Hotel
Franklin
Spartanburg,
S.C.
6.
Nov. 1927
Margaret
dear
This
is a Southern Sunday and from the hotel it seems to
be about as merry as one in Toronto. However I am to
dine at the College at one o’clock and hope for diversion[.]
Judging
from last night, it should be forthcoming.
The
reading was very good, an audience of two to three hundred,
mostly students of the College.1
Converse College has 4 or 5 hundred students,
girls of about 16 on the average, I should judge, and
all very enthusiastic [—] many of them interested in
poetry. After the reading they swarmed up to the platform,
and I was terrorized for a moment. However they did
not come to a clinch, and I stood them off with a handshake.
But it was a close call. All very pretty and seemingly
voracious. I have to undergo the social ordeal or trial
by fire again after dinner, and to hold a conference
on the technique of poetry &c to-morrow. Prayers
for safety are in order.
Ah, well, the tour has actually started
off well, and has made a hit here as well as in Chapel
Hill. So that is a blessing. But as I go on I keep hearing
of more and more colleges and schools innumerable that
I never heard of before. For instance Duke University
at Durham near Chapel Hill is a new institution with
untold millions at its command,2
and there are a lot more in Texas than the few I am
to visit. Apparently one could fill a whole winter in
reading in the South and Southwest. Let us hope this
is only the beginning.
Happy
days and love to Margaret,—dear Love.
C.
-
Converse
College. See Letter 28 n.2 and Letter 30. [back]
-
Duke
University in Durham, North Carolina, a co-educational
and private institution owned by the Methodist Episcopal
Church, operated under the name of Trinity College
until December, 1924, when it was incorporated under
its present name. [back]
