He laughed to hide a touch of embarrassment, but with little mirth; and then he said, “Well, J.W., that’s not all foolishness, though I don’t see why you should pick on me.  Why not Marty?  Of course, I came here for fun, and I have had some, though not just the sort I expected.  And I’ve had several jolts too.  I might as well admit that if I could just only see how you hitch all of this League and church business to real life, I would be for it with all I’ve got.  The trouble is, while I’ve never been especially proud of my own record, neither have I seen much excuse yet for what you ‘active members’ have been busy with.  I have been playing my way, and you have been playing yours; but it all seems mostly play to me.  All the same, I guess I am getting tired of my kind.”  If Joe could ever have spoken wistfully, you might have suspected him of it just then.

Clearly, thought Marcia Dayne, in the silence that followed, something big was already happening.  But how to help it on she could not tell; so, with a desperate effort to do the right thing, she contrived to turn the subject It seemed to her it had become too difficult to go further just now without peril to Joe’s strange new interest, as well as to a very new and tremulous little hope that had begun to sing in her own heart.

The shift of the talk was a true Institute change, and would have been most disconcerting to anyone unfamiliar with the ways of young Christians; but Marcia was sure that what had been said would not be forgotten, and she knew there would be another time.

It was this that made her say, “I wish you boys would suggest what sort of stunt our district should give on stunt night; you know the time is getting short.”

“That’s a fact,” exclaimed Marty, sitting up.  “Stunt night is to-morrow, and our delegation has to fix up the stunt for the Fort Adams District.  Let’s get to work on something.  We’ve been mooning long enough.”

For though Marty never thought as quickly as Marcia, he too felt some instinct of fear lest by an unfortunate word they should break the spell of Joe Carbrook’s interest in the “Big Idea,” and promptly the four were deep in a study of stunts.

To the uninitiated, stunt night at the Institute is without rime or reason, but not to those in charge who are looking ahead to Sunday.  They know that the converging and cumulative psychic forces which the Institute invariably produces must be tempered, along about midway of the week, by some sharp contrast in the communal life.  Otherwise, the group, like over-trained athletes, will grow emotionally stale before the week is done, and at the end of that is let-down and flatness.  Hence “stunt night.”

In the early Institute years it was easy, as in some places it still is, for stunt night to be no more than clowning, witless and cheap; but there is a distinct tendency to exercise the imagination in producing more self-respecting efforts.