Front matter (continued 4)

Fleetwood must think that Berri isn't quite right; for he followed the instructor around all day more or less, waiting for him at the doors of lecture halls, intercepting him in front of the Colonial Club at lunch-time, running after him in the Square, and calling on him twice at his room, to ask if the thesis had turned up yet. But of course it never had. At that time neither of us could account for its disappearance, and Berri can't yet. He is existing in a state of nervous dread for fear it "may have fallen behind something" in the dark vestibule and will eventually turn up. Well, it will turn up, but not in Fleetwood's room.

Berri spent most of the time in which he wasn't dogging Fleetwood's footsteps discussing the thing with me. But I could n't help him much beyond hoping that the thesis—like the love-letter or the lost will in dramas at the Bowdoin Square Theatre—wouldn't be found until the fifth act, after an elapse of twenty years.

I had to leave him alone part of the afternoon. Duncan Duncan sent me word that he was sick and that the Advocate was in dire need. So I floundered through the alley to the printing-office, and learned from the proof-reader that they had to have six inches of poetry immediately or the paper would be very much delayed. I did n't know what to do, as we had n't any poems of that length in stock, so to speak. While I was sitting there in despair, one of the printers gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, and said,—

"Here, hurry up and write a couple of sticks of po'try; I want to go home." He was quite serious; so I got to work, and in about fifteen minutes had written twenty lines about the pigeons in the blizzard; only I referred to them, for various technical reasons, as doves. There was a heavenly smell of printer's ink in the place which made it easier to write somehow.

No letters came that day from any direction on account of the storm. The next afternoon I met the postman on the steps. He stopped to chat, and I thought I should grab the letters from his hand before he finished, as I caught sight of one in Duggie's handwriting addressed to me. I thought of course that he had postponed his trip and had written to tell me why. The postman talked on and on, but he told me one tale that interested me in spite of myself.

One Sunday morning old Professor Pallas (my ally in the hieroglyphics course) went over to the post-office for his letters. He must have been thinking very deeply about recent discoveries or cuneiform inscriptions or some such thing, because when he went up to the window he could n't remember whose letters he had come for. So he said to the clerk,—

"Young man, do you know who I am?"

The clerk unfortunately was a new one, and had to confess, with regret, that he did n't. So Professor Pallas, after a moment or two of reflection, looked up and murmured through the window,—

"I ask you this because I am equally at a loss myself; but perhaps if I take a little walk it may come to me." Then he strolled away, and in about ten minutes returned, very much pleased, with a slip of paper in his hand.

"I remembered it all by myself," he exclaimed, "and wrote it down."

I got Duggie's letter at last, and ran upstairs to read it. This is what it said:—

DEAR GRANNY,—We are steaming slowly out of the harbor, and I am sitting in a sheltered corner of the deck writing you this note for the pilot to take back with him. My fingers are stiff with cold, but as the air down below is thick with what Mrs. Chester calls "floral tributes." I 'd rather stay here and say good-by to you and the Goddess of Liberty at the same time.

What I wish particularly to do, however, is to thank you for letting me read your diary last night (I have some things to say about it—the parts where I come in, I mean—but that can wait) and to make a confession. When I got to the last page, where the ink was scarcely dry, I dashed over to Fleetwood's room, although I had lingered so long in your room I did n't have any too much time in which to catch my train. Fortunately there was a light in Fleetwood's window. While I was talking to him I saw out of the corner of my eye the great pile of—is the plural "theses" or "thesises"?—on his desk, and when he went into his bedroom for a minute to get a book for me to read going over, I sniped Berri's performance from the top of the pile and stuck it in my pocket. I did it on the impulse of the moment, and I may have been all wrong—I don't know; the whole thing worries me. But don't say anything to Berri about it. I should n't care to get you and the diary into trouble. When I reach Southampton I 'll send the thing back to him with a letter. Good-by, Granny. Take care of yourself and write often.

DUGGIE.

XIII

Some day I 'm going to write a book about Boston, because it's the most wonderful place in the world. I suppose I really mean by this that it is so different from Perugia. Berri, of course, would have to help me,—that is, he would unless I lived here fifty or sixty years for the purpose of gathering notes. It would take about that long to understand everything and be able to write intelligently and sympathetically. Anybody, of course, may sojourn for a time among the Bostonians—just as he may among the Chinese or the strange races of the Pacific islands—and record his impressions of them. But I don't think his remarks would be more valuable than the ordinary travel book that tells you merely the things you could tell yourself if you were on the spot with a pencil and a strong right arm. Really to know the place you have to be born and brought up here; which in itself amounts to saying that Boston will never, never be understood. For the people who were born and brought up here know and won't tell,—"know and can't tell," Berri declares. "It would take a genius to do the thing properly," he says, "and Boston went out of the genius business some thirty or forty years ago."

Now, Berri was born in Paris ("Paa-is, France—or Paa-is, Kentucky?" as a Southern girl once asked him), and I don't suppose he's a genius, actually. But as he has, on his mother's side, more cousins and aunts and things in Boston than anybody I 'm ever likely to know so very intimately, and as he seems more like a genius than anybody I 've ever seen before, what he tells me always sounds somehow as if it were the real thing. He laughed, though, the other day—we were taking a long walk—when I said this to him, and answered that it was very evident I did n't know what the real thing was.

"I'm not," he added, "if for no other reason than that I am able, quite seriously at times, to consider going some place else to live after I finish with all this." And he fluttered his hand in the direction of Cambridge.

"Does n't anybody else?" I asked.

"Mercy, no—how you talk!" he exclaimed. "Why should they?"

"I suppose I was thinking of papa," I replied meekly. "He believes it's better for most young men to get away from home and start life for themselves as soon as they grow up; they 're always boys to somebody unless they do, he says. Then, besides, he has great faith in perfectly new places. He 's often told me that even Perugia was too old and crowded for a young man. Perugia was fifty-three years old last spring." Berri laughed.

"That's important, if true," he answered, "but what has it to do with Boston?"

"Why, I merely imagined that some one in this part of the world might have the same idea," I suggested. "Now, take Duggie, for instance. Don't you think that Duggie wants to get out and try to do something?"

"Oh, Duggie!" said Berri, with a shrug. "He thinks he does now, but he really doesn't. Of course Duggie is simply slopping over with strenuousness and that sort of thing. But he gets most of it out of books,—Fleetwood's books at that. And after all, as I say, he slops over; it 'll just run into the sand without making even a silly little hole. After a while, when he gets tired of reading, and thinking how unworthy everybody else is, it won't do even that. Duggie in college is stunning and a leader of men; but Duggie at forty will be leading nothing but a beautiful purple life down there at his country-place,—unless, of course, he gets fat; if he gets fat, he 'll be a stockbroker."

"Say, Berri, how old are you, anyhow?" I asked. I know he is older than I am, but he never will tell me how much,—he didn't this time,—he just laughs, and says his early education was grossly neglected over there in Europe, or he would have been classes and classes ahead of me. I did n't like what he said about Duggie, and told him so. He answered that I 'd brought it on myself, and I suppose I had.

"Maybe we'd better talk about Bertie Stockbridge," he added. "He's my third cousin, you know—but, dear me, if people begin to be loyal to third cousins, Boston would turn into a sort of gigantic asylum for deaf mutes. I don't mind what you say about Bertie. Besides, he 's a more perfect specimen than Duggie, because Duggie is passing through a phase. Even Bostonians sometimes pass through phases when they 're very young. It doesn't happen often, though. The truth is, Duggie can't decide whether to be a Greek god or a college settlement. He'd really rather be a Greek god, only it's so immoral. He 'll probably end, you know, by coming out of his trance some June morning and finding himself married. Then it will be too late to be either one or the other. But what was it we were talking about? Oh, yes—Bertie. Now, Bertie isn't passing through a phase. Not on your life. Bertie just rose Venus-like in a state of hopeless completion from the crystal waters of the Back Bay. He never disappoints."

"But I like Bertie," I protested; "not as much as I do Duggie, of course. But I do like him; he's so—so—sensible."

"Sensible!" Berri screamed. "Why, child, the Stockbridge family is all sense. With trousers bagging at the knee and Adam's apples rising and falling above their abashed collars, Bertie's ancestors came into a lovely foolish world and created sense. That's all they ever do now,—just create one another and sense. So, the next time you hear some old thing groaning about the scarcity of common-sense, you 'll know that it's because the Stockbridges have it all,—they and a few friends who live in the same street during the winter and share several thousand front feet of the Atlantic Ocean from May to November. But you mustn't think I don't like Bertie and his family,—perhaps I should simply say 'Bertie,' for Bertie is his family,—because I do, you know. I admire him very much," Berri added after a moment. "He radiates a sort of atmosphere of modest infallibility that makes me feel exactly as I should feel if I suddenly went into Appleton Chapel and found the Pope there reading the Boston Transcript. Calmly and without the slightest tinge of bitterness, I admit that Bertie is always right.

"You heard what he said to Bobbie Colburn, didn't you? It was after the hour exam in English 68, and we were all in Bobbie's room comparing notes. Now, Bertie had passed, of course, because he 'll always pass in everything, whether he has any talent for it or not; but he had n't passed particularly well. It takes a person of some imagination to get a good mark in that course. Bobbie Colburn, on the other hand, who apparently hadn't studied at all and who'd been having a fierce time the night before the exam, just sailed into the examination-room with a dress-suit on under his overcoat, and got through brilliantly, which worried Bertie to death. We 'd all made some comment on the matter, and finally Colburn, as if to end it, said in his breezy way, 'Well, you know the old proverb,—He laughs best who drinks most!' Whereupon Bertie fixed him with his fine gray eyes and remarked, 'That is n't the way it goes, Colburn; you 've got it mixed.' Then he repeated the words correctly,—not with triumph exactly, but with the cold joy of one whose life is spent in righting unimportant wrongs.

"And yet I can't help confessing," Berri mused, "that I 'm exceedingly glad to acknowledge my relationship to Bertie and his tribe. They madden me at times; they have such clear, narrow, unelastic, admirable intellects. Their attitude toward all questions, public or private, is so definite and uncompromising; they 're so dog-gonned right. Why, American history is just one glad, sweet testimonial to the fact that they 're never wrong. They 're not always on the popular side, or the successful; they 're merely right. Any other human beings would keep on trying to make use of such a splendid faculty. Years and years ago they did make use of it; but nowadays it's enough just to know that they have it, and pretty much all to themselves.

"But, as I was saying, I 'm secretly darned glad that Bertie and I belong to each other, so to speak. Is n't it funny—I'm not a bit loyal to Bertie, but he 's perfectly loyal to me. He does n't in the least understand me. I don't think he even likes me, although that disturbing thought probably has n't occurred to him yet; but there's no getting around the fact that I 'm one of his relatives, and he accepts me,—accepts me in a way he never will accept you, no matter how well he gets to know you and like you. There's something rather fine in that, don't you think? Of course, it might be a good deal of a bore if he took a fancy to me; but as he won't, it's really a great comfort. The fact that that plain, but healthy-looking, silent person in the very badly made dark gray suit accepts me and will always accept me, is equivalent to an illuminated address of welcome and the freedom of the city.

"You really can't imagine how it simplifies things," Berri continued. "It's such a relief, such an absolution! It leaves me, as some one says, 'with nothing on my mind but my hair and my hat;' and even they don't have to be brushed as long as people consider me a Stockbridge at heart. Why, if I didn't feel like it, I shouldn't have to be even polite. Of course I am polite. But it's a mere habit with me; I dare say I 'll get out of it. You've noticed, haven't you, how brusque and sort of primitive Bertie's manner is as a rule? Well, they 're all more or less like that. People who like them say it arises from shyness and simplicity, and people who don't like them declare that it's just common or domestic rudeness; but it really is n't one or the other, and I think I ought to know. The family manner comes from a curious conviction that politeness, grace, tact—the practice of making oneself agreeable free of charge, so to speak—has to do with the emotions; which is perfectly absurd. The habit of politeness is about as emotional as the habit of brushing one's teeth. But Bertie's tribe does n't think so; and emotion with them is simply another word for effeminacy. You see, they 're so sure of coming up to the scratch in the big things that they let the little ones slide. I think they always vaguely associate politeness with French waiters and Neapolitan cripples. So, in a way, they 'll rather expect it of you; they like all foreigners to seem foreign."

Bertie gabbled about no end of things that afternoon. He had what he calls a "dry jag," and hardly ever stopped talking from the time we left our house just after luncheon until we came down Brattle Street on the way back and went into Mrs. Brown's for dinner. Once he and a lot of kids coming out of a schoolhouse away across the river somewhere, pasted one another with snowballs (I joined them) until a policeman made us stop, and for a few minutes the torrent of talk was interrupted. But he made up for it by yelling every time he hit any one or got hit himself. He told me all sorts of tales, and I could n't help thinking how different everything was from Perugia.

It had never occurred to me before that Perugia was so happy-go-lucky and uncivilized. Why, out there we just seem to grow up like those great round weeds on the prairie that suddenly let go for no particular reason and then bound along in the breeze through the wide flat streets until they run against a fence or a house and, for a while, stick there. It does n't seem to me that anything much is decided for us in advance. I did n't know even that I was coming to college until about a year and a half beforehand,—which made it simply awful, as I had to study everything at once and did n't learn much of anything. Now, Berri says that, with the exception of himself, who was "grossly neglected" and never studied anything but French and German, his entire family for generations has lived by a sort of educational and social calendar from which they never deviate except in the event of a civil war. He says he should n't be a bit surprised to learn that there were certain definite, unalterable dates at which the little boys began and left off tin soldiers and the breeding of guinea-pigs, and the little girls began and left off paper-dolls and "dressing up." He declares that, providing the laws of nature are reasonably consistent, they all know exactly what they 'll be doing at any period of their lives; that even matrimony has ceased to be a lottery with them, as they go in for marrying, not individuals, but types. Isn't it perfectly wonderful?

"Now, take Bertie," he said. "Bertie knew who his classmates in college were going to be, at the age of five. They 're the same chaps he's been going to school with, and to the kid dancing-classes, you know, the Saturday Mornings and Thursday Afternoons or whatever they are, all these years. They go to the Friday Evenings this year, and next year they 'll go to the Saturday Evenings, and at all these morns and noons and dewy eves they dance with the same girls that two years from now they 'll meet in society and subsequently marry, just because it's part of the routine. After they get out of college they 'll all go abroad for a few months in groups of three and four, and when they get back they 'll be taken into the same club (their names will have been on the waiting list some twenty-odd years), and they 'll join a lunch club down town in order not to miss seeing one another every day at noon for the rest of their lives."

Then Berri told me about the girls. Really my heart bleeds for the girls, because apparently, unless they are terribly pretty or terribly clever or terribly rich, they must have a devil of a time. Berri says that although they all "come out," they don't all stay out; that after about a year or so a good many of them sort of slink in again by unanimous consent. (Imagine such a thing in Perugia! Why, every girl has a good time there for just as long as she wants to.) The pretty ones, however, never go in again; because, if you once get a reputation for beauty here, Berri says it never leaves you (the reputation, I mean), and that 's why an evening party in Boston often strikes a stranger as being so largely a matter of physical traditions. At a dance the rich plain girls, he says, have a good time too, but only for the first part of the evening. The men speak of them as "pills" (a quaint, chivalrous custom, is it not?), and try to dance with them as early in the evening as possible, because everybody else is trying to do the same thing and there isn't so great a chance of getting stuck for an hour or so. But later on they ask only the ones they really want to dance with, and the plain rich girl finds herself spending a cozy eternity with some one who is inwardly moaning because he delayed until the rush was over.

The girls too are born into a sort of rut, Berri says. It takes the form of sewing-circles. Berri can discourse for hours at a time on these institutions. His aunt Josephine has been going to the same one every week for fifty years. He said that once when he was a little child he heard an Englishman who had lived in India telling about the mysterious rapidity with which a piece of news spread among the natives of that country. Within half a day, this man declared, a rumor would sort of leap through the air from Calcutta to the most obscure villages on the Afghan frontier, and no one could explain how it was done. Berri used to fall asleep at night worrying over it. But now, even in India romance is dead, Berri says; he 's convinced that the whole thing was nothing but just sewing-circles.

"Why, Granny, if I were to lock myself up in my room in Cambridge and draw the curtains and stuff the keyhole and then murmur in a low voice that—well, for instance, that you and Sarah Bernhardt had been quietly married at the First Baptist Church in Somerville that afternoon, and then dash in to my aunt Josephine's as fast as a car could take me, she would greet me in the library with: 'My dear, have you heard! I 've just come from the sewing-circle, and they say—of course I don't believe it'—and so on. And this is n't any idle jest, either; it's a fact."

He was just beginning to tell me something else about them—I forget what—when we both realized that it was rather late, and that if we expected to get back in time for dinner we should have to find a shorter way or take the car. We neither of us knew where we were, although Berri said the place looked as if it might be called "Upper-West-Newtonville-Centre Corners." So we stopped a little girl who was trudging along with a pitcher of milk in her hand.

"Little girl, can you tell me where we are?" Berri asked her solemnly. She stared at us for a moment with great round eyes (Berri admitted afterwards that the question was a stupid one), and finally answered in a high, scornful little voice,—

"Main Street."

Berri refused to ask again after that, and we strolled about for a time until we caught sight of the tower of Memorial,—it suddenly appeared against the sky in quite the wrong direction,—and then of course getting home was easy enough.

We were rather confidential on the way back, and talked about the "Dickey," which we had never discussed before. The Dickey is the great Sophomore secret society. I don't remember just how the subject came up, but something reminded Berri of one night earlier in the year,—one of the nights on which the society takes on ten new members. They choose them from the Sophomore class always except late in the spring, just before college closes, when ten—the "First Ten"—are elected from among the Freshmen. However, by that time the Freshmen are almost Sophomores, so it amounts to about the same thing. When a ten is taken on, the whole club marches through the streets at about eleven o'clock at night, singing a song that has no words but "Tra la la la, la la, la la." It's a wonderful little tune; it's very short and simple, and after you 've heard it once it sticks in your head, you can't forget it. Unlike other catchy airs, though, you somehow don't get tired of it. I 've heard it over and over again since I 've been here,—on pianos as I passed under the windows of upper classmen, whistled by muckers in the Yard, and sung by the club at night,—and it always gives me a thrill; I suppose it 's because it means such a lot, and because you realize that no one (except the muckers) would play it or sing it or whistle it who was n't entitled to.

On the night that Berri referred to, the club must have been half a mile away when we first heard it. Berri was in my room reading, and I was writing a letter. My back was toward him, and we neither of us said anything when the vague musical "tra la la las" floated up from away down by the river somewhere. They were very faint, and after a minute or two stopped entirely. Then, just as I had forgotten about it, the song began again,—a little louder and more distinct this time and getting louder every second. Then it suddenly broke off once more. But I didn't forget it, for I knew that the club had stopped to take some one out of his room—some one who had just been elected—and march him along with the others, and I waited kind of nervously for the refrain to begin again; it never gets started quite evenly,—only a few voices at first, the rest joining in as the crowd turns away from the door of the "neophyte's" house and starts along the street. They came nearer and nearer,—the song grew louder and louder. Some of the fellows were singing a clear tenor that made the last few notes of every verse die away in a kind of high, sad wail. It seemed ridiculous for me to be sitting there pretending to write a letter, with Berri reading in such elaborate unconsciousness by the fire, when the ears of both of us were strained to catch every note, and the hoarse, fierce shouts that suddenly broke through the song as the Dickey turned into our street; but neither of us knew what to say exactly. At last, however, I could n't stand it any longer, and jumped up and blew out both the lamps. With the room dark we could stand at the window and not be seen. Freshmen are n't expected to show any particular interest in the proceedings of the Dickey; it's considered fresh. They were just tramping past our house when we leaned out,—a singing, shouting, irresistible mob,—and Berri and I looked down at them in silence. We were both excited, and I felt chilly all over—but that may have been on account of the open window. The crowd did not pass on, as we thought it would, but stopped at a house across the street a few doors down. Once more the song ceased; men formed in a double line that reached from the piazza to the street, and there were hoarse cries of "Pull him out—pull him out!" Then the front door burst open, and a fellow—he seemed to be half dressed—came hurtling through the air between the double row waiting for him. There was a moment of confusion and savage yells, during which it looked as if the whole crowd was trying to get its hands on him. We lost sight of him in the shuffle, and in another instant the song began, louder than before, and the Dickey swayed away into the darkness. We stood at the window until the clearness and energy of the "Tra la la la, la la, la la," faded to a thin, dim, uncertain rhythm,—a suggestion of tenor that all but lost itself in the pearly fog rolling up from the marshes.

I fumbled for a match when we turned at last to the room. But before I found one, Berri said, "I think I 'll go to bed, Granny," and by the time I got the lamp lighted he had slipped away. I don't know why exactly, but I was rather glad he hadn't waited. After that I tried to finish my letter, but I could n't make myself end the sentence I had been writing the way I had meant to end it in the first place. So I put the thing in the fire and sat there awhile, thinking, and then went to bed myself.

XIV

Well, as I said, something reminded Berri of that night, and as we were on a deserted road far from Cambridge, he referred to it,—indirectly at first, and afterwards right out in so many words. But he didn't talk in the same free and airy strain he had been talking in before, and although I wanted to hear what he said and ask questions and say a few things myself, I had a feeling all the time that perhaps we ought to change the subject; it made me uncomfortable. Then I thought of the way I had talked to Duggie the first evening, away back in September, and positively blushed when I remembered that I had asked him, outright, how one ought to go about getting on clubs. Why, that was enough to sewer me with almost anybody in the world but Duggie. Imagine my doing such a thing now! No one ever thinks of mentioning the clubs in general conversation. Of course once in a while some fresh kid who happens to live next door to one of them comes out with an allusion of some kind, and embarrasses everybody to death; and I 've had one or two upper classmen—Juniors or Seniors—who hadn't made the Dickey and didn't belong to a club talk to me quite freely about the whole matter in a tone that implied that such things were all very well, no doubt, but did n't interest them particularly. You can get a good deal of information from upper classmen of this kind,—fellows who are n't on clubs and have given up expecting to be; they don't think you fresh. But it would never do to ask for any from a Dickey man; that would be awful. Why, you 'd never be taken on if you did that.

Even Berri does n't seem to know much about the Dickey, or, if he does, he did n't tell me anything very definite. He said, though, that if you didn't make it, you might just as well pack up and go home; that Dickey men kind of flocked together and did n't go outside much for their friends, and that the fellows you wanted to know usually were on the Dickey. Then, too, he said that if a man did n't make the Dickey, he wasn't likely to be taken into a club. Berri seemed to know a lot about the clubs. I knew hardly anything at all; in fact, I thought the Dickey was a club, but he says it isn't,—that it's a society. The clubs, he says, are great. His uncle took him to one for breakfast once before he—Berri—got into college. (Of course he couldn't be taken to one now.) He said he did n't notice anything particularly secret about it; it was just like one of the good clubs in town. I found out the names of most of them from him—they seem to have Greek names, yet are called by queer nicknames as a rule—and where they are. This last, however, I knew pretty well before, but I did n't know which was which, and could n't ask exactly. I had often seen fellows going in and out of certain houses along Mount Auburn Street that did n't look like residences somehow, although they might have been, and wondered just what they were. At night, even with the shades down, they were always lighted from top to bottom. No matter how late it was, the lights were there, cheerful and inviting,—which in itself seemed remarkable when I considered how early Cambridge (the town, I mean) goes to bed. But one morning when I was hurrying to a lecture, two fellows came out of Claverly Hall, and one of them said to the other, "Hold up a minute; I left my note-book at the club," and dashed across the street. Then it suddenly dawned on me. Of course I never look curiously at them any more, but just walk right on with my eyes fixed on something in the distance as if they were ordinary houses. I can't help wondering, sometimes, whether anybody ever noticed me staring at them and at the fellows going in and out—before I knew. I hope not.

When I asked Duggie about getting into clubs that time, I remember he evaded the subject (which was darned good of him, it seems to me now) by saying something about being polite to everybody.

"That's all very well," Berri answered, when I laughed a little and told him about it, "but there's such a thing as being too polite. You see, there are fellows right now in our class—you know who they are and I do too—who are, even as early as this, being considered for the First Ten. If you suddenly turned in and tried to make yourself nice to them, why, everybody would say you were 'swiping;' and so you would be. The First Ten elects the Second Ten, you know."

"Duggie did n't mean that you ought to be polite only to the fellows you think are going to help you along," I answered. "It was exactly the reverse of that. What he meant was that you ought to be the same to everybody."

"I wonder if he was," Berri mused. "It's so easy, after you 've once got to the top yourself, to think you did it all with the help of the Scriptures. It's like these old vultures who 've stolen everything in sight ever since they were born, beginning their magazine articles on 'How to Get Rich' with: 'Honesty and Industry must be the motto of him who would attain wealth!'"

I refused to see any connection between Duggie and the old vultures, and tried to get back to the clubs. However, we did n't say much more about them, and squabbled most of the way home over the subject of popularity. It does seem queer that some fellows have so many friends, while others who start with about the same opportunities and even greater natural advantages now and then have so few. I suggested that when a fellow was tremendously popular and "in" everything—and I could n't see why it was exactly—he probably had very interesting or fascinating qualities that I had n't perhaps discovered. Berri, however, maintained that popularity was often nothing but an idiotic fashion, and mentioned several popular fellows he did n't like, to prove it.

"Now look at Tucker Ludlow," he burst out. "What is he? A dissipated little beast; you know he is, everybody knows he is. Not that I should mind his being dissipated and a beast, if he were ever anything else; but he isn't. He's stupid, and he 's ignorant, and he is n't even good-looking, yet he moves in a crowd,—a nice crowd too; and when he moves, the crowd moves with him. That's nothing but fashion. It is n't possible that anybody can really like the creature. But it amounts to the same thing; I 've already heard it kind of whispered around that he 'll be on the First Ten."

What Berri said interested me very much, for Ludlow and I had agreed, a few days before, to grind together on a course for the mid-year exams. I had intended to remind him of it, but now that Berri said he was spoken of for the First Ten I don't like to; people might think I was swiping. I don't care much for Ludlow myself; but he doesn't irritate me the way he does Berri, and I do think there must be something to him.

After the freaks of fashion, Berri seemed to think that the most popular men—in one's Freshman year anyhow—were the fellows whose opportunities for making friends were good to begin with, and who were n't in any way particularly startling,—athletics, of course, always excepted; athletes never lack a following. But it does n't do, he says, to be different, or to excel at first in much of anything else. You may with perfect safety have the reputation for knowing things or being clever, but that 's very different from really knowing or being. The man who actually knows or is, is doomed.

"What about Reggie Howard, then?" I asked. Everybody likes Howard, and yet he knows a fearful amount and is as clever as any one could be. I knew Berri thought so, and wondered how he would get out of it.

"Yes, Reggie's wise,—very wise," he admitted, "but with the exception of you and me, almost no one suspects it. He does n't object to my knowing, because he feels sure I don't mind; and you 're safe because you 're so kind. But he takes care that people generally don't get on to it. That's part of his wisdom."

One thing I 've learned here that surprised me a good deal, and that is—popularity has nothing to do with money. I always had an idea that people with money to throw to the birds could n't help being liked; but that evidently is n't the case. And Berri did n't have to tell me; I found it out for myself. Of course it's nice to be able to live in comfortable rooms and have plenty to eat and wear decent clothes. No one objects to that, and no one objects, apparently, to a fellow's doing more than that,—to spending, indeed, a good deal of money if he has it to spend. But the mere fact of a man's having a record-breaking allowance does n't seem to interest people in the least, and if some frightfully rich fellow comes to college with a flourish of trumpets in the Sunday papers about his father's income, and how many horses he intends to keep, and how much the furnishing of his rooms will probably cost, it 's decidedly against him. I was thinking, I suppose, of Tony Earle in our class. His father makes millions and millions out of safety-matches—I believe it is. Anyhow, everybody speaks of Tony as "His Matchesty," and has very little to do with him. The fellows are simply prejudiced against him because the papers said he had so much money. And he 's really a perfectly harmless, rather quiet sort of person who plays well on the piano. Berri and I spent an evening with him once. We were dining in town, and Earle was all alone across the room. He looked so dreary that Berri finally exclaimed,—

"For heaven's sake, why doesn't some one take pity on that poor wretched millionaire? It's positively pathetic!"

I suggested asking him to come over and have his dinner with us. But Berri, like every one else, objected.

"He 'd probably order nightingales or peacocks or some such thing, and then insist on paying for us," he said.

"Well, let's ask him and see," I urged. "We'll make that the test. If he tries to pay the whole bill, he won't do." So Berri went over and asked him to join us, and he turned out just as I said,—quiet and not especially interesting, but a good deal nicer than a lot of fellows who won't know him. When it came to paying the waiter, Berri kicked me under the table and spent an indecently long time in looking over the check. I think he was actually disappointed when Earle glanced across the table and merely said,—

"By the way, what's my share?"

When we got to Cambridge he asked us over to his rooms. They certainly are dreams; even Berri could n't find anything wrong with them. He bangs the box like a wizard.

"I was afraid he was going to say he was lonely, or something melodramatic like that, when we got up to leave and he asked us to come again," Berri remarked on the way home. "Of course he is horribly lonely, and it was very considerate of him not to spoil everything by saying so. I think we 'll have to go back. To-morrow at luncheon we can start a society for the prevention of cruelty to millionaires."

Well, if I 'm ever ostracized it won't be because people are scared at my allowance. Papa and I have been having an exceedingly brisk correspondence lately. Just after the family got back to Perugia, Mildred wrote me that papa had won an important lawsuit and was going to get an unusually large fee. So I bought some clothes and a few things I really needed on the strength of it and had the bill sent home, as he made me promise to let him know just what I spent. He replied at some length, declaring, among other things, that I reminded him of what Charles Lamb says of a poor relation; Lamb's remark being, "A poor relation is a preposterous shadow lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity." I expostulated, and told him about Willie Jackson. Willie's elder brother passed through Boston not long ago, and when Willie went in to see him he asked for money with which to buy a dress-suit case and some shoes he needed badly. No one knows exactly how it happened,—some think that Willie had been brooding over the Fine Arts course he is taking and the instructor's plea for more beauty in one's every-day environment. Anyhow, when Willie stepped off the car in Cambridge, he had—not the shoes and the dress-suit case, but a palm and a canary-bird.

To this papa replied that he didn't see why I had taken the trouble to record for his benefit the exploits of Willie Jackson, as he never for a moment had doubted that there were as many fools in college as elsewhere. That is where the matter rests at present.

As there is nothing doing now that you can watch in the afternoon as you can the football practice in the autumn and the baseball and crews in the spring, some of us at the table have become athletes on our own account. We go to the gym every day at about five, and work with chest-weights and dumbbells, and are put through all sorts of agonizing performances in a large class of hard students who never take any other kind of exercise. Then we run up North Avenue as far as the railway-station and back to our rooms. I don't know how far it is, but the return trip at first seemed to be about a hundred miles; it's a little shorter now, and gets shorter every day. After a hot shower-bath and then a cold one you feel eight or ten feet high, and walk through the Square to dinner, sticking out your chest. It's queer you don't catch cold, running in the icy wind with literally nothing on but a pair of tennis shoes, loose short cotton drawers, and a thin sleeveless undershirt; but you never seem to. The gym made me stiff all over for a day or two, but I feel fine now, and wonder why we never thought of it before. The muckers on the Avenue bother us a good deal with snowballs when we run. Hemington very foolishly chased one of them not long ago and washed his face with snow. The paternal mucker has since sued Hemi for assault and battery. Hemi is in a great state about it, and we are all looking forward to cutting a morningful of lectures and testifying in court.

The mid-years are almost here, and I feel as if it were only about the day before yesterday that I was failing in the hour exams. I simply must do well in the mid-years, for if I don't they will probably change my probation to "special probation" (as it is called), which is the limit, my adviser says, of everything obnoxious. I should have to report—to him most likely—every morning at half-past eight, just to show that I was up bright and early and "in sympathy with the work," so to speak. Then at ten or eleven in the evening I should have to drop in again, which of course would make it impossible to go to the theatre without permission. An extra-sharp lookout would be kept on my work, and altogether special probation is easily a consummation devoutly to be avoided. I suppose I 'll have to grind and grind night and day in order to get everything down cold. I wish now that I had kept on studying an hour or two every day, as I did for about a week after my encounter with the exams in October. I should n't be well prepared even then, but it would n't all seem so perfectly hopeless as it does now. It's so hard, though, to do anything regularly when the front door is unlocked most of the time, as ours is. And there 's no use in locking the door of my room, as the fellows don't knock once and go away, but pound and rattle and shout insulting remarks through the keyhole. All of which makes me feel disagreeable and rather affected,—locking myself up when other people get along so well without that sort of thing. I have n't done it more than once or twice.

Anyhow I 'll probably get a good mark in my English Composition. The instructor seems to like my themes and reads a good many of them in class. Lately, however, he has developed the unnecessary trick of pronouncing the words, when he is reading, exactly as they are spelled, which is extremely trying for me and not fair to the theme. It has made several really good ones sound ridiculous. Spelling is n't my strong point, I know; but I draw the line at Berri's guying me about it,—Berri, whose spelling, unless he digs every other word out of the dictionary, looks like some kind of absurd French dialect. He has recently taken to getting off a rigmarole (it's supposed to be about me) that begins something like this,—

"'Berri, how do you spell "parallel"?'

"'Why, p-a-r-a-l-l-e-l, of course.'

"'Thank you; that's the way I have it.' (Then nothing was heard but the scratching of a penknife.)"

I think they 're rather fussy about details here. On the back of my last theme the instructor wrote: "By the way, dotting one's i's and crossing one's t's are charming literary habits when once acquired."

However, I think I shall get a good mark in this course, notwithstanding. But life isn't all English Composition, and I have a terrible amount of work to do in the other things. Berri and I began, in a way, to prepare for the ordeal by going to the theatre for the last time until the mid-year period is at an end. We made an occasion of it, and ended by doing something that I had never dreamed we were going to do when we started out. It was foolish, I suppose, and I don't know exactly what mamma would think about it. I should like to tell her and find out, but I 'm afraid papa might get hold of it, and my idea of his opinion on the subject is somewhat less vague. What we did was to invite one of the girls in the show to supper.

Berri proposed it. We were sitting in the front row away to one side, and when the second act was about half over, he exclaimed to me,—

"There, she 's done it again; that's the third time." I asked him what he meant, and he replied that one of the girls on our side of the stage had winked at us. The attention, he explained, must have been meant for us. And for a variety of reasons it did n't seem as if it could have been intended for any one else. In the first place our seats were the last in the row. Behind us were some ladies, and on the other side of Berri was a very old man who sat half turned away from the stage, holding a great black tin trumpet to his ear, as if he were expecting the actors to lean over the footlights and pour something into it.

"I don't want to appear vain," Berri went on, "but as a mere matter of geographical position I think that we 're It." The comedian was singing a song in the middle of the stage, and on either side of him was a row of girls—convent girls they were supposed to be—who joined in the chorus at the end of every verse and shook their fingers at him reprovingly. They were all dressed in tights. This was n't the convent uniform (they had appeared in that during the first act), and was explained by the fact that they had been rehearsing for private theatricals when the comedian fell in through the window. The comedian was a burglar, and his tights were merely a clever disguise. He was making the girls believe that he was a professional actor hired by the mother superior to teach them how to sing and dance. This was the plot, and it was really rather complicated, for when they all decided to leave the convent with the burglar and spend the evening at a roof-garden, they rushed in dressed as policemen, pretending that they had come to arrest the burglar. The mother superior did n't recognize them, of course, and was naturally glad to have the burglar taken away. Then, at the roof-garden—in the third act—they appeared as waiters; all of which made it hard for me to keep track of them very well. But Berri could spot our girl every time, and by carefully examining the program and comparing the names of the chorus with the various changes of costume she went through, he managed in some way, by the end of the second act, to discover her name. It was Miss Mae Ysobelle. To tell the truth, I did n't think her particularly pretty. She was tall and not a bit graceful, and when she danced she looked as if it were hard work to move her arms and legs the right number of times and finish with the others. She smiled a great deal, but the moment she stopped dancing her mouth sort of snapped back to place as if it were made of stiff red rubber. I found, after watching her for a long time, that my own mouth got very tired. I told Berri this; also that her clothes looked as if they had been made for some one else. But Berri somehow seemed to think she might be unusually agreeable if one knew her.

"Very often, you know, really pretty people don't make up well at all; and as for her clothes looking as if they did n't belong to her, why, she can't help that, poor thing! they probably don't. She is a little knock-kneed, but you would n't notice that if she had a skirt on."

"Well, there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger of our seeing her with a skirt," I answered, for some of the convent girls—Mae Ysobelle among them—had suddenly changed their minds about being waiters and had decided to give the interrupted private theatricals right there on the roof-garden stage. They came prancing in dressed as jockeys, while the man in the orchestra who, as Berri says, supplies music with local color, slapped two thin boards together to imitate the crack of a whip.

"Oh, I don't know," Berri mused; "we might manage to meet her after the show,—ask her to supper or something. She seems friendly enough," he added; for, as he was speaking, the jockeys drew up at the edge of the stage, touched their caps, then leaned over, and all winked. Miss Ysobelle was unmistakably looking at us as she did it.

I did n't believe she would go with us even if we asked her, but Berri said we 'd rush out after the third act and buy her some flowers and send an usher behind the scenes with them. We ended by doing this—we got her a big box of roses—and writing a note asking her to meet us at the stage door when the performance was ended. Berri signed it "Front row—extreme left."

We did n't get an answer to it, at least not in words; but when the curtain went up again on a scene in the convent garden, Miss Ysobelle had one of our roses in her hair and another at her belt, and I began to feel excited at the prospect of meeting her. In fact, the whole last act had a personal interest for us that the others had not. It was almost like being on the stage and enjoying everything from the inside. I even felt rather sorry for the rest of the audience who were sitting there perfectly oblivious to the intrigue going on in the blaze of the footlights, before their unsuspecting eyes. One thing struck us both as rather odd at first. Miss Ysobelle, except for the roses, scrupulously ignored us through the entire act. She not only never winked at us, she never even looked at us. In fact, she gave us both the impression that she had become absorbed in something at the other side of the house. I could n't understand this, and neither could Berri, although he said there was probably some theatrical etiquette connected with her averted gaze, or perhaps the stage-manager had told her to be more dignified. We decided to ask her about it at supper. Well, we never got a chance to ask her, but we found out soon enough for ourselves.

As we had the last seats on the left side of the front row, we were naturally the last to get into the middle aisle on the way out, or, rather, we and the people who had the corresponding seats on the other side of the house were the last. We met them when we reached the end of our row, and had to stop a moment as they stood there putting on their overcoats and blocking the way. One of them I noticed particularly,—a great, big thug of a creature who had shiny black hair slicked up in front with a barbery flourish, and a very fancy waistcoat and cravat. They kept just ahead of us on the way out, and laughed a good deal. Berri and I were unusually silent.

We did n't go quite to the stage door, as the electric light fizzing right over it made everything in the little alley as bright as day. Neither of us was very keen to join the group loitering near by, so we stood a little back in the shadow and waited. Finally some men with their collars turned up came out; then two women with thick veils on. They seemed to be in a great hurry, and for a few seconds we were afraid that one of them might be Miss Ysobelle; but we remembered how tall she was and did n't run after them. Then more men came, and more girls,—some of whom were joined by men waiting at the door. It seemed at last as if the whole company must have come out, and Berri and I were beginning to think that Miss Mae Ysobelle must have left before we arrived, when the door opened once more and she appeared with our box of flowers in her arms. For a moment she stood on the step and looked around expectantly.

"I think we ought to go up," Berri murmured nervously; but I thought it would be better to wait and join her as she passed by.

Then a queer thing happened. Just as she decided to leave the step, who should go up to her but the big thug with the shiny hair and loud waistcoat? He lifted his hat and shook hands with her very cordially, then took the box of flowers—our flowers—and strolled away with her out of the alley to the street. As they passed by, we heard her exclaim, "Say, it was awful nice of you to send those Jacques. When Myrtle seen me open the box—" The rest of the sentence was lost in the rattle of a cab.

Berri and I waited a moment before coming out of the shadow. Then we looked at each other, and Berri shrieked with laughter. We laughed all the way back to Cambridge. The people in the car must have thought—I don't know what they could have thought. For a long time we could n't imagine why things had turned out as they had until Berri remembered that he had signed the note "Front row—extreme left." He had meant our left, but Miss Ysobelle no doubt thought that it referred to her left,—which was quite another matter.

XV

I've been dead to the world for more than a month; it seems about a year. Yet when I came to look at the situation squarely, there wasn't anything else to do exactly. It was a case of getting the drop on my exams or letting them get the drop on me. Of course, I could have sort of fooled with them and thought I was learning something about them and then perhaps have scraped through in one or two and failed in the others. And this, as a matter of fact, was the way in which Tucker Ludlow and I did go at them at first. Tucker came up to my room two or three times, armed with some type-written notes on Greek architecture that he had bought at one of the book stores in the Square. The first time he came was rather late in the afternoon. He examined everything in my room, and we talked a good deal; he had been out West once, and seemed to know much more about that part of the country than I did. However, we finally got to work and had read about two pages of the notes when Hemington came in. He saw that we were grinding, and said he would n't sit down and interrupt us, especially as he ought to be in his own room, grinding himself. He did n't actually sit down, but leaned against the mantelpiece and smoked for a while, and then compromised by half sitting on the arm of a chair in a temporary way and swinging his leg. When at last he got up to leave, it was so near dinner that Ludlow went with him, and said he would continue some other time. He left the notes with me, and at first I thought I should study them alone, but as Ludlow and I had agreed to grind the course up together, there did n't seem to be any point in getting ahead of him; so in a few minutes I went to dinner myself.

The next time Ludlow came to study was in the evening. He proposed that I should read the notes aloud, as he found the architectural terms so hard to pronounce; we were to stop and talk over anything we did n't understand. I made myself comfortable in a chair near the lamp, and Ludlow drew up to the fire. After droning along for about ten minutes about triglyphs and epistyles and entablatures and all that sort of thing, I suddenly had a jealous feeling that he was getting more good from the performance than I was, for he had n't asked a question, while I had n't understood a single sentence. Finally, without looking up, I said,—

"Tucker, if you really know what 'pseudo-peripteral' means, I wish you would tell me." Tucker didn't answer, and I thought he was probably trying to get at a definition simple enough for me to grasp. But when I glanced over toward the fireplace, I saw that he was asleep with his mouth open. Well, I felt rather angry at first,—it all seemed such a waste of time; but it struck me, too, as being funny, so I did n't wake him. He must have slept for at least ten minutes longer (of course I did n't bother about reading aloud any more), and then he came to, exclaiming,—

"Read that about the ground plan once more; I don't think I quite got that." As the ground plan was almost the first topic mentioned, I suppose he had dozed off almost immediately. After that I made him do the reading, but he had n't stumbled through many pages before he put down the notes and said,—

"Granny, don't you think that if we tackled this beastly drivel in the daytime, our heads would be clearer?"

That was the end of our grinding together. He came to my room once more, but I was out. It was after this experience that I thought the matter over and decided I should have to do the thing differently, and for the most part alone. My most brilliant stroke was getting the key of Duggie's room from Mrs. Chester; I could lock myself up there and be perfectly safe. When fellows saw my own door wide open and no one at home, they went away at once without making a row. Of course I had to let Berri into the game; but as he began to be scared about some of his own exams, he was grateful for the refuge and did n't give it away.

I went to work at the whole business scientifically, determined not to leave a single thing, however unimportant, to chance. And I 'm convinced now that if I have the nerve always to do this, I can get through any examination I 'm ever likely to have,—not brilliantly, perhaps, but very respectably. First of all, I spent a day in the library and got hold of a lot of books that gave my various courses in their simplest, clearest form. For the Fine Arts course I found that a copy of the notes that Ludlow had was better than anything. They stated facts in a condensed way that made it possible to keep in your head a bird's-eye view of the entire course, as far as we had gone. Then I made a list of the number of pages of general reading we had to accomplish in every course, and split them up so as to be able to get through them all—taking notes as I read—by reading a certain number of pages a day. I left a margin at the end for review and in case of accidents. And finally, after I had made these preparations and collected as many of the necessary books as I could (I had to do some of my reading in the library), I locked Duggie's door one morning after breakfast, and sat down at his desk, and stayed there until luncheon; and after luncheon I went back and stayed until it was time to go to the gym and take a run; and after dinner I went back and stayed until bedtime. And I did this every day with very few interruptions until I could pick up any of the text-books, turn to the alphabetical index, and plough right through it, describing in detail every darned thing it mentioned; and an alphabetical index mentions a good deal. If I slipped up on anything, I would mark it with a pencil, go back and learn it. Oh, it was perfectly awful! I got so tired and discouraged and maudlin at times that I would have to lean back and close my eyes and let my bursting mind become a throbbing blank for a few minutes, in order to keep from screaming. But after the gym and the run and the shower-bath, I felt all right again,—just as if nothing had happened.

Two courses—the physics and philosophy—I had to tutor in for a while. There was no use pegging away at them by myself, for I simply did n't understand some of the experiments, and logic I could n't make head or tail of. A Senior who lived in College House explained them to me in simple golden words (three dollars an hour were his terms), and when I once saw through it all and had it down on paper in my own language, I could let it soak in at home. The other things—the ones I did understand, like History and Fine Arts—were merely a matter of incessant repetition and memory.

The night before the Fine Arts exam I went to what is called a "Seminar" in that subject. I could have got along very well without it after my days and days of slavery, but about every one I knew was going, and I wanted to see what it was like. There are several men here who make a business of boiling popular courses down to their most painlessly swallowable dimensions, and then giving the thing the evening before the examination in a kind of lecture, for which they charge an admittance fee of three or four dollars. This performance is a seminar,—a kind of royal road, if not to learning at least to passing examinations. They say that fellows who never look at a book or take a note in class often go to a seminar and, providing they have good memories, are able to answer enough questions on the exam paper the next morning to get through with colors flying. A certain number of questions on almost every paper simply have to deal with cold, isolated facts rather than with the generalities, comparisons, and discussions that necessitate a real knowledge of the subject, and it is with these facts—pounded in at a seminar—that one puts up a successful bluff. The authorities naturally object to all this. As Berri remarked about the seminar we went to,—

"After a professor has earnestly expounded a subject for half a year, it must make him rather sore to have a cheeky parrot get up and do the whole thing much better in four hours."

The Fine Arts seminar was held in a huge room, almost a hall, in a kind of office building near the Square. It was advertised to begin at half-past seven, and pretty much every one was there on time,—all the sports of the Freshman and Sophomore classes, some Juniors, and even a few Seniors. It was what the society reporter refers to as "a large and fashionable gathering." It certainly was a mighty nice-looking crowd of fellows; clean, well dressed, and (to quote Berri) "much more intelligent in appearance than we actually are, or we should n't be here at all." As every man came in, he was given a large sheet of stiff paper on which was printed a synopsis of the course, with all the subjects that had been touched on methodically arranged, and a list of definitions, simple and easily remembered, but adequate. It was Greek art in a nutshell,—a perfect marvel of clearness and condensation. The little folding chairs had been neatly arranged in a semicircle at first, but by the time the fellows had taken possession of them, they looked as if they had been thrown in at random. A good many men who were evidently old hands at the business arranged themselves comfortably in two chairs, leaning back in one with their legs stretched across another, as if prepared to spend the night. A lot of them took off their coats and waistcoats—the crowd and the gas made the already overheated room unbearably warm—and I 've never seen so many pretty shirts in my life as I did that evening.

After every one was settled, the man who was giving the seminar took a chair on a little platform in front of us, and began—not to talk exactly, but to drone. He had a harsh monotonous voice—une voix trainante, Berri called it—and spoke with painful slowness, as if trying not to emphasize any one topic to the exclusion of the others,—which had the effect of making his entire discourse, from beginning to end, horribly important. Except for this crawling sound, the room was absolutely silent; for once nobody seemed conscious of himself or of any one else. Even when the man on the platform pronounced Greek words in a novel fashion that was all his own, there was n't a smile. I don't think we realized the intense strain of attention we were undergoing until, at the end of an hour and three quarters, Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to sleep, fell off his chair. The second or two of relaxation that followed the crash was exquisite. We stretched our arms and swabbed our foreheads with our handkerchiefs, and then sank back again for another hour and fifteen minutes, until the bell in the tower of Memorial boomed out ten o'clock. This seemed to be the signal for a short vacation; for the fact-machine on the platform finished the sentence he had begun and then stood up.

There was a general shuffling of chairs and a babbling of voices, and the crowd divided into chattering groups. Some of the fellows did n't seem to know anybody, and they either went out and strolled up and down the corridor or sat studying the synopsis. The host of the evening had provided beer and ginger ale and cheese and crackers with which to sustain life until the ordeal was over. He could well afford it, as there were at least seventy-five men in the room, every one of whom would deposit three dollars and a half before he left.

While Berri and I and most of our table were talking in a corner, a fellow named Smith, a Sophomore, sauntered over to us. Berri and I were the only ones who knew him, so of course he must have come just to speak to us. I don't remember what he said exactly, as the conversation of the others sort of faded away when he approached, and Berri and I were fearfully rattled. He 's very prominent and belongs to everything. After we had stood there for a minute or two, Hemington and Bertie Stockbridge and the others drifted off, leaving us three together, and in a moment more Berri said, "I 'm going over to get another cracker," and also left us. I happened to notice that he did n't go near the crackers, and furthermore he never came back. This seemed so queer and unlike Berri that I spoke to him about it on the way home and asked him why he had done it. He answered by saying,—

"You don't have to be much of a fox to know when you 're wanted and when you 're not; and that happened to be one of the times when I wasn't." This struck me as absurd, and does still. Berri knew Smith every bit as well as I did, for the only other time he had ever spoken to us we happened to be together just as we were the night of the seminar. I reminded Berri of this; but he only laughed a little and replied,—

"Well, as Fleetwood says, 'I 'm an old man and I know my place.'" Since then Smith has joined me twice when I was walking through the Yard and seemed very friendly in a distant kind of way. I mean that his joining me at all was friendly; he is n't much of a talker, and I never know quite what to say to him. Of course it's very nice in him to do it, but it makes me rather uncomfortable; for both times we stopped a moment on the steps of Sever—the bell had n't rung yet—and although there were a lot of fellows I knew waiting to go in, they merely nodded to me and then looked away.

But I 'm forgetting about the seminar. We went back to our chairs again, and once more tuned our ears to the monotonous voice of the lecturer, that dragged on and on till midnight. It became harder and harder to take in everything he said. The air was heavy with the smoke of Egyptian cigarettes, and I counted nine men who were sound asleep. I suppose that, even though asleep, they were more likely to acquire a fact or two than if they hadn't been there at all. Just at the end—I can hear him now—the man on the platform leaned back wearily with closed eyes and chanted in the same hopeless tone,—

"Let me once more urge upon you the importance of expressing in your examination papers sympathy with the Greek life, the Greek art, and the Greek ideals of the best period. A page or two of sincere regret that we moderns do not possess the innate sense of beauty, the joy of life, civic pride, harmony, and all the other things that the Greeks went in for will help you to get a passing mark. Remember what I told you about [Greek: sophrosúne]. Refer to [Greek: sophrosúne] constantly. John Addington Symonds calls it 'that truly Greek virtue; the correlative in morals to the passion for beauty.' S-y-m-o-n-d-s, and there are two ds in Addington. If you get stuck, make use of the quotation I gave you from Goethe—G-o-e-t-h-e—it comes in well almost anywhere. Good-night and good luck." He stood at the door as we passed out, holding a box in his hand, into which every one dropped three Plunks and a half. I was tired when we got home and went right to bed. But Berri sat up almost until morning, studying the synopsis and going over his notes.

It must have been some time before this that Berri's thesis arrived from England one morning with a long letter from Duggie. I have kept a sort of lookout for it right along, but that morning Berri saw the postman from my window and ran downstairs to meet him. As he was coming up, he exclaimed in a surprised voice, "What on earth do you suppose—" and then broke off abruptly. He passed quickly through my room, dropping a bill on my desk as he went, and after that the house for about half an hour was very silent. I had so often wondered what Berri would do, what he would say, how he would take Duggie's letter when it came, that I instinctively knew it had at last arrived, and asked no questions.

He surprised me by neither saying nor doing anything; and for two days I had no reason to suppose that the thesis had wandered back to Cambridge at all beyond the feeling in my bones that it had. On the third day, however, Berri, who was just starting off to spend Sunday at his aunt's, stopped in my room with a letter in his hand. He looked at it doubtfully for a moment, as if making up his mind about something, and then tossed it into my lap.

"I got that from Sherwin the other day," he said; and then added, as he made for the door and I drew the letter from its envelope,—

"Well, it may be all for the best."

I don't think anybody could read Duggie's letter and not feel that it was for the best. Berri has n't said anything more about it, and neither have I. There really is n't anything to say.

I passed all my exams. My marks are n't anything to be stuck up about, but they let me through decently, and in three courses were even a little better than they actually had to be,—which is a comfort in a way. For my adviser says he thinks that in a few weeks it would n't do any harm to petition the administrative board (or whatever it is that has charge of such things) to let me off probation. He says he can't promise anything, of course, but that stranger things have happened; all of which seems to me rather to explode Berri's conviction that every adviser in college spends all his odd moments in devising fiendish schemes for the destruction of his Freshmen charges. But then Berri was unfortunate in his adviser. He is n't young and does n't try to be sympathetic like mine, and he annoys Berri extremely by glaring at him over a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and exclaiming à propos of nothing,—

"You can't fool me—you can't fool me!"

My adviser has had me to dinner twice at the professors' club. He invites his Freshmen, four or five at a time, to dinner, in order, I suppose, to get to know them better. Of course, he never really does get to know us better by having these stiff little parties, but it's awfully kind of him to ask us, and he thinks he does; so it's all right. I dreaded the first one, but my dread was n't a patch on the dread with which I dreaded the second, because I 'd been to the first. Naturally I did n't dare refuse to go to either of them. Nobody does. The dinner itself is good, and my adviser not only lays himself out to be just as nice as possible,—he succeeds. Yet the fellows don't feel altogether at their ease somehow and are n't themselves. They want to be and try to be, and once in a while they put up a pretty good bluff at it, but they never quite are. I don't know how to explain it exactly, but when you can't help feeling that your host is sizing you up and talking only about the things he thinks you like to talk about—even if you do like to talk about them, why, you just can't. (I've read that sentence over six times and it means a little less every time.) After dinner he takes the fellows up to his room and asks them to smoke, and they never know which would be the better swipe,—to accept or to refuse. Some decide one way and some the other; but whether they want to smoke or not has very little to do with the decision. The best part of the evening comes when somebody gets up enough nerve to murmur that he is very sorry he has to say good-night, as he has a lot of studying to do. This usually makes the others laugh, and it always breaks up the party. Then the fellows get together in somebody's room—if they know one another well enough—and talk the thing over.

Oh, I wish spring would come! This seems to be the time of year when nothing much happens. As long as we were all grinding most of the day for the mid-years, I didn't think much about the weather, except that when it was bad there wasn't so much temptation to idle out of doors. Now, however, everybody wants the weather to be good, and it's vile. It always manages to do four or five different things in the course of a day, and the walking is unspeakable. To a certain extent, though, this is the fault of the town itself. Most of the residence streets have dirt sidewalks and curbstones that might be very picturesque in Egypt or some place where it did n't rain and snow and freeze and melt all in the course of a few hours; but here they turn into troughs full of mud and slush, and the curbstones keep the mixture from running into the gutter. I know I ought n't to criticise such a fine old town. So many great people have, all their lives, floundered uncomplainingly through Cambridge mud that I suppose it's cheeky of me to notice it. But in wet weather the sidewalks are really not nice. In front of a few houses the owners put down temporary wooden walks,—three boards wide, running lengthwise,—but you invariably meet a lady in the middle of them and have to jump gracefully into the nearest puddle, looking as if you considered this the dearest privilege of your young life.

The candidates for the track team are crazy to get out of doors and begin regular practice on the Soldiers' Field cinder track, but it 's too soft yet to be raked and rolled, and they have to keep working in the gym and on the tiresome old board track behind it. Dick Smith was talking about this not long ago when he joined me in the Yard. He says it's great on a warm spring morning to go across the river and sit on the bleachers and watch the fellows practise starting and short sprints.

Well, there's nothing like that now. I hardly know how the days go by.

XVI

I notice that when I last wrote in my diary I was wishing for spring, and here it is almost the end of June! Where did all those slow days I complained of go to so quickly, I wonder? How did I spend them, and why haven't I tried to tell about them? I don't know unless it was because they were so slow and did go so quickly. Nothing ever happened, really, until just at the end; but to-day with Cambridge sizzling hot (I can smell the asphalt on the main street even here in my room) and perfectly deserted, except for its inhabitants (who don't count) and the kids who have come to take their entrance exams, the last three months and a half seem like a dream. The spring is scarcely over, and yet I 've already begun to look forward to it again next year.

I liked it so much, I suppose, because in Perugia we don't, as a rule, have any. Out there it's very much like what you read about Russia: for a long time it's winter, and then you wake up some morning feeling as if you had spent the night in a Turkish bath, and know that it is summer; you know that the soda-fountains are hissing, that a watering-cart is jolting past, leaving behind it a damp, earthy sensation (something between an odor and a faint breeze), that an Italian is leaning over the fence languidly calling out, "Bananos—bananos," that a scissors-grinder is ding-donging in the distance, and that, of course, a lawn-mower is whirring sharply back and forth under your windows.

Here warm weather comes slowly and shyly, as if it could n't quite make up its mind to come at all. There are many days that from the other side of a pane of glass look all blue and white and gold, and tempt you to snatch up a cap and run out. You do this, and stand undecidedly on the sidewalk for a moment; then you go in again and put on your overcoat and gloves.

Somehow the leaves don't seem to burst out all at once, as they do with us. You notice first, on Brattle Street and in the Yard, that the trees have undergone a change. That is, you think they have; the change is so slight you aren't sure, and may have only imagined it, after all. But in a few days—I can't now remember how many—you know that you were right; the branches and twigs that have stood out so hard and definite against all the winter sunsets have blurred a little,—they are no longer altogether in focus. They blur more and more as the days go by, until—shall I ever forget it?—you cease to think of them as trees, and only know that over and beyond you there is a faint, uncertain mist of tenderest green,—so faint, so uncertain that you almost glance up to see whether it has drifted away on a slow, pungent gust from the marshes. But instead of doing that, it grows denser and greener against the rain-washed blue, until it is no longer a mist, but a cloud. Then at last there is a delicious crinkling, and the leaves have come. In May and June bleak, shabby Cambridge covers all its angles and corners. They are softened and filled with billows and jets and sprays and garlands,—green, gold, silver, mauve, and—what is the color of apple blossoms? They are such a tremor of white and pink that I never really know. The wind loses its bite, and then its chill. The air is moist and warm, and as you walk slowly through the quiet leafy streets at night, the damp, fresh lilacs stretch out to dabble against your face, and something—it may be the stillness and sweetness of it all, or it may be just the penetrating smell of the box hedges—something makes you very sad and very happy at the same time.

During the day, between lectures, we loafed a good deal,—on Brattle Street chiefly; and often in the afternoon, when we were beginning to think of thinking of grinding for the finals, Berri and I and occasionally Hemington used to take a book or some notes and go up to the vacant lot across the street from the Longfellow house. At the further end of this open space—a meadow during the poet's lifetime, but now, unfortunately, a rather ugly little park—there is a stone terrace with a short flight of steps and two broad stone seats against the wall below. Passionate pilgrims come there for a moment, once in a while, but as a rule it is deserted. We pretended to study here; but dates and formulas and Geschmitzenmenger's reflections on the building materials of ancient Rome always got mixed up in Hemington's tobacco smoke, or we forgot about them in watching the sun sparkle on the pools left by the falling tide. Berri said that even Italy had very little more to offer one than a stone bench soaked in sunlight and the delusion that one was accomplishing something. Now and then we strolled in Longfellow's garden. The family were out of town, and Berri inherits the privilege of doing this from his aunt.

I can't get away from the idea that although the days were getting longer and slower as Class Day drew near, they went ever so much more quickly than they had at first; notwithstanding, also, the fact that I got up earlier. I happened to do this the first time by accident. Bertie Stockbridge was the only person at breakfast, and when I asked him not to leave me alone, he said he had to or he would be late for Chapel. I had n't known before that he went to Chapel, but he told me he never missed a morning. I had n't been there myself at all, but that morning I went with him. It was very nice. The President was there, and the Dean, and several of the professors, and a good many students—some of whom I would n't have suspected of even knowing where the Chapel was. The music was fine; the little boys in the choir sang like angels,—the same little boys who used to paste us with snowballs during the winter. After that I went to Chapel almost every morning until college closed. It was a good way to begin the day, somehow. Berri began to go too after a while, but he said he did it to give him luck in his exams.

On Saturday afternoons and Sundays we bicycled a great deal when the roads began to get into shape. The whole table would start off and explore the park system, and once we made a historical tour of Lexington and Concord, which Berri wrote up for the Lampoon. I think Berri will make the Lampoon next year if he keeps on. His way of going about it is killing. He writes things, and then comes into my room with a solemn, anxious face, and says,—

"Do you think this is funny? Glance through it carelessly and tell me just how it strikes you. I think it's perfectly side-splitting myself,—I do really; but it mightn't strike anybody else that way."

Then there was Riverside, where the Charles all but loses itself between steep, cool, shady banks, under trees that peer over the edges all through the long, drowsy summer, or flows brimming across a meadow where a man ploughs a rich black border and talks to his horses and sings. It takes just the amount of effort you like to make, to follow in a canoe the course of this lazy stream. Riverside is another place to which you like to take all the essentials for study except the power of will.

As the board decided to let me off probation late in the spring, I could cut lectures once more without anything very terrible happening, and it was great on a warm morning to walk into town for luncheon and keep our hats off while we were on the bridge. There 's almost always a sea-breeze on the bridge.

I hardly know how to write of the surprising and wonderful thing that happened to me at the end of May. It came so unexpectedly that even now I sometimes stop to wonder if it ever happened at all, and if I can be really I. But when I think it all over carefully, remembering a few of the situations that led up to it,—trifling incidents that were inexplicable at the time and worried me very much,—I see now that I wasn't very intelligent in not suspecting a little what they meant. I never did, though, not in the least.

The thing that happened—how little the simple statement would mean to papa, for instance, and how much it really does mean!—the thing that happened was, that I made the First Ten of the Dickey.

As long ago as April, the First Ten began to be—well, it began to be very much on people's minds, although, of course, hardly anything was said about it. Berri and I used to talk about it a little; Hemington and I mentioned it once in a while; I suppose there are about four men in our class that I knew well enough to discuss it with. But naturally we spoke of it only when we were absolutely alone. If any one else came into the room, we began to talk about something else. Yet, although the subject could n't come up in general conversation, I often knew that it was there—in everybody's thoughts—in the atmosphere. Every day some little thing would happen that almost made you jump, as it suddenly brought the question into your mind, "Who is going to make the First Ten?" things, for instance, like seeing some one in our class walking through the Square with a Dickey man who was in the Sophomore class. That always looked as if it meant something, because—well, because it very often did mean something. One night Berri told me (in the strictest confidence, of course) that Phil Blackwood—an upper classman—had met a girl cousin of his in town at a tea, and had said to her that he liked Berri, and thought he was great fun to talk to. She had told this to Berri's aunt, who had repeated the remark to Berri, who was in a great state about it, and wondered how much importance he ought to attach to it. It really did sound to me as if something might come of it.

We made lists of names and bet on them, and then locked them up in our desks. I put Berri's name on my list; but whether or not he put mine on his, I don't know, for after the crash came, we forgot to compare notes.

As the time grew near, not only Berri, but a good many fellows I knew well began to treat me in a way I did n't understand and did n't like. I don't know just how to describe the gradual change in their manner toward me, because it was the sort of thing you feel without being able to put your finger on the cause, or even on the change itself, without seeming morbid and exaggerated. But I could n't help realizing that they treated me rather coolly. They stopped coming to my room as often as they had been in the habit of coming, they left me out of all sorts of little things I had always been in before as a matter of course, and more than once, as I took my seat at the table or went into somebody's room, I could see that my appearance made the fellows uncomfortable for a moment, or at least gave the talk a different turn. All this hurt my feelings terribly, and I tried to think what I could have done to make the fellows I liked best and considered my friends treat me this way. But I could n't think of a thing. I supposed I must have done something without appreciating what the consequences would be. It made me feel pretty badly, I can tell you, and several times I was on the point of demanding an explanation; but they were all so polite and distant and reserved that I never could bring myself to.

Of course, now I understand exactly why it was, and see how hopelessly stupid I must have been not to have suspected anything. The whole situation arose from the fact that there was a rumor in the class to the effect that I was being considered for the First Ten,—a rumor that was apparently given foundation by my being seen several times with Dick Smith. This made the fellows instinctively avoid me a little, from a feeling that I and the class generally might imagine that they were trying to swipe if they went around much with me. It seems to me now particularly dense on my part not to have had a glimmer of this, because it was just the way I felt myself toward Tucker Ludlow, who had gone to the theatre one night with Phil Blackwood, and two or three other men who were spoken of for the First Ten. Yet I never dreamed that any one could look at me in this way.