A White Bird Flying by Bess Streeter Aldrich

The month of May brought all of those final events so important to college students. One of the early dates was Ivy Day. When the smoke of battle had cleared, Bernice Fowler, efficient and capable Mortar Board, emerged triumphant as May Queen. Many of the co-eds on the campus shrugged their shoulders and said it was an empty honor, the result of intensive political strategy. Most of them would have given their souls to have been in her shoes.

A shower in the morning, swift and sudden, threatening disastrous results for a time, suddenly stopped and left in its wake glorious sunshine and a sparkling campus. Suddenly there were the townspeople and students massing themselves for the annual parade. There were the processional by the military band and girls carrying the daisy chain entering the green triangle set aside for the ceremonies, a chorus of sorority representatives singing "Who will plant the Ivy?" and the pages announcing on silver trumpets the entrance of the queen. There was a great white throne encompassed about, not quite with angels, but by pretty coeds in appearance falling not far short of that appellation. There were the crowning of the Queen, the competitive inter-fraternity sing, the reading of the Ivy Day poem, the giving of the Ivy Day oration and the planting of the traditional ivy plant. In the outside world stocks went up and down, stores sold their commodities, hospitals cared for their sick, ships sailed to far countries. But here on the campus was a world within the other, a little world that had eyes only for the traditional exercises, and for the tapping of the Innocents and the masking of the Mortar Boards, with all their attendant enthusiasms and disappointments.