The End of It by Josephine Daskam Bacon — Read

There are two methods of conducting a class supper. The first is something like this: you pick out three utterly unrelated girls who never had anything to do with one another in their lives, and call them the supper committee; you pick out two clever, uninterested girls and call them the toast committee; you pick out an extremely busy girl who lives half a mile off the campus and call her the seating committee; you pick out a popular girl who is supposed to be humorous because she laughs at everybody's jokes and knows one comic song, and call her the toast-mistress.

And this is the result of it: The supper committee meets, wonders what under heaven induced the president to appoint the other two, finds out what caterer they had last year, and after a little perfunctory argument employs him again without further action, with the result that one end of the table has five kinds of ice cream and the other a horrifying recurrence of lukewarm croquettes; the toast committee spends a great deal of time in hunting out extremely subtle quotations from Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam, with the result that no one of the toasters gets the least idea of how she is expected to elaborate her theme; the seating committee is so harassed by everybody that she gives up her diagram in despair, and successive girls erase and sign and re-erase till nobody but the three or four leading sets in the class are satisfied, and they are displeased because the toasters are either put in a line at the head or scattered about the tables, and that separates them from their immediate cliques; the toast-mistress turns out to be more appreciative than constructive, and worries her friends and bores her enemies beyond previous conception. The main body of unimportant necessary people are crowded off by themselves and feel somewhat flat and heavy and irritated at the noisy groups beyond them; the toasts are apt to be a little sad and vague because the girls don't fit them and talk too much about enduring friendships, the larger life, four years of stimulating rivalry, and alma mater. Why they do all this at this season and this alone, only the Lord who made them knows.