellectually refreshing."

Bentley's chair at the corner table was empty that night, but nobody begrudged him his intellectual refreshment. There had been some good sense in what he said about inter-housing at Harkness and the Business School. If Harvard really were a university, and sometimes it was hard to tell, it might be fun to go over and eat with the graduate students. More than one who noticed Bentley's empty seat that night would have joined him at his dinner.

Things changed when Bentley tuned up in the Common Room at eight o'clock, looking very grim.

"They charged me," he moaned. "They charged me a dollar ten. In coupons. They wouldn't allow me to sign inter-house. I was so upset I could hardly eat."

The chair at the corner table is never empty anymore. And as Bentley sits there, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, he pauses every now and then between bites to think of that evening at Harkness Common. For a moment, a smile flits across his face as he savours the memory. But then, with an angry jab at a string bean, Bentley remembers the dollar ten.

"Intellectual refreshmen," he may tell you if you ask, "is nice. But not for me," he will add. "It costs too much."